Transition To Adulthood Quotes

If we fail to provide boys with pro-social models of the transition to adulthood, they may construct their own. In some cases, gang initiation rituals, street racing, and random violence may be the result.

Transitioning to adulthood is hard enough. Having your friends judge your progress doesn't make it any easier.

Girls often aim their most severe meanness at their mothers—

Teenagers often manage their feelings by dumping the uncomfortable ones on their parents,

You want your daughter to become a critical consumer of the media, so use what she's watching to help her build those skills. Swing by the couch or lean over her laptop and say, "I'm all for mindless entertainment, but you know that I'm not a big fan of shows that celebrate women for being sexy and stupid." Your daughter may roll her eyes, but do it anyway. Girls can listen and roll their eyes at the same time.

The most successful people I know do their best work under any conditions, for anyone.

People make choices, choices have consequences.

It’s bad enough to be rebuffed by your daughter—it’s worse that it happens right when you feel that she needs you most.

Looking back on their own teenage years, most adults feel grateful that there's no easy-to-access document of all the dumb things they did.

I’ve come to learn over my years of practice, which is that having a delicate conversation with a teenager is like trying to talk with someone on the other side of a door.

Party parents figure that if their daughter is going to do risky things when with her friends, she’ll be safer if she and her friends do those risky things right under their noses. But party parents rob their daughter of one of the best protections she has: the ability to blame her good behavior on them.

sharing one’s true feelings at home makes it a lot easier to be charming out in public.

Thanks so much for letting me know. I am really confident that the girls will find a way to come to their own resolution.

If you really want to help your daughter manage her distress, help her see the difference between complaining and venting.

heavy social demands can undermine what cultural anthropologists call “sustainable routines,” the predictable patterns of daily life that go a long way toward reducing stress.

As one of my friends put it, “My daughter has five different, extreme emotions before eight in the morning.

Did all siblings revert to their childhood selves when they were together, or was there a way to transition to functional adulthood even while being in one another’s lives?

if you feel you must criticize your daughter’s friends—and sometimes you must—use your words and your tone to communicate that the girls are in a tricky situation, not that they are bad people.

I’d had a less tumultuous transition from childhood to adulthood, but somewhere in my twenties I feel like I got stalled in the process and now I’m drifting, marking time without any great passion to move forward.

under the sway of social influence, teenagers don’t disregard the issue of rules completely. In my experience they still think about it, but in the wrong way. Instead of reflecting on why we have rules, teens focus on trying not to get caught while breaking them.

Camus-boy, you're always going to be the same you, just older. It's not like there's a moment when you wake up and go, Shit, I'm grown-up, I don't feel like myself anymore.' I don't tell him, but this is the scariest fucking thing I've ever heard in my life. Being grown-up should feel like a big transition. It can't be something that, despite my best efforts, I've been drifting closer and closer to every summer. It needs to be a shock. I need to know at what point to stop holding on. And that moment will suck, and probably every moment after that will suck, but at least I'll know that everything that came before really was valid. I really was young and innocent. I wasn't fooling myself.

while it was to be expected that any child would lose this sparkle little by little in the inevitable transition to adulthood, Simonopio lost it suddenly, like a light going out, without giving them the opportunity to gradually get used to the new person who emerged in the blink of an eye.

Alexander Rostov was neither scientist nor sage; but at the age of sixty-four he was wise enough to know that life does not proceed by leaps and bounds. It unfolds. At any given moment, it is the manifestation of a thousand transitions. Our faculties wax and wane, our experiences accumulate, and our opinions evolve- if not glacially, then at least gradually. Such that the events of an average day are as likely to transform who we are as a pinch of pepper is to transform a stew. And yet, for the Count, when the doors to Anna's bedroom opened and Sofia stepped forward in her gown, at that very moment she crossed the threshold into adulthood. On one side of that divide was a girl of five or ten or twenty with a quiet demeanor and a whimsical imagination who relied upon him for companionship and counsel; while on the other side was a young woman of discernment and grace who need rely on no one but herself.

We don’t enter adulthood as fully formed adults, nor do we enter adulthood as fully formed readers. When I graduated, I knew I still had a lot of growing up to do, but nobody told me I had to grow up as a reader too. Every reader goes through this rite of passage: the transition from having books chosen for us to choosing books for ourselves. When given the choice, some choose not to read. But you, dear reader, moved from being told what to read to choosing for yourself.

