Where does owning a home fit in the changing lives of adults after emerging adulthood and in “established adulthood”? Here are some hints:
When Mehta appeared on camera bouncing her newborn in her lap, that professor started laughing sympathetically. She’d just read Mehta’s 2020 paper on the life phase from age 30 to 45, which described it as a hurricane of major changes and responsibilities. Career advances, marriage, parenthood, homeownership, care for aging parents—for many people these days, the paper had argued, all of those milestones fall in a short and furious chunk of time. And here Mehta was, embodying that point.
The connection between Mehta’s circumstances and her academic focus wasn’t a coincidence. Mehta was in her 30s when she started noticing that no one seemed to be studying her own age group. Her colleague Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, the author of Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road From the Late Teens Through the Twenties, had become an expert in ages 18 to 29. Psychologists of middle age, meanwhile, were usually observing those in their 50s and early 60s. She’d reached a part of life that was anything but quiet, yet when she looked to her field for answers, she heard relative silence.
Now, at 45, she has interviewed many, many people in this stage, which she named “established adulthood.” She believes that life for the youngish—especially for women—is getting only more hectic. The average man is parenting (a little) more than he used to, and the average woman is working outside the home (a lot) more than she used to. And compared with eras past, people today tend to be older when they begin hitting the classic landmarks of adulthood. A typical young person might once have, say, met a partner in their teens, married and started a family at 20-something, then taken on more career responsibility or begun caring for an ailing parent while in their 30s. Now all of these formative experiences are getting compressed. Many people do cherish this time, Mehta told me. But the fact remains that they’re in the “rush hour of life”—and they may be dealing with a milestone pileup…
Recently, this period of uncertainty has been getting longer: Many young people are saddled with debt, searching for work in a brutal job market, unable to afford buying a house. Building a career, a home, or lasting relationships—all things that can help shape a person’s sense of self—have become more difficult. And as emerging adulthood expands, it eats into the next stage of life.
From what I have seen of different surveys and published work, a majority of adults still want to pursue homeownership. Buying a residence is still an important part of adulthood and achieving the American Dream.
But this summary above and other work also suggests that this may be delayed and/or more difficult than in the past. The expectation in the postwar decades that young adults could buy a home in their 20s and perhaps on one family salary is hard to live up to today. A variety of social factors mean that homeownership is now delayed. This means more years of other living arrangements plus potential changes to how people feel about homeownership.
Given this increased difficulty, it would not surprise me if in the next decade or two fewer adults ages 18-45 say they want a home. When faced with obstacles, some people will turn to other priorities or adapt to the possibilities they do have. And it would get interesting if less than a majority of adults say they to own their residence; how does this change individuals, communities, the housing industry, and more?
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