The ‘rush hour’ of life: Navigating your 30s and 40s, with Clare Mehta, PhD

Between raising young children, climbing the career ladder, and handling the everyday demands of adult life, the '30s and '40s can be a particularly busy time for many people. But for years, researchers didn't pay much attention to the period of life between ages 30 and 45, sandwiched between young adulthood and middle age. Today we're going to talk to a developmental psychologist about what she calls "established adulthood" and what she's found about people's experiences during this life stage. Are most people especially stressed or unhappy during this busy time of life? Or are there rewards that balance out the stressors? What happens to our friendships and other relationships in our '30s and '40s? Why is it useful to think about this time of life as its own developmental stage? And what does the research suggest about how we could better support people during this time? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. My guest today is Dr. Claire Mehta, an associate professor of psychology at Emanuel College in Boston, where she leads the Lifespan lab. She is also a staff scientist at Boston Children's Hospital. Dr. Mehta is a developmental psychologist who studies human development across the lifespan. Her current research is focused on established adulthood, that period of life between ages 30 and 45. Dr. Mehta, thank you for joining me today. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be able to talk about my research. Great. So you first came up with the concept of established adulthood a few years ago, and it's still new in the psychology literature. So can you start by telling us what is established adulthood? What inspired you to come up with this new theory of human development? All right. Well, I'm going to start with the story of what inspired me, and then I'll tell you a little bit about it, because these things really fit quite well together. So the time that I came up with it, I was about 37 years old, so I was an established adult myself, and I remember there were a couple of things that were happening. So I had friends who were getting divorced, who were having children. Some people were getting married. People were all trying to work really hard at work. I actually had a friend who lost a child, which seemed just so kind of awful and traumatic to be happening. And I was teaching lifespan developmental psychology, and I also teach child development, adolescent development, and adulthood and ageing, and I saw all of this stuff happening and thought, why is no one studying this age period? There is so much that is going on. All of my friends seem to be dealing with so many different things and trying to balance and juggle all of these different components of their lives, and something else happened around the same time, which was I looked at my bookcase and realized that I wasn't going to live long enough to read all the books I had amassed, which it sounds a bit depressing, but it actually didn't feel depressing to me. It felt really freeing. And so I actually went through my books and I got rid of all the things I weren't interested in, which funnily enough, the infant development books were the first ones to go, and I like to joke about it now because I just had a baby and I'm like, oh, I wish I'd kept these books. But you know, I just, it felt kind of freeing. So I realized all of these things were happening. No one was studying it. And so it was, you know, people joke around, research is me search, and I had this moment of, well, what about me? All of these things are going on and no one is talking about it, and it seemed really bizarre to me. And at the same time, a few months later, I was at a conference in Romania, and I saw Jeff Arnett talking about his period of development emerging adulthood, which is the one that comes before established adulthood, which is ages, roughly ages 18 to 29. And as I listened to him talk about that, again, I was thinking, what about the next stage? What happens when you're in your 30s and early 40s before you reach midlife? And so I actually went and chatted to him and I was taking a sabbatical, so I went and spent it at Clark University and he helped me figure out how to build out this theory. And so to answer the first question, what is established adulthood? Hopefully you've got a sense of it now, just from me kind of describing the things I was noticing. But it's this period from 30 to 45. Some researchers have described this period of the lifespan as the rush hour of life, and I think you can really think of it that way. So a lot of people are trying to get ahead in a chosen career, trying to maintain a romantic relationship, making decisions about having children or having children and then having to raise young children at the same time that you're trying hopefully to maintain some friendships in all of this and some semblance of a social life, but you also have aging parents. So all of these things are kind of colliding at the same time. So we talk about a career and care crunch that takes place during this period. So that's probably the defining feature of established adulthood. And how is it different from emerging adulthood, right, 18 to 29, and then middle age, old age? I mean, what are all of the developmental stages and how are they different in the same? Yeah, so I think that's a great question. And for people who aren't familiar with how we think about the lifespan as developmental psychologists, we carve it up. And I can come back to that too in a few moments, why it's maybe not always great to carve up the way that we do. But we talk about infancy, then we have childhood, then we have adolescence. And interestingly enough, by the way, adolescence didn't exist until the early 1900s. So that's still, we think of it as a relatively new developmental period. And then at 18, you move into this emerging adulthood, then we have established adulthood that starts at 30. And then midlife, I would argue, starts at about 45 and that goes until 65. And then we have older adulthood, which has been carved up into the young old, the old old, and the oldest old. So there's lots of space to carve up all of these periods. And I think what's so different about established adulthood, and I'll compare and contrast it to the periods on either side of it. So emerging adulthood and midlife, when you're in emerging adulthood, you're still figuring out who you are, what you want to be, and where you want to go. And I'm not saying that's not still happening when you reach your 30s and 40s, because surprisingly, my