While an adolescent remains inconsistent and unpredictable in her behavior, she may suffer, but she does not seem to me to be in need of treatment. I think that she should be given time and scope to work out her own solution. Rather, it may be her parents who need help and guidance so as to be able to bear with her. There are few situations in life which are more difficult to cope with than an adolescent son or daughter during the attempt to liberate themselves. —ANNA FREUD (1958), “Adolescence

A person stops maturing at the age that they start abusing substances,

People don’t do nice things for people who are mean to them. Better for your daughter to learn this lesson before she leaves your home than after she is out on her own.

girls know when they’re stepping over a boundary and find it strange when adults seem not to notice.

we learned that girls are much more likely to seek help for a suffering friend if they can count on adults to respect their tribal loyalties.

Girls will often set aside their own wishes to help a needy friend.

Your daughter works hard every day to harness powerful and unpredictable emotions so that she can get on with doing everything else she means to do.

Raising teenagers is not for the fragile, and that’s true even when everything is going just as it should.

researchers have found that many well-liked girls aren’t considered to be popular, and that many girls who are considered to be popular aren’t actually well liked.

When teens are trapped with parents who would rather flaunt their power than negotiate on even minor points, it doesn’t always end so well.

Girls often aim their most severe meanness at their mothers—especially if they have had a particularly close relationship in the past—

So if your teenage daughter is developing normally, you are living with someone who secretly worries that she is crazy and who might have the psychological assessment results of a psychotic adult.

In the United States, thirteen-year-old Jewish boys often mark the transition to adulthood with a bar mitzvah, involving a rather elaborate ceremony that includes singing a passage from the ancient Torah, followed by a celebration of dancing to hip-hop music and gorging on dessert. Sambian boys in Papua New Guinea mark the same transition by participating in the Flute Ceremony, which includes playing ritual flutes and performing fellatio on older boys and elders of their tribe. Imagine if the Sambian and American Jewish boy suddenly changed places. We’d witness how a momentous source of pride to members of one culture could be a totally meaningless or humiliating experience to members of another, because the behaviors and achievements that confer self-esteem do so only to the extent that we embrace a cultural worldview that deems them worthy.

There are few situations in life which are more difficult to cope with than an adolescent son or daughter during the attempt to liberate themselves.” Raising teenagers is not for the fragile, and that’s true even when everything is going just as it should. Parents of teenagers need supportive partners and friends to prop them up when they feel that they just can’t take one more push-off. Knowing that you can serve as a reliable, safe base allows your daughter to venture out into the world; having the strength to stay in place when your daughter clings to and rejects you in short order usually requires the loving support of adult allies.

One explanation is that popularity brings hard work, regardless of how girls come by it. Girls who are at the center of large tribes have a lot of social connections to maintain and often run into loyalty conflicts.

Personal discretion, respect for our daughters’ privacy, or even competitive feelings within tight communities make it hard for parents to talk with one another about the garden-variety challenges that come with raising teenagers.

By some definitions I am a millennial. I was born in 1980 and entered adulthood in the early 2000s, and my transition from child to adult lasted over a decade. However, I don’t identify as a millennial. If I had been born five months earlier I would have been branded Generation X, a label I don’t feel a strong connection to either. And no brand savvy sociologist came up with a term catchy enough to enter the zeitgeist for the in-betweeners born on the cusp.

Girls also use online environments to try on personas that don’t really match their actual personalities. By posting risqué comments or images that suggest sophistication, girls sometimes conduct digital experiments in parting with childhood.

The sense of adventure and curiosity to see what the future holds is the other side of serenity. It, too, is a spiritual state most attractive in people in transition, whether entering adulthood or preparing for death. -Sexuality and Spiritual Growth

Other cultures make a clear delineation between childhood and adulthood; there are rites of passages and initiation ceremonies to mark these transitions. People expect and are willing to expose young people to hardship and pain, because it helps them grow.

