ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the five features of emerging adulthood as they relate to the student-family relationship and provides recommendations for practitioners to consider and implement in their work. The five features are identity explorations, instability, self-focus, feeling in-between, and possibilities/optimism. The chapter utilizes the term "parents" as a generic descriptor of the relationship between the emerging adult and other significant adults, including, but not limited to single parents, step-parents, grandparents and same sex parents. An exploration of the parent-emerging adult relationship through the college years confirms J. J Arnett's features of emerging adulthood. The chapter provides frameworks to view identity exploration for emerging adults: college selection, transition, personal identity exploration, and major and career exploration. Emerging adulthood is filled with a sense of possibilities that can simultaneously energize and overwhelm. In college, parent persuasion can still trump a supervisory conversation or reasonable job expectations.
