Okay, twentysomethings. What no one is telling you is that they cringe when you say “like” and “you know” and “lates” for later and “word” for agree. I know what you’re thinking: “My friends don’t cringe. They talk that way too.”
In my last post, I discussed why huddling together with like-minded peers limits who and what you know. Now, I want to explain why it limits how you speak and think as well.
Read More For the past decade or so, there has been much talk about the urban tribe, or the makeshift family that has come to the fore as twentysomethings spend more years on their own. Sitcoms and movies tout the value of the tribe and, without a doubt, these friends play a crucial, supportive role. Essentially the college buddies of the twentysomething years, the urban tribe gives us rides to the airport and we vent about bad dates and breakups over burritos and beer.
Read More As a therapist who works primarily with people in their 20s and 30s, I often feel like a priest who hears Facebook confessions. Over the past few years, my office has become a place where day after day one twentysomething after another drops onto the couch and groans “According to Facebook, I’m the only person not saving orphans after graduation” or “I feel pretty good about my career until I look on Facebook and see what everybody else is doing” or “Every time somebody changes their relationship status on Facebook, Ipanic” or “I’m convinced Facebook was invented to make single people feel bad about their lives.”
Read More In The Defining Decade, clinical psychologist Meg Jay explains how to optimize the crucial years of your 20s, citing stories from her practice. Any recent college grad mired in a quarter-life crisis or merely dazed by the freedom of post-collegiate existence should consider it required reading.
Read More AT 32, one of my clients (I’ll call her Jennifer) had a lavish wine-country wedding. By then, Jennifer and her boyfriend had lived together for more than four years. The event was attended by the couple’s friends, families and two dogs.
When Jennifer started therapy with me less than a year later, she was looking for a divorce lawyer. “I spent more time planning my wedding than I spent happily married,” she sobbed. Most disheartening to Jennifer was that she’d tried to do everything right. “My parents got married young so, of course, they got divorced. We lived together! How did this happen?”
Read More It’s almost that time of year again, when a new crop of 20-something college graduates prepares to take those first steps into the working world.
In her new book, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter — And How to Make the Most of Them Now, University of Virginia clinical psychologist Meg Jay argues that those first years of adulthood are the most important time in a young person’s life.
Read More Psychologist Meg Jay has a message for twenty-somethings: just because marriage, work and kids happen later, doesn’t mean you can’t start planning now. She tells twenty-somethings how they can reclaim adulthood in the defining decade of their lives.
Read More There’s been no shortage of articles written about how 20-somethings are struggling to turn the corner into adulthood. But psychologist Meg Jay says it’s not because they lack opportunity; it’s because they lack motivation. She joins host Michel Martin for a special parenting segment to discuss life skills for millennials.
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The slut. The good girl. The party girl. The anorexic. The starving artist. The single mom. The childless wife. The reluctant mother. Are these women that you know? Are you one of them?
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They’ve been called the Twixters, Choisters, pre-adults, adultescents, the stuck generation and the lost generation, playing out an extended adolescence or an emerging adulthood or their odyssey years. They are the 20-somethings that graduated into one of the worst economies in decades, saddled with some of the highest debt burdens. According to a new report, half of recent college graduates are unemployed or underemployed, scraping by with low-wage service jobs. Those who are working earn less than their 1970s counterparts, when adjusted for inflation.
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