In good marriages, partners can help their children appreciate what they should and shouldn’t take personally in the other parent’s behavior. My husband has told our daughters that I’ve been clean crazy for as long as he’s known me and that he stopped taking it personally years ago.

shame is one of the last places we, as parents, want to land with our kids. Indeed, the capacity to shame a child is one of the most dangerous weapons in our parenting arsenal. Shame goes after a girl’s character, not her actions. It goes after who she is, not what she did. Shame has toxic, lasting effects and no real benefits. Once shamed, teens are left two terrible options: a girl can agree with the shaming parent and conclude that she is, indeed, the bad one, or she can keep her self-esteem intact by concluding that the parent is the bad one. Either way, someone loses.

Having used you as their emotional dumping ground, they are prepared to return to school and play the part of the good citizen. Indeed, they may be able to act as a good citizen at school precisely because they are spending some of their time imagining the colorful complaints they will share once their school day has ended.

So far, here’s the picture I’ve painted of adolescent girls: aloof, withdrawn, and, sometimes, surprisingly mean. There’s truth to this picture, but for parents it’s not the whole story. Being pushed away is only the half of it. Raising a teenage girl becomes that much more stressful when she interrupts days of distance with moments of intense warmth and intimacy.

girls told us that they would be open to telling an adult if a friend showed signs of an eating disorder, except for one thing: they didn’t want to be seen as disloyal. They were fiercely committed to supporting one another and keeping one another’s secrets, and they worried that telling an adult about a troubling change in a peer’s eating would be a social transgression.

Raising a young woman will be one of the most vexing, delightful, exhausting, and fulfilling things you will ever do. Sometimes all on the same day. The job is hard enough even under the best conditions, and anyone doing a hard job deserves support. When we get that support, when we understand the developmental tour de force that is adolescence, we can truly enjoy and empower our girls.

As we know, when teens say that a girl is popular, they’re usually saying that she’s powerful. And when she’s powerful, it’s usually because she’s willing to be mean and everyone knows it. If your daughter mentions that a girl is popular, ask, “Is she popular or just powerful? Do kids like her, or are they scared of her?” Give your daughter a good reason to take popularity off of its pedestal.

There’s no excuse for either girl’s behavior, but there’s an explanation: as a culture, we do a terrible job of helping girls figure out what to do when they are mad. As far as girls know, they can either be a total doormat—think Cinderella—or flat-out cruel like Cinderella’s stepsisters. We rarely help girls master assertion—the art of standing up for oneself while respecting the rights of others.

For some people, the transition to adulthood happens almost overnight. It certainly did with me. I’ve met other orphans. We are kids who can’t even pinpoint when this change happened. We have felt like old people since our fathers died. Our mothers looked to us for big decisions. They relied on us. Before we ever went out on our first date, we were already acting like a retired father of four. All our paychecks went toward rent. All our spare time went toward helping to keep a home fire burning. We got so good at pretending we were older than our age that we started to believe it. We begin to hate our own reflections because they betray how we see ourselves. The mirror portrays us too young. We are not children; we are ancient. We’re fifty years old thirty-five years before our fiftieth birthday.

Few moments in life spark more maturation than when a young person recognizes that her parents have strengths and limitations that were in place long before she came along and that will be there long after she moves out. In letting go of the dream of turning you into the perfect parent, your daughter recovers a lot of energy that has been devoted to being angry with you, feeling hurt by you, or trying to change you.

As a society and as parents we face a challenge without precedent. We have to help girls and boys make a transition to a gendered adulthood, to adult life as women and men in a culture in which women can do anything, including being rocket scientists, and men can do anything, including staying home to raise a baby. We have to find ways to value and cherish gender differences without restricting freedom of opportunity.

You should start by allowing your daughter more privacy than she had as a child. Interestingly, findings from a research study that examined how much parents seek to know about their teenagers—and how much teenagers choose to share—suggest that we grant greater privacy to our sons than to our daughters. We are more likely to ask girls what they’re up to behind closed doors, and our daughters, more than our sons, answer our questions.

Teens are physically safer than ever and are making less risky choices than generations past. It’s part of a larger picture of growing up more slowly rather than an overall shift toward responsibility, but it is still undeniably good that they are safer. Other trends are more troubling: How can we protect our kids from anxiety, depression, and loneliness in our digital age? What can parents and colleges do to ease the transition from high school to college when fewer students have experienced independence

Offering to help with carpooling will come at the cost of your time, gas budget, and likely your sleep, but you will learn more about what is going on in your daughter’s personal life in the time it takes to drop off her friends and get back to your home than you will in three weeks of asking about how things are going. Wise chauffeurs know it’s best to really play the part; trying to join the conversation or ask questions usually breaks the spell and ends the chatter or—even worse—gets the girls to take the conversation to their phones.

