Challenges Facing Young Adults

What I see as the biggest challenges young adults face today


What can be worse than falling in love before you are ready?   Getting married before you are ready!  

Imagine two 12 year olds, shyly and awkwardly holding hands for the first time?   Pig-tails and peach fuzz.

Fast forward four or five years and   these same two are exchanging wedding vows.

How much have they really changed?    

Their bodies look fully developed but their brains have not caught up yet.  

It is not a surprise that more than half of all marriages end in divorce when you realize that marriages before the age of 20 are most likely to fail.

Matthew Bramlett, PhD, a statistician with the CDC ’s National Center for Health Statistics   found that younger age at marriage is associated with higher probability of disruption.

Why do you think that is?     It is because of a lack of maturity!  

What kind of maturity -   physical, emotional, intellectual?  

Their bodies may be physically mature,   but they have not reached   emotional or intellectual maturity.    

National Institute of Mental Health neuroscientist Dr. Jay Giedd, has conducted studies for over twenty years and has found that intellectual maturity comes about the age of 25 in men and a year or two earlier in women and corresponds with their brains becoming fully developed.     A fully developed brain uses rationality while under-developed brains are instinctual   and emotional.  

Recent studies, such as one done by NIH’s Institute of Mental Health and UCLA’s Lab of Neuro Imaging, show that many life changing decision such as marrying are made before the brain is fully ready to make such decisions.

So in reality you might as well be those 12 year olds but you have gone from pig-tails to pony-tails and he from peach fuzz to the beginnings of   a moustache.    

More than half of marriages fail and of these the majority are for persons under the age of   20.   Intellectual maturity is not reached until...