Experiences of Filipino Emerging Adults in Davao City

“Experiences of Filipino Emerging Adults in Davao City”

1. Introduction

For most young people in industrialized countries, the years from the late teens through the twenties are years of profound change and importance (Arnett, 2000).  Think for a moment about the lives of our grandparents and great-grandparents when they were in their twenties. How do their lives at that age compare to our life? If they were like most other people of their time, their lives were quite different than ours. Why there is that difference between their time and our own? And how should we understand the 18–25 age period today?

There is now a newly recognized life stage—emerging adult—a term coined by psychologist Jeffrey Arnett, PhD, in his 2004 book, Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road From the Late Teens Though the Twenties, in the book he describes emerging adulthood as the time from the end of adolescence to the young-adult responsibilities of a stable job, marriage and parenthood (Giordano, 2015). Emerging adults are on an intense search for personal authenticity, awareness, and personal definition. It requires individuals to make major changes in roles and behaviors as they take on the responsibilities of full participation in society. They shared a perception of "feeling in between"--knowing they were pulling clear of the struggles of adolescence and starting to feel responsible for themselves, but still closely tied to their parents and family (Munsey, 2006).

It is during this stage that young people begin to form bonds outside the family, go to college, and get a job. Even so, emerging adults don’t tend to be fully independent and do not yet take on all the responsibilities of an adult – like getting married and having one’s own family. It’s not been so long ago that this stage has been defined. That is due in part to that fact that the lives after high school of the young generation of today is very much different compared to those of yesterday (Stangor,2010).

It has now been a decade since Jeffrey Jensen Arnett proposed emerging adulthood as a new life stage between adolescence and young adulthood, lasting from the late teens through the mid-to-late twenties. From the beginning emerging adulthood proposed as a cultural theory, Arnett (2000) emphasized that it exists only under certain cultural-demographic conditions, especially widespread education and training beyond secondary school and entry to marriage and parenthood in the late twenties or beyond. In a book of Arnett on emerging adulthood, he proposed five features of emerging adulthood based on his research on hundreds of Americans ages 18-29 from diverse ethnic groups and social classes. However, he emphasized that those features are applied specifically to Americans and would not necessarily be found to apply to emerging adults in other cultures.

In a Filipino perspective, we are different to another country because of the way our family raised up. They teach us the ancient culture, beliefs, ideals and value that passes through generation to generation. Filipino stayed in the family even if they old enough and they have their owned family and work (Lookupgrade, 2017). Because of this different culture and beliefs, the researchers of this study seeks to explore if there is really difference in terms of the Filipino characteristics and issues that they are facing in compare to other emerging adults from other culture.

        This research seeks to answer what are the characteristics of emerging adults in Davao city as well as the issues that they are facing and thus raises the following questions:

1.        What are the characteristics of the emerging adults?

What are their strengths and weaknesses?

What are the factors that contribute to their characteristics as emerging adults?

2.        What are the issues in life they are facing?

How did they face their issues in life that they encounter?

How does this issue give an impact to their lives?