The major first point to understand in making sense of the moral reasoning of emerging adults, then, is that most do not appeal to a moral philosophy, tradition, or ethic as an external guide by which to think and live in moral terms. Few emerging adults even seem aware that such external, coherent approaches or resources for moral reasoning exist. Instead, for most emerging adults, the world consists of so many individuals, and each individual decides for themselves what is and isn’t moral and immoral. Morality is ultimately a matter of personal opinion.

In practice, most teens spent a few years transitioning to adulthood living away from home as apprentices. In the Middle Ages, some spent those years training to be a knight, as did, I will note, my D&D-playing nerd friends seven hundred years later. But the difference was that my friends and I weren’t spending all our time with adults. Until the twentieth century, teens lived very much in the adult world as they trained and worked. They didn’t have the opportunity to develop their own unique identity and culture. By the twentieth century, they did. Adolescence was born, and D&D quickly followed.

The quarter century following World War II was a ‘golden age’ for most workers and their families…, even for men with a high school education or less…. Well-paying manufacturing jobs allowed many men to support a family on a single income” (Danziger and Ratner 2010, 134). This working-class success story characterized black diaspora labor as well (Gregory 2005, chapter 3; Sugrue 2004), though not in equal measure. African Americans working on the docks, in the steel mills, and on the auto-assembly shop floor were excluded from the skilled unions and relegated to the “dirtiest and least desirable jobs” (Durr 2003,

Don’t hesitate to validate your daughter’s experience when she complains to you about another adult. Unless you have reason to believe otherwise, her description is likely accurate; teenagers are particularly clear-eyed and can provide descriptions of adults’ characters that would put a Brontë sister to shame. If your daughter has been lucky enough to spend her childhood surrounded by reasonable grown-ups, she may be confused when a less-than-impressive one first crosses her path. Spare her the trouble of doubting her perceptions while calmly acknowledging that she will need to learn to deal with all sorts of people.

counterparts. Although the lower-SES average is higher overall, higher-SES white men have the highest reported levels of binge drinking, of any drug use, and of drug use other than marijuana, followed in each instance by lower-SES white men. In fact, within SES levels, white averages exceed the African American: 3.8 versus 2.9 for those of lower-SES origins; 3.0 versus 1.6 for those of higher origins. This pattern hardly squares with the popular perception of lower-SES African Americans as the face of urban disadvantage, fueled by the media's racialized portrayal of inner-city drug abuse, dealing, and violence (see, for example, Alexander 2010). The

Study Questions Define the terms deaf and hard of hearing. Why is it important to know the age of onset, type, and degree of hearing loss? What is the primary difference between prelingual and postlingual hearing impairments? List the four major types of hearing loss. Describe three different types of audiological evaluations. What are some major areas of development that are usually affected by a hearing impairment? List three major causes of hearing impairment. What issues are central to the debate over manual and oral approaches? Define the concept of a Deaf culture. What is total communication, and how can it be used in the classroom? Describe the bilingual-bicultural approach to educating pupils with hearing impairments. In what two academic areas do students with hearing impairments usually lag behind their classmates? Why is early identification of a hearing impairment critical? Why do professionals assess the language and speech abilities of individuals with hearing impairments? List five indicators of a possible hearing loss in the classroom. What are three indicators in children that may predict success with a cochlear implant? Identify five strategies a classroom teacher can use to promote communicative skills and enhance independence in the transition to adulthood. Describe how to check a hearing aid. How can technology benefit individuals with a hearing impairment?

I think you grow up twice, The first time happens automatically. Everyone passes from childhood to adulthood, and this transition is marked as much by the moment when the weight of the world overshadows the wonder of the world as it is by the passage of years. Usually you don't get to choose when it happens. But if the triumph of this weight over wonder makes the first passage into adulthood, the second is the rediscovery of that wonder despite sickness, evil, fear, sadness, suffering-despite everything. And this second passage doesn't happen on its own. It's a choice, not an inevitability. It is something you have to deliberately find, and value, and protect.And you can't just do it once and keep it forever. You have to keep looking.

