For those that read my articles on today’s young adults know that I typically try to not be an alarmist. I try not to focus on the bad and I work to offer some helpful suggestions to use when interacting with a young adult. Today, I need to share some concerning data that we should all be aware of. Forgive me for geeking out on some of the most recent research data.
Ryan Burge, a sociologist, researcher, and former American Baptist pastor, recently shared a report that caught my attention. The title of his article is Flourishing or Floundering? How Young Poeple See Their Lives. For a deeper dive, feel free to read his entire article.
Burge referenced a study by Tyler VanderWeele of Harvard University, who is researching human flourishing. VanderWeele proposes five different dimensions of human flourishing: happiness and life satisfaction, physical and mental health, meaning and purpose, character and virtues and close social relationships.
There is a lot more in the article by Burge that I referenced earlier but what stood out to me was this graph.
Compared to teenagers in middle school and high school, the young adults (college-aged through age 25) score far worse than their younger peers. You can clearly see that something happens between ages of 17 and 18. This is not to say that we shouldn’t pay attention to the teenagers (obviously we should pay a lot of attention to them) but maybe we aren’t paying enough attention to those who are going off to college and entering into the workforce.
I like what Burge wrote at the end of his article. “They (young adults) leave the stability of their home, many take on student loan debts, and they wrestle with making their way in life. According to this survey, it’s certainly an incredibly fraught period of life.”
I’ve seen a lot of college graduation pictures lately on my social media feed. Maybe one thing we can do is say a prayer for those who are graduating and trying to figure out what is next.
