If you want to get a sense of how American midlife has changed, look no further than 1991 comedy “Father of the Bride,” in which actors Steve Martin and Diane Keaton play parents in their mid-40s. Conversation around a 2022 viral tweet calling out those portrayals largely agrees: whatever the movie’s ideal of middle age, it doesn’t resemble today’s spry 40-year-olds.
Yes, midlife looks different now—in fashion, in youthful attitude, and in cold, hard numbers. Most days, with no kids, no husband, no mortgage, I don’t think of myself as a “real” grown-up at 37, at least not of the Keaton-Martin caliber. Sure, some people of my generation will soon have kids old enough to get married. But many are just having their first children—the median age of mothers giving birth increased to 30 between 1990 and 2019—or, like one fifth of adults, don’t plan to have kids at all.
As millennials hit middle age, difficult financial and cultural realities leave many of us with a similar sense that we’re not living up to the standards of modern adulthood. But changing ideas about aging are also shaping our midlife behavior in new ways, creating more space for accomplishments and adventure.
Financial strain means delays for starting a family, home ownership
Rewriting the rules of development is nothing new for millennials. Even in the early 2000s, social scientists noticed that the eldest millennials (those born starting around 1981, although the exact cutoff year is still under debate) weren’t hitting the typical markers of finishing education, getting jobs, getting married, and having kids, says Karen Fingerman, a professor of human development at UT Austin and director of the Texas Aging and Longevity Consortium.
Twenty-four years later, we’re continuing to delay both marriage and childbearing, says Carolina Aragão, who studies social and demographic trends at the Pew Research Center. Her research shows that the percentage of today’s adults aged 30-34 who are married is down more than 10 percent over the last two decades. The mean age of first motherhood in 2021 was also 27.3, the highest it’s ever been, and another recent Pew poll found 44 percent of nonparent adults aged 18-49 planned to stay that way.
Financial pressures are affecting the timing of these milestones. A 2024 report from the National Association of Realtors found that a third of older millennials owe over $40,000 in student loans, and that we delay buying homes “primarily” because of both that debt and high rental costs, which prevent us from saving for a down payment.
Between mortgages, healthcare, elder care, and childcare, midlife has always been expensive, but for millennials it is proving especially crushing. According to an article by researchers at the Center for Household Financial Stability, median millennial savings in 2016 was $23,200, 34 percent lower than expected income based on historic trends.
Millennials face expectations from a bygone era
The theory of a universal “midlife crisis” phenomenon has long been debunked, says Margie Lachman, a professor of psychology at Brandeis University who focuses on midlife. In reality, only a small percentage of people report experiencing one, and the crisis can happen at many different ages. Instead, midlife has historically been a time to shift focus from oneself to other people, to find meaning through mentoring or getting involved in activism.
A shift in focus to others also means juggling priorities and increased stress, says Lachman. During this period, a person is likely to have the broadest constellation of roles: parent, spouse or partner, sibling, coworker or boss, community leader, friend, and sometimes even grandparent, she says. “People are really depending on you, pulling perhaps in different directions.”
But the dual trends of millennials having children later and parents living longer intensifies this “sandwich generation” phenomenon. While the sense of control over one’s life generally peaks at midlife, Lachman says, more recently born generations progressively feel less in control than previous generations.
And, she adds, millennials not only have to balance these roles, they’re also handling instability around work, geopolitical upheaval, cost of living and inflation, and the rise of social media.
So how is it that millennials still somehow measure our growth by benchmarks from another century? Fingerman and other social scientists call “cultural lag.” “It’s not that you ‘failed’ or didn’t grab opportunity,” Fingerman says. “What happened was that those markers disappeared, and the world became less structured.”
Without the structure to support us but with these lagging norms, many millennials are left with a sense of prolonged adolescence. Take Anna Schumann, who at age 38 is frustrated that her life doesn’t feel stable enough for kids. Not being able to achieve financial benchmarks “makes my personal growth feel stunted as well,” she says. “In so many ways, I still feel like a child; I wonder if that’ll ever change.”
Changing midlife standards might be a good thing
But, with a lack of structure also comes a burgeoning flexibility, and some millennials feel excited about the idea of staying ‘young’ longer. Biotech advancements helped increase the fertility rate of mothers aged 40-45 by 132 percent between 1990 and 2019, giving women more time before motherhood than ever. Recent national health trends data shows late life independence is on the rise, with fewer adults over age 72 reporting unmet self-care and mobility needs and a ten percent jump in people with “high physical capacity” in that age group (reaching almost one third) between 2011 and 2019. The result is a broad canvas millennials are filling in a multitude of new ways.
One of those ways is travel. Radha Vyas, CEO and co-founder of the midlife group travel company Flash Pack sees the popularity of her business as stemming in part from millennials using scrimped-and-saved money toward new priorities. Flash Packers are often unmarried and childfree; many are traveling after a layoff. “Society’s kind of shifted,” she says. “There’s no such thing as a secure job anymore; maybe they never want to settle down and maybe they never want to have kids.” So, they ask themselves, now what?
In losing traditional structures of adulthood, millennials have also gained new freedom, Fingerman says, making space for a version of adulthood where “you don’t have to leave the parent home to be an adult; you don’t have to get married to be an adult.” Take for example the surge in popularity of co-living, developing trends in non-monogamy, or the rise of digital nomadism. “If your identity is less constrained by the need to accomplish a specific societal goal, then you’re freer to derive meaning from other experiences,” she says.
What if maturity just means something new now? Fingerman asks. Rather than pursuit of what can feel like impossible goals, maybe it means “seeing the constraints on your life but adapting to them,” using those limitations to spark a process of self-definition and exploration.
“If the script is not as clear as it once was, you may as well take advantage of it, right?” Lachman says. “It could be exciting. You get to determine what your own midlife looks like.”
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