All relationships come with ambivalence. Knowing someone well means that we enjoy the best of what he or she has to offer and must reconcile ourselves to being frustrated and disappointed at times, too. Acknowledging your own crazy spots (and, perhaps, your partner’s) welcomes your daughter to these facts of life. Don’t hesitate to extend this same lesson to adults beyond your home as well. When we help girls let go of the idea that there are perfect people or perfect relationships, they move into a vastly more mature way of dealing with people as they are and the world as it is. And on your end, too, remembering how to hold on to good feelings when we are angry or disappointed will come in handy because sometimes your daughter will do things she’s not supposed to do.

There’s something to be said for detaching from others. When we are alone and disconnected from technology, we can reflect on our feelings, vent silently to ourselves or our diaries, and imagine what we might say or do while considering the impact of any real action. Everyone who grew up without digital technology recalls having written a letter we’re glad we never sent or having a rant we’re glad no one heard. Using private time to express and get to know a feeling lets the feeling come down to size, teaches us a great deal about ourselves, and acquaints us with our internal resources for managing distress. Social disconnection also allows time to develop a considered plan about how (or if!) we want to act on hard feelings. In other words, we have time to keep our thoughts and our feelings separate from our actions.

Talking about your crazy spots not only saves your daughter the work of trying to change your fully formed personality, it also builds her emotional intelligence. In its more basic form, your daughter’s emotional intelligence will help her to consider competing mental states. But when you teach her about your crazy spots, you are taking her emotional intelligence up several notches: you are inviting her to think about your motivations in a broad perspective that includes past experiences and relationships. By encouraging her to expand her insight beyond what’s happening in the moment, you’ll advance your daughter from varsity level emotional intelligence (“Why does Mom act psychotic when I track mud through the house?”) to the pros (“Mom acts psychotic because she didn’t have to share her space when she was growing up, so she doesn’t always handle it well now”).

When the subjects arrived at the psychology lab, they were sent into individual dressing rooms with full-length mirrors. Half of the dressing rooms contained bathing suits (one-piece for the women, trunks for the men) and half contained sweaters, all of which were available in a wide range of sizes. Once the subjects put on the assigned clothing, they were told to hang out in the dressing room for fifteen minutes before they filled out a questionnaire about whether or not they would want to purchase the item. While they waited, they were asked, in order to help the researchers use the time efficiently, to complete a math test “for an experimenter in the Department of Education.” As you’ve already guessed, the psychologists weren’t helping their colleagues in the Department of Education. They were measuring whether taking a math test while wearing a bathing suit would affect the women’s scores.

The word adult implies that all the people who've attained legal majority make up a coherent category, but we are travelers who change and traverse a changing country as we go. The road is tattered and elastic. Childhood fades gradually in some ways, never ends in others; adulthood arrives in small, irregular installments if it arrives; and every person is on her own schedule, or rather there is none for the many transitions. When you leave home, if you had one, when you start out on your own, you're someone who was a child for most of her life, though even what it means to be a child is ill-defined. Some people have others who will tend and fund and sometimes confine them all their lives, some people are gradually weaned, some of us are cut off abruptly and fend for ourselves, some always did. Still, out on your own, you're a new immigrant to the nation of adults, and the customs are strange: you're learning to hold together all the pieces of a life, figure out what that life is going to be and who is going to be part of it, and what you will do with your self-determination.

On the day you’re born, you’re given a little plot of rich and fertile soil, slightly different from everyone else’s. And right away, your family and your culture start to plant things and tend the garden for you, until you’re old enough to take over its care yourself. They plant language and attitudes and knowledge about love and safety and bodies and sex. And they teach you how to tend your garden, because as you transition through adolescence into adulthood, you’ll take on full responsibility for its care. And you didn’t choose any of that. You didn’t choose your plot of land, the seeds that were planted, or the way your garden was tended in the early years of your life. As you reach adolescence, you begin to take care of the garden on your own. And you may find that your family and culture have planted some beautiful, healthy things that are thriving in a well-tended garden. And you may notice some things you want to change. Maybe the strategies you were taught for cultivating the garden are inefficient, so you need to find different ways of taking care of it so that it will thrive (that’s in chapter 3).