research has actually suggested that it is still happening. But there's, there are some really big differences. So if we think about things like romantic relationships, when you are an emerging adult, when you're 18 to 29, a lot, they start off being kind of transient relationships. So you might be with someone for six months or a year or two years. And eventually, when you get toward the end of it, the romantic relationships become a little bit more long term. And whereas when you're in established adulthood, most of them are long term relationships that then may turn into committed relationships, so marriage or some kind of committed partnership. And then the other thing that happens in established adulthood is people start to get divorced and separated. And so that looks a little bit different. And career is very different to, I think in emerging adulthood, people are really trying to figure out what career they're interested in. So they have a lot of job changes, there's a lot of research that suggests that people are changing jobs very frequently as they explore and figure out what they actually want to do. And so we can think of that period of career development as really being information gathering and exploration. But then when you are an established adult, hopefully, most adults in this period have decided to commit to a field. And so they're building this expertise, they're building responsibility. People are coming to them with things and there's more stability. So you kind of know from year to year that you're likely to be, if not in the exact same job in the same profession and the same career. And by the time you get to midlife, you have a lot of seniority, you've got this acquired expertise, so you're not building it anymore, you have it, and you start mentoring the next generation. And I always like to tell a story about this because my husband's a little bit older than me, and one of his friends who's in her late 40s, talked about a lot of the senior people at her place of work retiring, and she suddenly realized that she was the senior person and kind of having this panic that now people are coming to me when they need advice and they need mentoring. And I, you know, she didn't feel quite ready for it. But I think that that really, that was a great story that kind of illustrates this transition from being the person who's still figuring things out to now being expected to know the answers. So in terms of family, when you're an emerging adult, so again, 18 to 29, most people, and I do want to be clear, not all, so there are really some demographic differences in what people's lives look like. But for a lot of people, they're unmarried at least at the beginning of emerging adulthood, and this is very specific to the US, likely to be child-free and still getting support from parents. So again, this is, you know, as I'm, even as I'm talking about this, I'm like, this sounds very middle class. But if we're looking at the middle class, this is kind of what things look like. And then when you get to established adulthood, it's more likely, especially by the time people are in their 40s that they're married, they may have children, be thinking about having children or have made decisions not to have children. And then again, have these aging parents they're looking after. And then at midlife, people have been married for some time. Those relationships are really kind of strong, stable relationships. Some people are on their second relationship by midlife, too, if they've separated or been divorced. And then there are older children who hopefully need less support. I shouldn't say less support, it's different kind of support. They don't need their, you know, diapers, nappies to be changed, but they probably do want a little bit of money every now and again, so, you know, or need to come home for little spots of time as they're figuring out their lives. So, you know, for people at midlife, parenting definitely looks a bit different. And then you're either going through the loss of parents or adjusting to loss of parents or kind of living your life without your parents around. So as you can see, there's lots of different things going on in all of these periods, but there is some overlap. So as I said, there are some emerging adults who find their careers earlier, who do get married and have children earlier as well. So it's not, not exact, but if we're kind of looking at averages, which we do in psychology, you can see that there are some, some things that make these stages all distinguishable from one another. Right. And a lot of research has found that people are less happy in midlife than at other life stages, maybe because this is just such an intense and busy time, as you've just described. How does this track with what you found in your research when you reach established adulthood, are you happy or you're too busy to even think about being happy? That is a very good point and a very good question too. So I love this question because it's one of my favorite answers to give to anything in psychology as well. It's complicated. So it's complicated because people are busy. And when I talk to people who see people in therapy, who have like clinical practice, you do hear lots of stories of people kind of struggling to manage everything. But the interviews I've done, so I've done, I think it's close to 180 interviews at this point with established adults. I'm hearing a little bit of a different story. Now some of them are in therapy, not all of them are. And one of the things that I think is so fabulous about this period of the lifespan is that people are now reflecting a little bit on where they are and making peace with where they are and are able to find happiness. So one of the people who I interviewed had talked about how they really had wanted to become a doctor, but they ended up not doing that, but they went into the medical field doing something more on the business side, and they said, you know, I always thought I wanted to be a doctor, but I didn't do it. And now I'm doing this job. And this is actually okay. Like I like it. It's a good fit for me. And it works for my life. And so there's a lot of people kind of reflecting and looking back and thinking, you know, this is working out okay, it's not as bad as I thought it was going to be. And I think that other really positive thing that happens during this period is people feel like they know themselves better. So they have more confidence in who they are and what they're able to do. And again, some of my favorite stories that I heard was people saying, you know, my mother, she