Celebrating adulthood
By: Vinod Chandrashekhar Dixit
18th November is celebrated as World Adult Day to tackle the growing aging problem. It is an initiative to urge adults to live with their old parents and help them as one of the biggest social transformations is population ageing.
Soon, the world will have older people than children and more people of old age than ever before. Their health is determined by and contributes to broad social trends. Becoming an Adult that old saying “enjoy being a kid while you can” or when people told you that when you’re an adult that you will miss being a kid.
Everything they told you as a kid was true. As a kid you have no responsibilities, no bills, and no worries. Adulthood is divided into three stages, early, middle, and late adulthood.
The definition in the dictionary states an adult means being completely grown: fully developed and mature. Becoming an adult, also known as young adulthood, is a very crucial stage in one’s life. This is the climax of physical and health processes. This is the point in life when we make plans of our futures.
It is the time when we think of what life will be like as an adult and make plans for the future. Everyone eventually becomes an adult but just because you turn eighteen does not mean you should be considered as one. Being an adult means being the bigger person in difficult situations.
An adult is considered to be “living at home” or “living with parents” on the basis of the adult’s relationship to the head of the household. An adult is “living with parents” if at least one parent resides in the household. In 1910, the life expectancy for a female was 33 years, today it is 82 years. This represents a remarkable gain of almost 50 years of life.
The past century has seen remarkable improvements in life expectancy. This is largely due to improvements in public health. With the growing medical advancements and awareness about health issues, women are living 6 to 8 years longer than the men. The number of people around the age of 60 or more is likely to grow from 900 million to 2 billion up to 2050.Young adults are marrying later i.e. 29 for men and 27 for women.
However, many youth experience setbacks by becoming parents too, dropping out of school, failing to find work etc. Adulthood can be hard, especially when you are not used to it. Doing taxes, keeping the house and yourself clean, handling a job and making sure you are having three meals a day, can be a little too much to ask.
However, at the end of the day, it is indeed satisfying that you have the whole house to yourself and you are living a self-made life.
Education is life–not a mere preparation for an unknown kind of future living…The whole of life is learning; therefore, education can have no ending. This new venture is called adult education–not because it is confined to adults but because adulthood, maturity defines its limits.
There is no doubt that one of the biggest social transformations is population ageing. Soon, the world will have older people than children and more people of old age than ever before. Their health is determined by and contributes to broad social trends. It is a fact that every adult is the heart of a child. We just gradually convince ourselves that we have to act more like adults. Inside every adult there’s still a child that lingers.
(The author hails from Jodhpur Tekra, Ahmedabad)
KV News
