Limitations, Strengths, and Conclusion
This review presents limitations. Firstly, the chosen electronic databases along with the non-English exclusion criterion might have introduced publication bias, hampering our access to other relevant publications meeting our inclusion criteria. Secondly, the diversity of discussed topics and methodologies did not allow for cross-national or cross-socioeconomic contexts comparisons. Further, three out of the four studies focusing on sibling relationships were carried out by the same first author, which could represent a research skew in this review due to the potential communalities of these studies’ rationales and methodologies. Nevertheless, the current review provided an overall description of family relationships during emerging adulthood, identifying the main gaps in this body of research. A core recommendation for future research consists in a shift from family-related research to family research (see Scabini et al., 2006), demanding the inclusion of more than one family members as participants.
More importantly, the present findings underscored the relational nature of the transition to adulthood, in accordance with Elder’s (1994) view of the interdependence of human lives and with systemic conceptualizations of the family life cycle (Author citation, 2000; Carter & McGoldrick, 1988). Furthermore, it is legitimate to assume that not only children but also parents/families are feeling “in between” during this time of their lives. Inherently, during these years, parents are viewed as the “sandwich generation”, divided between their offspring and their elderly parents (Author citation, 2000), with a lengthy transition to adulthood of their children. Nowadays, this could be even more pronounced: on the one hand, offspring strive for independence and, on the other hand, they are still, at least financially, reliant upon their parents, often shifting between living together and living apart. According to Aquilino (2006), there is a lack of social norms and cultural expectations for how emerging adults and parents should renegotiate relationship changes, which fosters a great variability among families during this period. Ultimately, the present review attempted to examine this variability, being, to the best of our knowledge, the first endeavor to systematically address the recent literature on family relationships during emerging adulthood. Implications from this review draw attention to the “old and new” challenges that families with emerging adults must overcome, providing a renewed vision of this stage of life cycle.