The Ticking of the Social Clock: Adults' Beliefs about the Timing of Transition Events

In two studies, beliefs about descriptive and prescriptive age norms for adult developmental transitions were examined in a sample of 214 Australian university students aged seventeen to fifty years. The results of Study 1 revealed a belief by the vast majority that descriptive age norms still exist for both family transitions (marriage, parenthood, grandparenthood) and career transitions (leaving school, retirement). While these results were in keeping with those of Neugarten et al.'s [1] original study of age norms in the United States, the actual “best” normative ages recommended by this sample of contemporary Australian adults differed in every case from the U.S. age norms [1] of three decades ago. Matching contemporary demographic trends, the present Australian young-adult sample advocated later ages for marriage and grandparenthood, a younger norm for leaving school, and a broader normative age range for retiring from work. Study 2 tested Neugarten's hypothesis that age norms today lack some of the prescriptive overtones implicit in original “social clock” concept [2]. The results supported this suggestion. In fact, only a minority of contemporary Australian adults believed that there were prescriptive upper age boundaries for first marriage or university study. Furthermore, their prescriptive lower age limits for every transition except retirement fell at or below the onset of adulthood itself (18 years), in keeping with biological constraints on procreation and maturational constraints on social and cognitive development. The mean ranges of acceptability prescribed by this Australian sample for each key adult transition were likewise very wide, stretching from an average of twenty-four years (for motherhood) to forty-nine years (for a man's first marriage). This result also contrasts sharply with the ranges of no more than five years prescribed for the same transitions by the vast majority of Neugarten et al.'s sample three decade ago [1]. The probable consequences for self-esteem, mental health and life planning of this heightened variability and reduced prescriptiveness in the timing of life events for contemporary men and women were discussed.