established addulthood, life transitions, well-being, work-family conflict

Objectives: Established adulthood is based on Mehta et al. (2020) model of development between young and middle adulthood (30-45 years), that describes changes in psychosocial functioning, mainly due to the postponement of developmental tasks (i.e., marriage, family) in the previous period of emerging adulthood. Aim: Studies 1 and 2 focused on characteristics of established adults: ideal and real timing of their important life transitions (e.g., entry into marriage, parenthood), subjective and psychological well-being and work-family conflict. Sample: Study 1: 404 former university students aged 30 to 43 years. Study 2: 151 people from general population aged 30 to 45 years, 84 people aged 18 to 29 and 78 people aged 46 to 65 years. Methods: Online questionnaires with methods related to well-being, ideal and real timing of life transitions (Study 1); to work-family conflict and life satisfaction in the work, partnership, and family areas (Study 2) were used. Results and Conclusions: Results in Study 1 suggest that when compared external societal timing expectations (individual timing of life transition compared to mean age in general population), higher well-being is connected rather with early or on-time transitions than with late transitions. However, in intraindividual comparison (comparison of one’s own ideal and real timing) people with earlier experience of life transitions than their ideal age had lower level of well-being compared to people with the same or with later real timing of transitions. Study 2 shows that established adults are more satisfied in the family area than emerging adults, but do not differ from older people; they experience higher work-family conflict than people in middle/older adulthood. However, people in established adulthood have different structure of relationships between work-family conflict and life satisfaction in work, partnership and family areas compared to their younger or older counterparts.