Study Tracked How Three Generations Dealt With Adulthood: Millennials Showed The Most Fear

Millennials Started Out Most Afraid of Adulthood. By Midlife, That Fear Had Faded.

There’s a name for that nagging wish to just stop the clock, to skip the mortgage payments, the career pressure, and the slow creep of responsibility and retreat somewhere simpler and safer. Researchers call it “maturity fear,” and according to a 30-year study, Millennials had more of it than any studied generation before them. Like Generation X, though, they also shed it faster than the Baby Boomers did.

A study published in Developmental Psychology tracked more than 2,400 college students across three generational cohorts, Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Millennials, from their college years into their late 30s and around age 40, measuring maturity fears, a survey-based marker of wanting to retreat to the security of childhood.

Researchers expected those fears to get worse over time, especially for younger generations already dealing with rising housing costs, climate anxiety, and economic instability. What they found instead was the opposite, and it raises some genuinely surprising questions about how people come to terms with getting older.

Millennials Entered College With Higher Maturity Fears Than Older Cohorts

Researchers pulled data from students at a private university in the northeastern United States, recruiting new groups in 1982, 1992, and 2002, representing Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Millennials, respectively. Each group was surveyed in college and then followed up 10 years and 20 years later, giving the team a rare window into how the same individuals changed across decades of adult life. In total, 2,482 participants took part, about 70% of whom were female, with a starting average age of just under 20.

To measure maturity fears, participants answered questions from a four-item subscale of a validated psychological assessment, originally designed to capture a person’s desire to retreat to the security of childhood. At the starting point, college, the pattern was clear: each successive cohort came in with higher levels of maturity fears than the one before it. Among women, fears were higher in the 1992 group than the 1982 group, and higher still in the 2002 group. Among men, the 1982 group had notably lower fears than both the 1992 and 2002 groups.

Contrary to Predictions, Maturity Fears Dropped With Age Across All Groups

Going in, the research team expected maturity fears to increase as people got older. After all, the pressures of midlife are real, and other research has shown that general life satisfaction tends to dip between a person’s 20s and 40s before recovering later in life. Millennials, already starting from a higher baseline of fear, were predicted to feel the weight of adulthood even more intensely as they aged.

That prediction did not hold up. Maturity fears decreased across the board, for both men and women, and across all three cohorts. People, it turns out, tend to become less afraid of growing up the more they actually do it. For a generation that entered adulthood already more anxious about it than those before them, that’s a more hopeful arc than most would have predicted.

One explanation offered by the researchers: aging itself may work like a form of gradual exposure. Just as someone who fears flying might find their anxiety lessening the more they board planes, people may find that getting older turns out to be more manageable than anticipated. Gaining financial independence, building careers, and developing a greater sense of control over one’s life during the years between ages 18 and 38 may have all contributed to that easing of fears, the researchers noted, particularly for participants in this study, who attended a highly selective university.

Gen X and Millennials Both Outpaced Baby Boomers in Shedding Maturity Fears

While every cohort showed declining fears, the Baby Boomer group showed the least change over time. Fears among that group were relatively low to begin with and stayed fairly stable. Millennials and Generation X, by contrast, started higher and fell further, at statistically equivalent rates. Among women, the decline was particularly steady across all three cohorts, suggesting that lived experience and growing confidence may help ease those fears over time.

Millennials’ Maturity Fears Stayed Higher Even as They Declined

Despite the encouraging decline over time, the generational gap never fully closed. Millennials generally remained higher than the older cohorts at each time point, though not every comparison was statistically significant. Researchers pointed to a broad mix of forces that may have set younger cohorts up to be more anxious about adulthood from the start, including economic pressure, the cultural emphasis on staying young, delayed milestones like marriage and homeownership, and the constant flood of distressing news amplified by social media.

According to the authors, a form of talk therapy focused on life transitions, helping people process anxiety about change and build new sources of meaning and connection, could be a useful tool for people struggling with fear of adulthood, one that might ease fears in the short term and support their continued decline over time.

Thirty years of data across three cohorts offers a genuinely reassuring bottom line: for most people, the thing they dreaded about growing up turns out to be far less frightening once they’re actually in it.

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