152 Grief and Loss Across the Lifespan
their grief as they grapple with the accident, homicide, or suicide. Jordan and
McIntosh (2011) propose that survivors be taught how to manage their Dual
Process by “dosing” their grief.
A common observation after the death of an emerging adult is that
the person’s “life was just beginning.” In obituaries, one is struck by the
way this theme jumps out whenever the decedent is a teen through young
adult—essentially an emerging adult. This is not surprising: The develop-
mental stage is one where life truly is beginning to take on the shape of
adulthood with forays into work, love, and other life roles. When an emerg-
ing adult dies, the parents and other loved ones are often left to grieve not
only the person, but the potential adult life, the contours of which had just
started to emerge.Typical and Maturational Losses
Loss of Economic Viability
In the past, emerging adults were likely to move into economic
self-sufficiency between 18 and 23 years old, depending on class origin and uni-
versity attendance, and the maturational losses involved in giving up depen-
dency on parents for economic survival were often experienced as a loss. Such
loss still occurs, but today’s cohort of emerging adults faces it later, on the whole,
because the transition has become far more difficult. As Davidson (2014) reported
(www.nytimes.com/2014/06/22/magazine/its-official-the-boomerang-kids-
wont-leave.html?_r=0), aside from needing to return to the family home to live
after college due to poor employment prospects, emerging and young adults
today can expect to earn significantly less than previous cohorts, and most grad-
uate with significant debt (p. 25). According to Urban Institute data, while 20 to
28 year olds in 2007 had a mean head-of-household (HOH) net worth of $74,684,
that same age group in 2010 had mean HOH net worth of $37,223 (p. 29). Lost
here is an imagined and even expected future of success and security.
Lisa B. Kahn, an economist at Yale University, notes (Davidson, 2014,
pp. 25–26) that starting at lower salaries along with higher educational debt
virtually ensures that this cohort will not be able to make up the difference
over their careers. This circumstance is attributable most immediately to the
Great Recession, but more generally to the often chaotic economic restructur-
ing driven by the globalization of markets and the declining bargaining power
of labor. As “adolescence” was an artifact of economic modernization in the
late 19th century, “emerging adulthood” as a recognizable life stage has roots
in the rapidly changing modes of digital-age production that have transformed
labor markets worldwide.
Emerging adults and their parents are aware of this, if only intuitively.
They report a sense of economic pressure that leads to pessimism about the
economy as well as anxiety and depressive symptoms for both groups (Stein
et al., 2011). The parents tend to have anxiety and depression related to con-
cerns about their children’s career possibilities and potential for sacrificing to
assist parents, while emerging adults tend to have more anxiety and depres-
sion about personal economic pressures (though they were not unaware of the