Abstract
One of the many poignant scenes in Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman, is the conversation between Happy and his mother, Linda. Linda is trying to convince her son that he has to commit to something in life; that he can not just sit around and not do anything. This conversation represents a segment of a transition to adulthood process – the mother–son conversation in which they are discussing his future. Similarly, the research literature on the transition to adulthood reviewed in Chapter 1 has pointed to transition as a process. It also showed that this process takes place over a longer period of time than once was the case, often a decade or more, well after 18 years of age. Third, what constitutes a successful transition to adulthood is less clear than it once was. Marriage, full-time employment, and leaving the family home are not the decisive markers of adulthood that they were even 50 years ago, the kind of markers that Linda Loman sought for her son.
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Young, R.A., Marshall, S.K., Valach, L., Domene, J.F., Graham, M.D., Zaidman-Zait, A. (2010). Transition to Adulthood as Goal-Directed Action. In: Transition to Adulthood. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6238-6_2
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