Ramadan Blog: Week VI


Chapters nine and ten really hit home for me, as they talk about the time in life that I am either now experiencing or will experience in the coming years. Again, I have found a few figures in my readings that I will be referencing as discussion points unlike last post, where I focused on rehashing the chapter reading.

Chapter nine, titled “Early Adulthood” focuses on people aged 18 to 25. It starts out with the different ways people are initiated into adulthood and even touches on hazing and its issues. Then it moves into the significant factors that can affect development in early adulthood such as lifestyle. Another important thing it talks about is the relationship between sexual identity and gender roles such as dating trends and/or acceptable and unacceptable behavior for males and females in certain cultures. Stemming from this topic is the way young adults deal with relationships of sexuality and love, and finishes up with the type of jobs and work that young people tend to move towards.

“Middle Adulthood” is the title of chapter ten of the text. Middle adulthood usually refers to people ages 30 to 60. By this time, the physical growing and development has ceased but that doesn’t mean that you remain the same until you die. In this time, men remain fertile while women eventually go through menopause. There is some controversy as to whether one’s ability to learn is hampered with new age, though I personally do not believe so. Some go through a midlife crisis, and others go through the experience of being empty-nesters. This mostly is a time for marriage reprisal for the older couples, though this isn’t always the situation.

The first thing that caught my attention came from Graph 9.3 on page 213 titled “Binge Drinking”. It shows that overall, men tend to binge drink more than women over all. What stuck out to me were the age statistics. The first category was the 12-20 age range and the other was 21 and older. At first I was shocked to see that the 12-20 age range wasn’t higher than the 21 and over category. The biggest reason for the surprise was because of college, and the amount of underage drinking that occurs there. After I thought about it more, I realized that the bigger population of the second category might be why the latter category had the higher numbers.   

The next thing that stuck out to me was Figure 9.8 on page 224, which gave a visual of states that allowed gay marriage as compared to states that allowed marriage to first-cousins. In this map, only 8 states allowed for same-sex marriage in contrast to the second map where around half of the union allows for the marriage of first-cousins. This boggled me, because I could’ve sworn that more states allowed gay marriage. I then looked up the year that this book was published, and found that it was released in 2011. Upon a quick Google search I found out the only 13 states, today, still do not allow same-sex marriages which is a huge change from the 2011 data.

The final thing that I found very intriguing was Table 10.3 on page 248 titled, “Age at Marriage and Subsequent Divorce Rate for Americans”. I thought it was interesting how the male “Under 20” category had a lower divorce rate than the male “20-24” category, which subsequently had the highest rate at 38.8%. For women, the “20-24” category was also the highest but it was followed closely at 27.6% by the “Under 20 category”

Comments

  1. Ms. SandraOctober 1, 2018 at 9:59 PM

    Yeah , I would think that the younger the couples are, the lower the chances are for them to stay together a life time. To my experience many of my cousins who had married at 20 -24 are now divorced. I do remember seeing once in a sociology book on sex and gender, divorce rates. It said that people who divorced once and remarried twice or three times, had really high chances of another divorce. Basically , people who get divorce once, have higher chances of another divorce. it can be because people become paranoid or something . They may have some kind of ptsd after divorce and think that their new marriage is going to be the same thing, so they jeopardize themselves.

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  2. Todd FitzpatrickOctober 2, 2018 at 11:43 AM

    Good Breakdown, Jay. Surprisingly, I was not stunned to see the high divorce rate of men and women ages 20-24. It has always been my opinion that this age group is the age of wonder and experimentation. Much like Piaget states, I believe it is the time when young adults are beginning to socially flourish and are subconsciously prone to partake in multiple relationships, romantic and platonic, to figure out who they really are. When people get married in this time frame, perhaps it is because they shut down the body's natural yearning for communication in a variety of ways, that eventually the need for social interaction with others become so overbearing, they feel oppressed by their own decisions, thus the high divorce rate. Either way, I would strongly discourage marriage by anybody before the age of 25. The body needs to adventure for adequate development. At least, that's my belief.

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