always used to try and dominate me and tell me that I needed to do this and I needed to do that. And I just don't care anymore. That is not who I am. And so I'm going to be myself. So a lot more confidence, a lot more self understanding. And I think with that comes a lot of happiness. And one of the things that I always think of when people ask me about happiness too, and you can tell from my voice that I'm from England originally and so I have a very European outlook on life, even though I've been living in the US for a long time. And so there was a study that I really appreciated by glass and colleagues and what they did was they looked at a number of different European countries and the US and Canada. And they looked at this idea of wellbeing and how when people have children. So again, usually in this established adulthood stage, we talk about there being this huge dip in wellbeing. And what they discovered was that in countries with good social support, so countries that give good maternity leave that provide universal childcare, that dip doesn't actually happen in wellbeing when you have children. In fact, people have increases in wellbeing when they have children. And because the US has the fewest in this study, they had the fewest number of social safety nets. And I think that's why we see some of the dip. And so this to me is one of the big implications of what we should be doing with this work is thinking about how we can support people in this age period to ensure that they are able to be happy and healthy and function well. Have you looked at gender differences in your research of men and women share a lot of the same experiences in the 30 to 45 age range, or are their lives different? Oh, I love that you asked this question because before I studied established adulthood, I was actually a gender researcher. And so that was where where all of my research was focused. I was a feminist psychologist was the work that I was doing. And so when I'm interviewing people and hearing the stories, I'm always looking for some of these differences and some of these similarities. And I think one of the biggest differences that I was really looking for was around this career and care crunch and childcare, because I really expected to see that women were struggling a little bit more. And to be honest, they are, they are in a lot of ways. But it was very refreshing to hear male parents really wanting to be involved in their children's lives and feeling the career and care crunch to as they tried to figure out how they could be there. So there was one participant in particular who had two daughters and really wanted to be there for his daughters as they were growing up and was making career choices around that so that he could make sure that he was there to pick them up from school and had kind of put his career to the side to be able to be a good parent. And but, you know, there weren't many men who were talking about that. One of the males in the study, I remember very clearly, he was asked about the career and care crunch and whether he felt like he was juggling a lot. And he said, well, it's hard to go and play golf for a whole afternoon now that I have two children. And after hearing some of the women talking about trying to start their own company and not being able to do the things that they needed to do because of the childcare requirements, now it's like, and you can't play golf in the afternoon. You know, so I did, there are definitely some gender differences. And I do think that the career and care crunch certainly hits women to a greater extent than it hits men, even though we would like to think that things are becoming more equal. I think we all know that women still do the lion's share of the childcare and housework as well. So it's definitely a definitely a gendered crunch and we see women suffering a bit more. What about the factors of race and ethnicity? Have you found differences in those cases as well? Yeah. So one of the things that's been really important to me as I've been developing this theory is to make this not another one of these psychological theories that is just all about white middle class folk, because so much of the research that we produce is those are the participants people are getting. So in my interviews, and I should probably also mention that these interviews, I did them for a book that will be coming out in early 2025. So if people are interested, they can check that out and actually read some of these stories. And so I made sure that I had, I think it was around 50% people of color. And the stories ended up actually being very similar. And I think this is my fault, because I think a lot of people were again middle class. So I tried to get more working class folk as well and to interview people who didn't have college degrees, because I think that definitely makes a difference. But because I was getting mainly middle class people, a lot of people had the same kind of concerns and the same worries. And I'm not 100% sure that I buy this. So this is one of the areas that I want to delve into a little bit more. And I did try to do a good job of making sure that if you were a person of color, you were matched by race, so you were being interviewed by someone who had a similar ethnic or racial background to you, because I think that makes people more comfortable to be able to talk about their experiences, especially of racism, but probably not going to feel comfortable talking to someone who's white about some of those experiences. And so I heard here and there some discussions of how race had impacted their lives. But generally, people in this age period were all coping with the same things, so trying to juggle children, trying to figure out what they were doing for work. And so it seemed, at least in the middle classes, that a lot of the concerns were the same. Now, the common wisdom is that it gets harder to make friends as you get older and even to stay in touch with the friends that you have. What have you found about people's friendships and support systems during established adulthood? Yeah, that's another great question, and I said that I studied gender before I studied gender and friendship. So these are the things that I've really been paying attention to. And so the friendship stuff I was really, really interested in, because in terms of my research, this was also how I got into established adulthood. I did a friendship study first, looking at gender and friendships and the tendency for women to be friends with women and men to be friends with men, and what that looks like in adulthood when we regard cross-gender