Researchers who study peer relationships have found that there are actually two different kinds of peer popularity. Sociometric popularity is the term used to describe well-liked teens with reputations for being kind and fun, while perceived popularity describes teens who hold a lot of social power but are disliked by many classmates. These two distinct groups emerge in studies that employ a simple peer-nomination method to examine social dynamics in school settings. Girls are given lists naming all the girls in their class (and boys are given lists naming all the boys) and asked to circle the names of the three girls they like the most, the three girls they like the least, and the girls who are considered to be popular. With this technique, researchers have found that many well-liked girls aren’t considered to be popular, and that many girls who are considered to be popular aren’t actually well liked. In fact, the disliked-but-popular girls are described by their classmates as domineering, aggressive, and stuck up, while the liked-but-unpopular girls are described as kind and trustworthy. A third group also emerges: well-liked girls who are identified by peers as being popular. They are amiable and faithful but differ from their liked-but-unpopular peers in that they aren’t easy to push around. In other words, the girls in the liked-and-popular group have found the relational sweet spot of being both friendly and assertive—a skill set girls often struggle to master and to which we’ll return soon. So we know from the research that when teens use the term popular, they’re likely to be describing girls with perceived popularity—girls who use cruelty to gain social power. Adults would like to think that girls who are mean would be shunned by their peers, but unfortunately, the opposite tends to occur. A girl who allows herself to be mean enjoys many “friends” who are eager to stay on her good side, and she is often

In 1963, Ebony magazine reported that “there [was] not one Negro in building trades apprenticeship training programs in Fort Wayne Indiana, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Baltimore, or Atlanta. Only two of 3,500 apprentices in all trades in Newark are Negro and in Chicago, where a quarter of the population is Negro, the apprentice figure is less than one percent.

Family life during the early elementary years is our point of departure. Lower socioeconomic status (SES) and disadvantaged minority youth begin school already behind on all criteria commonly used to gauge school readiness

The Long Shadow implicates family resources and early constraints with regard to socioeconomic standing in young adulthood. The internal environment of the family is one source of influence; the larger world to which children are exposed is another. The external environments most relevant for children's development are the neighborhood and the school. In the early years, family is decisive for both: by deciding where to live, parents determine the neighborhood and school contexts to which their children are exposed.4

only 1 of every 3 young black male high school dropouts was able to obtain any type of employment during the average month in 2005” and just 23 percent worked full time. That so few African American dropouts find any kind of work explains how their annual earnings can be so low—an excess of zero earnings drives down the average. Wilson (2008, 58, figure 4.1) adds that the black-white employment gap widens as one descends the education ladder, from 86 percent versus 88 percent among male college graduates in 2005, to 57 percent versus 73 percent among high school graduates, to 33 percent versus 54 percent among high school dropouts.12

In 1960, never-married mothers accounted for fewer than 5 percent of the children of single mothers; by 2006, they accounted for 43 percent (Thibos, Lavin-Loucks, and Martin 2007, 6). African American women find themselves especially challenged by the burdens associated with single parenting: today more than 70 percent of black children are born outside marriage, against 29 percent

Family conditions early in life cast a long shadow. That principle holds broadly, but with exceptions, and in this context they are numerous. The literature on so-called resilient youth shows that many who grow up in disadvantaged circumstances succeed in overcoming often daunting challenges (for example, Furstenberg, Brooks-Gunn, and Morgan 1987; Masten,

This volume aims to identify the resources and personal qualities that help disadvantaged youth, but also the barriers they face. It is a book about social stratification in the urban context, informed by the experience of the panel of Baltimore children whose life trajectories we tracked for nearly a quarter century from 1982 to 2006. They are an internally diverse group—black and white, mostly low income at the outset, but also some who began life in more favorable circumstances. The next section provides background on the project. The chapter concludes with an overview of the book.

those African Americans who did manage to penetrate the skilled trades mostly were consigned to low-wage work. According to Social Security Administration data, the black graduates of Carver High's auto mechanics program from 1956 to 1969 earned barely half that of the white graduates of Mergenthaler High,2 taking four and a half years to reach the earnings levels that Mergenthaler alums realized “after a few months” (Levenson and

Nordic societies believe that helping children develop a healthy independence from the random lottery of their parents’ resources, connections, and skills is arguably even more important when children begin to transition toward adulthood.

