13.4 Summary

Personality Development in Adulthood

1. The personality of adults remains quite stable, although many adults become more mature, as described by Erikson and Maslow. The midlife crisis is more myth than fact, more a cohort effect than a universal experience.

2. The Big Five personality traits—openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism—characterize personality at every age, with each person relatively high or low on each of these five. Adults choose their particular ecological niche based partly on personality. Culture and context affect everyone.

3. Although chosen careers and partners typically reinforce existing personality traits, unexpected events (e.g., a major illness or financial windfall) can temporarily disrupt personality.

Intimacy

4. Intimacy is a universal human need, satisfied in diverse ways, with friends and family, romantic partners, and consequential strangers. Each person has a social convoy of other people with whom he or she travels through life.

5. Friends are crucial for buffering stress and sharing secrets, for everyday companionship and guidance. This is true for both sexes.

6. Family members have linked lives, continuing to affect one another as they all grow older. Parents and adult children are less likely to live together than in earlier times, but family members are often mutually supportive, emotionally and financially.

7. Marriage typically occurs later now than it did in earlier decades, and cohabitation and living apart together are sometimes alternatives to, sometimes preludes to, marriage. Most adults still seek a romantic partner (same sex or other sex) with whom to share life.

8. Divorce can be difficult for both partners and their family members, not only immediately but for years before and after the event.

9. Remarriage is common, especially for men. This solves some of the problems (particularly financial and intimacy troubles) of divorced adults, but the success of second marriages varies.

Generativity

10. Adults seek to feel generative, achieving, successful, and instrumental—all words used to describe a major psychosocial need that each adult meets in various ways.

11. Parenthood is a common expression of generativity. Even wanted and planned-for biological children pose challenges; foster children, stepchildren, and adoptive children bring additional stresses and joys.

12. Caregiving is more likely to flow from the older generations to the younger ones, so the “sandwich generation” metaphor is misleading. Many families have a kinkeeper, who aids generativity within the family.

13. Employment brings many rewards to adults, particularly intrinsic benefits such as pride and friendship. Changes in employment patterns—including job switches, shift work, and the diversity of fellow workers—can affect other aspects of adult development.

14. Combining work schedules, caregiving requirements, and intimacy needs is not easy; consequences are mixed. Some adults benefit from new patterns within the labour market; others find that the demands of work impair family well-being.