Immigration and Motherhood on the transition to adulthood in Latin American young women

Abstract

The Emerging Adulthood is a theory about psychosocial aspects of human development that considers the effects of globalization. According to the theory, there are five main characteristics in the Emerging Adult: Instability; Ambivalence; Autofocus; Experimentation; Age of Possibilities. With the aim of validating this framework with a group of 22 Latin-American young mothers who are immigrant in Spain, the present study used the principles of Content Analysis to qualitatively analyze interviews with the chosen population. Results show that the Emerging Adulthood may be useful to understand the phenomena involved in the contemporary youth even if the contextual issues have a greater impact in the transition to adult life.