Anxiety felt by today's young adults may be due to conflicting pressures to hurry up -- and wait

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. ― Some of the anxiety and frustration that many young adults are experiencing today may be caused by feelings of being caught between opposing forces, some of which pressure them to accelerate their maturation and assume adult responsibilities earlier, while others strive to hold them back, according to a new paper by scholars at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

The tensions created by these forces ― which the authors call “hurries” and “waits” ― have changed young people’s trajectory toward adulthood and foster anxiety about their ability to meet adult milestones, said first author Kaylin Ratner, a professor of educational psychology, developmental sciences and counseling psychology. Christopher Napolitano, a professor and the division chair, was a co-author of the paper, published in the Journal of Family Theory and Review.

“Historically, we’ve done a really good job isolating issues related to youth distress,” Ratner said. “But how has the world that we’ve built both expedited, supported and sometimes thwarted young people’s developmental pace? That’s something that they feel very saliently.”

Ratner said the hurries ― the real or perceived pressures to grow up quickly ― include pressures to acquire credentials sooner to stand above their competitors, and the adultification of youths that is caused by earlier physical maturation, societal violence, economic strain and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Demographic characteristics such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and socioeconomic background impact the waits and the differing social pressures that youths may be under to assume adult roles at earlier or later stages, she said. 

We groom them from a very early age to get ahead of their peers, to do their best, to get all their ducks in a row, and that’s just one of the ways that we prepare them and orient them to adulthood,” Ratner said. “But then we stop them at the front door.

That is, as young people are hurried toward adulthood, they also encounter the pressures that she calls the waits ― those that slow or limit their ability to take on adult responsibilities and meet certain milestones, such as living independently, getting married, having children and buying homes.

Some of these waits are created by changing social and economic conditions ― including longer forms of job preparation such as college and graduate school; labor market competition, including that from older adults who are working longer; and spiraling tuition costs and student loan debt. Skyrocketing prices for housing and other goods, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, are causing greater numbers of young adults to live with their parents far longer, according to the paper.

“Because hurries and waits occur simultaneously, young people must navigate a double bind to be successful. Left unchecked, this contradictory tension may threaten well-being more than either pressure in isolation,” she said. “And so we ask why are youths distressed? Because we ask them to do all these things at once, and it’s hard to navigate and negotiate. And oftentimes there are many things that are simply not within their control. I think that can be quite frustrating for them.”

Choosing an educational and occupational path has become more complicated, too, in part due to the proliferation of digital technologies that created new jobs, industries and training requirements that did not exist for previous generations, Ratner said.

The plethora of educational and career options available can lead to choice overload ― stress that is created when a person is overwhelmed by the number of choices ― and even to decision paralysis. But deciding which path to take is further complicated by the knowledge that in choosing one option, the person is simultaneously rejecting other alternatives that they may later regret passing up, Ratner said.

Yet even when graduates finally have their diploma in hand, they are entering an uncertain economy in which low-status, low-skill jobs are proliferating, while high-status, high-paying occupations are evaporating. Many highly skilled candidates are forced into accepting lower-paying jobs, while they struggle to pay off their debt and achieve the perks viewed as the hallmarks of adult success ― the great job, the committed relationship or marriage, children and homeownership, Ratner said.

“They graduate college and if there’s a job ― and that’s a big if ― the world that young people have often worked their whole lives for just doesn’t exist in the same way as it once did,” Ratner said. “It’s very frustrating to watch young people work for a dream that’s often no longer there. And many of them feel very betrayed: They’ve played the game, now where’s their prize?”

One of the most important things that parents can do while launching their kids into adulthood is understand that the opportunities that exist today are different from the ones that awaited them as emerging adults, the authors suggest.

To shape how young people experience these hurries and waits and help mitigate potential developmental anxiety, Ratner and her co-authors propose that families nurture intentional self-regulatory skills that help youths explore their identity, develop a sense of purpose and strive for goals; cultivate social, emotional and behavioral skills that promote resilience, optimism and self-management; and encourage civic engagement and volunteering.

However, the authors said that many of the causes of hurries and waits are structural. The individual solutions they recommend are simply one way that young adults and their families can be resilient in the face of hurries and waits while society works to create broader and more long-term solutions.

The Center for Social and Behavioral Science on campus recently awarded funding to Ratner to continue the work, which will identify unknown sources of hurries and waits, capture young people’s lived experiences and create a scale for quantifying developmental anxiety.

Additional co-authors of the paper were U. of I. alumni Erin F. Budesheim, Chelsea S. Alexander, Robert C. Klein, Simone Leinenweber, Lei Zhang, Talia Yue Zhao and Oswaldo Garcia Romero.