A young adult is generally a person ranging in age from their late teens or early twenties to their thirties, although definitions and opinions, such as Erik Erikson 's stages of human development , vary. The young adult stage in human development precedes middle adulthood. For a variety of reasons, timelines on young adulthood cannot be exactly defined—producing different results according to the different mix of overlapping indices legal, maturational, occupational, sexual, emotional and the like employed, or on whether 'a developmental perspective Arguably indeed, with people living longer, and also reaching puberty earlier, 'age norms for major life events have become highly elastic' [4] by the twenty-first century.

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The young adult stage in human development precedes middle adulthood. A person in the middle adulthood stage is between the ages of 40 and In late adulthood , a person is 60 years old or older. According to Erikson, the young adult stage involves the personal need for intimacy and sex.

This article is from the archive of our partner. When we launched our series on Young Adult fiction for the many adults who are reading those books, we didn't consider it a statement about the official publishing-world definition of "Y. Basil E. Frankweiler or Beverly Cleary's Ramona series, are what you'd call "middle grade," or even "children's," for the under set. Meanwhile, the later books in the Harry Potter and Twilight series, for instance, skew on the older side of Y.