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.