Adulthood has been historically defined by social milestones such as employment, marriage, and parenthood. Traditional psychological models of adulthood were conceived in the 1950s and 1960s, a time when paths to adulthood were fairly uniform and people obtained a stable job, married, and had children in their early twenties. These stages of ‘settling down’ are no longer viable in our current world that is characterised by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. People’s trajectories into and through adulthood have become vastly varied over recent decades. Adults today spend more time in education, struggle to achieve financial independence and home ownership, and are more likely to delay, or forgo, marriage and parenthood compared with previous generations.
So, what does it mean to be an adult today? We found that people endorse on average more often psychological characteristics when they are asked to define adulthood than socio-demographic milestones of career, marriage, and parenthood.
Our figure illustrates these findings. In yellow are the five most often endorsed characteristics when defining adulthood, which described being responsible and financially independent. On average, about 80% of a sample of adults from Britain endorsed these top five items. By comparison, only around 25% of adults reported that being 18 years old, having a child, being able to drive a car, being married or having had sex defined what an adult was. These characteristics are shown in blue below.
Note: Data come from an online survey of sample of UK residents that was recruited via Prolific (N = 722; age range 18 to 77 years; mean age = 39.02, SD age = 13.14).
To capture adulthood as the rich and dynamic time of psychological development that it is, we developed the CARES taxonomy that includes five distinct qualities of adulthood:
Cognitive maturity refers to the confidence that an adult has in their own knowledge and abilities.
Sense of Aging is the realisation that you are getting older, and that life is finite.
Self-Reliance is the ability to look after yourself and have control over your life.
Eudaimonia describes how adults know themselves, and live in alignment with who they are.
Social convoy refers to the network of relationships in one’s life which support them through adulthood.
These five qualities map the cognitive, affective, and behavioural roots of development in adulthood, and form the basis of adults’ mental health and well-being.
While the five CARES qualities likely influence, and are influenced by, social milestones, the qualities represent independent aspects of psychological development, and they are missing from current models of what it means to be an adult today.
We are working on three current projects to advance our studies on the psychology of adulthood. The first is to develop scales that can be used to measure individual differences in the five CARES qualities. We finished piloting an initial item pool, and here are example items, one for each quality. For each, test takers are asked to respond to the prompt “This describes adulthood for me” on a scale from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree”.
|
CARES QUALITY |
EXAMPLE ITEM |
|
Cognitive Maturity |
Being able to use past experiences to make good decisions |
|
Sense of Aging |
Appreciating the time that I have in my life |
|
Self-Reliance |
Being able to look after myself |
|
Eudaimonia |
Living in alignment with my true character |
|
Social Convoy |
Having people in my life who understand and support me |
Our second project focuses on mapping the pathways through with the CARES qualities may be related to adults’ mental health and well-being. For example, cognitive maturity – to have confidence in one’s knowledge – is likely to boost people’s trust in their own decisions and thus, reduce their worrying and rumination about the future. Another example is self-reliance -- the sense that one is in control of their own life – which is likely to help being more resilient against setbacks in day-to-day life, exerting positive influences on mental health. In the future, we aim to empirically validate these pathways using longitudinal data.
There is variation in how people perceive adulthood depending on the cultures they grew up in. For example, people from Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic countries (“WEIRD” countries), like the UK or USA, believe that social roles – such as being married, having children, and having a career – are more important for adult status than people from non-WEIRD countries. In a sample of Danish people aged 18 to 29 years, only 17% believed that marriage was important for adult status, compared to 80% of a sample of the same age from Ghana. We plan to collect data on perceptions of adulthood from countries around the world to systematically study cross-cultural differences in the psychology of adulthood.