In recent decades, the lives of people in their late teens and twenties have changed so dramatically that a new stage of life has developed. In his provocative work, Jeffrey Jensen Arnett has identified the period of emerging adulthood as distinct from both the adolescence that precedes it and the young adulthood that comes in its wake. Arnett's new paradigm has received enormous worldwide scholarly attention due to his book that launched the field, Emerging Adulthood.

On the 20th anniversary of the publication of his groundbreaking work, this third edition of Emerging Adulthood fully updates and expands Arnett's findings, and adds a new chapter on cultural and international variations. Merging stories from the lives of diverse emerging adults with decades of research, Arnett covers a wide range of topics, including love and sex, relationships with parents, experiences at college and work, and views of what it means to be an adult. As the nature of American youth and the meaning of adulthood further evolve, Emerging Adulthood will continue to be essential reading for understanding the face of modern America.

Jeffrey Jensen Arnett is a Senior Research Scholar in the Department of Psychology at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. In 2000 he proposed the theory of emerging adulthood to describe development from age 18 to 29, and since then it has become a thriving international field. He was the Founding President of the Society for the Study of Emerging Adulthood and served as its first Executive Director.