From Childhood Plans to Adult Lives: Aspiration–Realization Gaps at Age 25 in a 1958 British Cohort

• In Event: Family Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 8: Family Attitudes and Aspirations

Abstract

Children often describe vivid images of adult work and family life long before these outcomes can be observed, yet we know little about how such early plans align with later realized lives. This study benchmarks aspiration–realization gaps by linking age-11 essays from the 1958 National Child Development Study to realized partnership, marriage, employment, and fertility outcomes at age 25.
Essays were annotated with a large language model to extract whether respondents imagined specific age-25 outcomes. Imagined indicators were compared with observed outcomes using mismatch rates and direction-of-error measures, and heterogeneity was assessed by sex, father’s social class, and cognitive test scores measured by age 11.
Early-life narratives substantially overpredicted family transitions by age 25. In comparable samples with both imagined and realized measures observed, mismatch rates were high for partnership (0.639), marriage (0.665), and having children (0.574), while employment mismatch was lower(0.245). Errors were dominated by false positives, indicating that children often described normative milestones that did not occur by age 25. For fertility counts, respondents overpredicted the number of children by 1.07 on average, with a mean absolute error of 1.37. Mismatch patterns were socially patterned, with higher employment mismatch among women and higher mismatch in having children among men.
These results quantify aspiration–realization gaps from late childhood to early adulthood and show how historical narratives can be used to measure early life plans at scale. The findings suggest that childhood depictions of adulthood reflect shared cultural scripts and timing expectations, offering a new lens on stratified life-course trajectories.

Author

• Zerui Tian, University of Oxford