Emerging Adulthood in the Media
I picked a film called CODA for this week’s written assignment. CODA" stands for
"child of deaf adults." The film portrays the story of 17-year-old Ruby, the hearing child of deaf
parents, who's caught between helping her family's fish business in Gloucester, Massachusetts,
and pursuing her singing aspirations in college.
The theory of emerging adulthood proposes that a new life stage has arisen between
adolescence and young adulthood over the past hafl-century in industrialized countries, Arnett
suggests that many of the individualistic characteristics associated with adult status correlate to,
but are not dependent upon the role responsibilities with a career, marriage, and/or parenthood
(waymarker, emerging adulthood). Rudy the character from the movie “CODA” is the best
reference for Arnett’s theory of emerging adulthood. Ruby was born and raised in a deaf family
(father, mother, and brother are both deaf), and she’s the hearing child of her family, she is like
the CPU to the computer that keeps her family functioning. Ruby would take a lot of the
responsibility for taking care of her family at a very young age, she works with her family on a
fishing boat and helps them to run the local fish shop business, and she is also the clerk and
interpreter that takes care of every document and translate gesture language for her family to
other people on a daily basis. When Ruby gets older, she finds her passion in singing. she wants
to pursue her dream of becoming a singer, but in order to make it happens, she has to attend a
college for better professional training which means she will be away from home, thus, she’s
struggling to make the decision on going to the college or staying at home for her family.
The short clip below also indicates that Ruby is on the stage of Intimacy vs. Isolation and
struggling to be adult-like in the relationship
You two have to use condoms _ Unspoken words!!!
😲 Scene from Coda, Coda and Miles
meet at the school choir, and they are both selected to be the lead singers. At first, they were not
attracted to each other, but as they spend more and more time together, they started to have
feelings for each other but they never confess their feelings, when Coda’s parents talk about sex
protection with them, they would feel awkward and uncomfortable, because they are not in the
romantic relationship yet.