I recommend an email that thanks the person for their time, reiterates your desire to work for the company after having met the hiring manager and learned more about the company, and that uses a specific reference to a point in the conversation that was meaningful. Also, mention what you think sets you apart from the rest of the candidates.

The relationship between obstetric drugs and sometimes ultimately fatal intoxication in adulthood is not accidental. Through amniotic fluid, the foetus develops a taste for the foods his mother prefers; this transmission is thought to assist the transition to nursing and, after weaning, to solids. The same transmission of preference applies to substances, meaning that a pregnant woman who drinks or uses drugs passes the preference to her foetus. Logically, this principle applies to the placental transference of obstetric drugs.

First, I am thrilled that paramedics are finally getting the respect they deserve for being the professionals they can be. The scope of practice is expanding, and patient care modalities are improving, seemingly by the minute. Patient outcomes are also improving as a result, and EMS is passing through puberty and forging into adulthood. On the other hand, autonomy in the hands of the “lesser-motivated,” can be a very dangerous thing. You know as well as I do that there are still plenty of providers who operate from a subjective, complacent, and downright lazy place. Combined with the ever-expanding autonomy, that provider just became more dangerous than he or she ever has been – to the patients and to you. Autonomy in patient care places more pressure for excellence on the provider charged with delivering it, and also on the partner and crew members on scene. Since the base hospital is not involved like it once was, they are likewise less responsible for the errors and omissions of the medics on the scene. Now more than ever, crew members are being held to answer for the mistakes and follies of their coworkers; now more than ever, EMS providers are working without a net. What’s next? I predict (and hope) emergency medical Darwinism is going to force some painful and necessary changes. First, increasing autonomy is going to result in the better and best providing superior patient care. More personal ownership of the results is going to manifest in outcomes such as increased cardiac arrest survival rates, faster and more complete stroke recovery, and significantly better outcomes for STEMI patients, all leading to the brass ring: EMS as a profession, not just a job. On the flip side of that coin, you will see consequences for the not-so-good and completely awful providers. There will be higher instances of licensure action, internal discipline, and wash-out. Unfortunately, all those things will stem from generally preventable negative patient outcomes. The danger for the better provider will be in the penumbra; the murky, gray area of time when providers are self-categorizing. Specifically, the better provider who is aware of the dangerously poor provider but does nothing to fix or flush him or her, is almost certain to be caught up in a bad situation caused by sloppy, complacent, or ultimately negligent patient care that should have been corrected or stopped. The answer is as simple as it is difficult. If you are reading this, it is more likely because you are one of the better, more committed, more professional providers. This transition is up to you. You must dig deep and find the strength necessary to face the issue and force the change; you have to demand more from yourself and from those around you. You must have the willingness to help those providers who want it – and respond to those who need it, but don’t want it – with tough love by showing them the door. In the end, EMS will only ever be as good as you make it. If you lay silent through its evolution, you forfeit the right to complain when it crumbles around you.

For most people, childhood merges into adulthood, a phase where you are both - a child as well as an adult. But that wasn’t the case with me; my childhood died an untimely death. Maturity sneaked in before time. There was no overlapping; it was a case of one replacing the other without any forewarning, leaving rough edges instead of a smooth transition.

The most important fact is not that there are one or three or four or six identifiable periods of crisis in a lifetime; rather, adulthood unfolds its promise in an alternating rhythm of expansion and contraction, change and stability. In human life as in the rest of nature, change accumulates slowly and almost invisibly until it is made manifest in the sudden form of fledging out or thawing or leaf-fall. It is the transition process rather than a thing called “a mid-life transition” that we must understand.

It’s not particularly pleasant for most teenagers to be at odds with their parents, but they generally prefer it to being at odds with themselves.

Confusion about how to communicate with this age group has haunted parents for many years. Mark Twain gave an amusing piece of advice concerning adolescence when he declared his preferred method of interacting with teenagers: “When a boy turns thirteen, put him in a barrel and feed him through the knothole. When he turns sixteen, plug up the hole.” This humorous advice reflects parental frustration about what to do with adolescents who are struggling to transition from childhood to adulthood.

