The best word to describe life for young adults is “difficult.” One need only examine what young adult life entails to understand this. From graduating high school to finding employment for the first time and from starting internships to filing out your taxes, young adult life is filled with a tremendous amount of very new and very challenging experiences that many feel totally unprepared for. But why do so many young people so often feel so totally unprepared, or at least so overwhelmed, by the whirlwind that is young adult life? The answer is simple: a lack of role models. Role models exist to inspire and guide people to do things and for young adults, role models are integral to their growth and development during the tumultuous period where people begin fully transitioning from children into adults. For young adults, especially in college, it can often feel as though there is very little to help guide them on the journey to true adulthood and it is my firm belief that the society that we have does very little to help alleviate those feelings.

This is because society, especially modern society in the US, lacks an incredibly valuable aspect of life that once used to be commonplace. That is, the value of community. It has been said that it takes a village to raise a child and I’d say it takes something similar to help a young adult truly become an adult. In medieval Europe, it was common for young people to have apprenticeships for a long period of time, where they would have a mentor or role model guide them through their first working experiences and through their young life as a whole. With the advent of industrialization, this sense of community guidance and the idea that one needs a role model at the young adult stage have been gradually lost.

This has been extremely detrimental for many reasons, but the most significant is the fact that childhood is filled with careful coddling and guidance. We spend years working closely with teachers and other adults who aren’t our parents. From teachers to coaches, from community organizers to members of one’s church, we spend years being brought up among lots of people who made it their priority to help us grow, develop and learn. This is incredibly valuable for the development of children, but the issue lies with the fact that this sense of coddling is immediately revoked once we enter adult life. As we go through high school, we are told that all of the guidance and help we have received up to that point isn’t what real life is like and we come to find out once we graduate how true this is.

Essentially, we go from being closely watched and developed to being thrust into the world on our own, with the expectation that we swim or we sink. This, in my opinion, is incredibly damaging to young adults; it gives us an expectation that is completely taken away as we enter life, as we learn that where once we had the support of so many, now we come to realize that we are alone and must depend almost entirely on ourselves. This switch between careful guidance and intense self-reliance makes life for young adults extremely stressful and chaotic and there is only one remedy for it: guidance. And the only people who can give guidance are role models. Thus, if we want to address the tremendous issues of stress and chaos that come with young adult life, we must reinstate into society important and integral parts of the development of young adults and those, most principally, are role models.