friendships with suspicion. And so in terms of what these social networks look like, it gets really difficult for people in established adulthood. This is another area that is right for research and intervention. So the quote that stands out in my mind the most from one of my participants, she said, my friendship circle is really a dot. And so she described how she had lots and lots of friends when she was an emerging adult, when she was in college, when she was first working, and that as she got older and took on more responsibilities and had a romantic partner, had children, she just didn't have time to see her friends anymore. So she said something like, in theory, I have friends, I just don't see them. And we see this, I think, pretty much everyone I interviewed, whether they were partnered, whether they had children, talked about this retraction and friendships that they had fewer friends. And one of the things that happens is people move. So this is something that we think about as happening a lot in emerging adulthood as people are exploring careers and figuring out who they are, where they want to live, but it's happening in established adulthood too. And I think a lot of this has to do with the cost of property as well and how difficult it is for people to own now that maybe 30 or 40 years ago, people were buying how they houses when they were emerging adults, now you can't afford to do it until you're an established adult. So you may have been living in a city or in an area that was a little bit more expensive and you realize you can't afford to live in this place if you want to buy a house, so you have to move. And some people, as they advance up that career ladder, are getting career offers that also require them to move. So a lot of friends are moving away. People are too busy with their children, with their families. There's also this cultural assumption that we make that if you are partnered, you do not need friends, that your partner will provide everything for you, which is an absolute lie. One of my favorite non-psychology writers is Annie Lamott and my favorite saying that I heard from her is you cannot get bread from a hardware store. And I have to remind myself this with my husband, if I want something from him, if I want him to give me like warm fuzzies and validate my feelings, he's not going to do that. I need my friends to do that. And so it's really important for people to keep the social support, but I would argue that our society isn't really set up to do that. So we have these cultural beliefs that if you're partnered, you're all set, you don't need to have friends because your partner is going to provide everything you need. And then we're also so busy and there's this grind culture that's going on now where we're always competing like who's the busiest, who's working the hardest. I just told someone this morning that I'm not going to have time to go and visit them. It was some cousins in Long Island until spring, which seems crazy, but we all do this. We're like too busy, too busy to do things. And so I think this is really dangerous. We know about this loneliness epidemic. I think established adulthood is really where it's taken hold. And you have these people in their 30s and 40s who feel as though they don't have a single friend that they can talk to about how they're feeling. And given how much is happening in this age period, those social connections are so important. They can be like a lifeline for people. So I think this is so important for us to be asking questions about looking at and thinking, thinking about. Why is it important to see life in these stages? Is this just something for psychologists to think about or is it helpful for just regular people to see their lives in these sort of slices? Yeah, that's a great question. I think that it's useful for everybody to look at it this way. And it's also not useful, so I'll give you both thoughts about this. So I think it's useful to be able to say, this is what we expect to be happening roughly around these ages, and this is what these ages should roughly look like. I think we all want to know that we are on track for the things that we want to do in our lives. And so having these stages kind of helps us with that. It also helps us just understand what our lifespan looks like, that we go through these phases of life. And I think all of us, even if we're not psychologists, just in terms of our lives, feel these different phases. We feel very different. You know, I remember my mom telling me she still feels like she's 17, and I'm sure she does. She's 83. I'm sure she does in some ways. But I'm sure there are other ways in which she definitely does not feel that young anymore. And so we can feel ourselves evolving. And so having these stages and labels to give them, I think, is really helpful for us in terms of making sense of our lives and how we're moving through our lives. I do think it's problematic to have these stages because things aren't this clear cut. So I like to say that you don't wake up in the morning, you go to bed at 29, and then you wake up in the morning at 30, and you're like, "I am now an established adult. I feel completely different. My life has changed. I'm feeling much more stable. I'm feeling more committed to all of these things in my life." That's not how it happens. And people do things at different stages too. So some of my research looked at people who were Mormon or former Mormons, so people who are members of Church of the Latter-day Saints. And it seemed for women at least in this group that established adulthood and emerging adulthood were flipped because they were having children earlier, so they were having children during emerging adulthood and raising their kids, and then they reached established adulthood and their kids were old enough that they didn't need lots of care anymore. And so people were thinking, "Well, what do I do with my life? Like who am I? Where do I want to go? Who do I want to be? What do I want to do for work?" And so a lot of the exploration that we associate with emerging adulthood was happening in established adulthood. And so when you see things like that, it's like, "Do these stages even make sense? Should we just get rid of them completely?" And I think there's a great discussion in psychology about the usefulness of having these stages when we know that development is continuous. And you can think of development as either being a straight line or steps. And it's not like a step. You don't wake up in the morning when you go from established adulthood to midlife, having jumped up the next step. You're