The significant relationships of early adulthood are thus construed as the means to an end of individual achievement, and these "transitional figures" must be cast off or reconstructed following the realization of success. If in the process, however, they become, like Dido, an impediment to the fulfillment of the Dream, then the relationship must be renounced, "to allow the developmental process" to continue. This process is defined by Levinson explicitly as one of individuation: "throughout the life cycle, but especially in the key transition periods . . . the developmental process of individuation is going on." The process refers "to the changes in a person's relationships to himself and to the external world," the relationships that constitute his "Life Structure" (p. 195). If in the course of "Becoming One's Own Man," this structure is discovered to be flawed and threatens the great expectations of the Dream, then in order to avert "serious Failure or Decline," the man must "break out" to salvage his Dream. This act of breaking out is consummated by a "marker event" of separation, such as "leaving his wife, quitting his job, or moving to another region" (p. 206). Thus the road to mid-life salvation runs through either achievement or separation.

Young people need to be loved, to put it as plainly as possible. They need to be engaged, challenged, mentored, and enjoyed. They, like every human being, need to be appropriately cared for, no matter how autonomous and self-sufficient they may think they are.

many in the social sciences like to think of themselves as “value neutral.” We don’t particularly believe in that. We do believe that social science should do its best to avoid distorting biases, to prevent ideologies from skewing its findings, in order in the end to describe and explain what is true about what is real in social life. But note that that depends not on “value neutrality” but on its opposite: on value commitments to truth, scientific integrity, accountability, and so on. Those are nothing if not values driven by beliefs in what is good. Good science is thus always based not on bracketing or setting aside particular human notions of what is good, but rather on an absolute commitment to particular goods, like telling the truth, being willing to be shown to be wrong, etcetera.

What Knowledge and Skills Will Our Children Need to Be Successful Adults? If the fundamental purpose of school is to prepare our children to be successful adults and citizens, this is logically the next question we should ask. To be sure, the world for which we are preparing our students today is not the world most educators entered when we transitioned from childhood to adulthood.

Baltimore's decades-long economic decline was well under way in the early 1980s when the children at issue in this volume set out on their journey through the city's public schools. Beginning in 1970, and continuing through the five years they were in elementary school (1982–1987), half the city's jobs in primary metals, shipbuilding repair, and transportation assembly disappeared (Levine 1987, 107). The historic core of Baltimore's industrial might had relocated offshore, to the region's rapidly expanding suburbs and low-wage parts of the country, or simply faded away in favor of the new postindustrial economy. This new economy provides lucrative

these communities are not just drug dens; they also are home to many “decent folk” (Anderson 2000), the poor, near-poor, and nonpoor who struggle mightily to forge respectable lives free of fear. The Long Shadow also is about those living in “inner cities across the country,” but our experience offers a different view of these neighborhoods. To correct the distortions perpetrated in popular accounts

For almost twenty-five years, we tracked the life progress of 790 children who began first grade in the fall of 1982 in twenty Baltimore public elementary schools. This book is about their journey from childhood into young adulthood. It happens that one of these schools, the poorest of the twenty, is located in a neighborhood that borders the two depicted in The Corner. To characterize that school as high need would be an

Partly, it is because we tend to think of black and white poverty differently. Sandra Barnes (2005, 17), citing census data from 2000, notes that “75 percent of all impoverished are white,” but also that (taken from Flanagan 1999): “poverty among whites appears to be less expected, less recognized, less stigmatized, and less often the focus of research and commentary.” Andrew Hacker (1995, 100) adds that:

Nationally in 2011, poor whites exceeded the poor African American total by roughly eight million: 19,171,000 versus 10,929,000.

It is commonly thought that high-poverty neighborhoods are socially fragmented and suffer a weak sense of community, but that is mistaken (see, for example, Sampson, Morenoff, and Gannon-Rowley 2002). Apropos of the point, we see in chapter 3 that these

For example, parent support could be most important in the early grades, when children's academic self-image is just beginning to coalesce, but over time, as children become more self-directive, the immediate influence of parent support might wane.

Middle-class parents are more verbal generally, their vocabulary is richer and more expressive, and they are more supportive and less controlling in conversation with their children (see Hart and Risley 1995).