still slowly changing throughout your life very slowly. I like to tell people every single day you're different than you were the day before. And so we talk about that a lot in psychology, but I think it's still useful to have these life stages so that we can study them. Because if I didn't name established adulthood, I imagine that people still wouldn't be studying it as a unique period of development. So people might be looking at romantic relationships and divorce and child rearing, but without giving it a name, these are the things that are happening in established adulthood and all of these things are connected to one another and they're not separate. I think it's so it's really important to have that name that we can unify all of the research under. Now, you mentioned earlier the fact that we don't have as many social safety nets in this country for people at this stage of life. I'm just wondering, what else could we be doing at a policy level to help people in their 30s and 40s? Yeah. So I think the easiest answer to this question is for people who do have children is to be able to provide parental leave for both males and for females. This can alleviate this gendered career and care crunch too. So I think that's really helpful. But for people who don't have children, having some kind of family leave policy is going to help if you're looking after aging parents, for example. And I live in Massachusetts, so I'm very lucky that we do have, we have some legislation now that enabled me, when I had my baby, I was able to get money from the state to take a slightly longer maternity leave. But it's not as long as a lot of these European countries where we see people being happier and healthier. So I think looking at parental leave, looking at universal childcare, which I would argue any universal education that we provide people benefits the society as a whole. It's not just the people with the children, because those children go on to be earning individuals who provide taxes, and so the more support we can give to these kids throughout their lives and their parents, I think, is really important. And then I also, this isn't really at the policy level, but if we could somehow change our culture and move a little bit more away from this grind culture and give each other more space and more time and be more respectful of people's home lives when they're at work. So somebody was telling me that they had met with a German colleague and had asked them, they only needed three more hours done on a project to finish it, but it was five o'clock on a Friday and the German colleague said, I'm sorry, I'm off the clock, it's five o'clock, I'm leaving for the weekend, and then I'm on vacation for the next two weeks. So I'm not going to work on this. And we don't do that here. If somebody asked me to stay for an extra three hours on a Friday, because this really needed to get done, I would just do it. And so I think all of us can play a role in this, just setting better boundaries and saying no, and then that will give us more time for our families, more time for friends. And I think too, one of the big things that I love when I go to the UK is, and it's not because I'm a boozy alcoholic, but I love the pub culture there, because it's a place for people to gather and you can bring your families. So whenever we're in the UK, we go to the pub and my friends come and they bring their children and there's play areas and the kids run around and they have a great time and the grown-ups get to talk and really connect with one another. And people who don't have children, they get to come to and have a drink and connect. And the kids are kind of off entertaining themselves and it's really hard to find spaces like that in the US and opportunities where you can have kind of everyone just get together and it not be a big deal if there are children there because they're just expected to be off running around and playing and being a little bit loud and messy and nobody really cares. So I think if there was some way we could have more places like that, it would be really helpful for people in this age period. So what's next for you? What are you working on now? What are your big questions that you're looking at? Oh, there's so many things I'm interested in. So I want to delve more into this friendships piece because I think it's really important and we know that loneliness is really bad for our health and actually at the APA convention in August 2024, this was one of the big themes was loneliness and how we can combat it. And I think, again, established adulthood is really the period where this loneliness is really beginning to take hold as people's friends kind of drop off and they get busy. So really figuring out what we can do to support friendships and established adulthood. But then the other thing that I'm most excited about at the moment is really getting a very close look of what it's like to be an established adulthood in terms of just what your daily life looks like. And so there are these very exciting intensive longitudinal studies that you can do. I would like to do it qualitatively. So that means I would be asking people every day for three, I'd love to do it for three months. I have to figure out how I can get funding for this. But I would love over three months to just follow established adults, have a quick phone call with them in the evening. How did your day go? What were some of the challenges? What were some of the rewards? What are the things you're thinking about at the moment? What feels important to you? And just be able to watch that development unfold in real time, I think would be so valuable and just so interesting. And again, to be able to get a diverse sample to look at multiple races, ethnicities in the U.S. to begin with, I mean, if I had loads and loads of money, I would study this across the world. But I think that's something that's really important because it's going to tell us and give us more details what it's actually like to be in this age period and what are some of these concerns and some of the rewards. And then we can better support people when we know that. Well, Dr. Mehta, I want to thank you for joining me today. This has been really interesting. Thank you. Oh, thank you so much. This was so much fun. Thank you for having me. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get podcasts. And if you like what you've heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at [email protected]. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lee Weinerman. Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills. Thank you.