Does autonomy increase with age? Comparing the goal motivations of college students and their parents

We found that parents of college students report greater goal-autonomy than their children, consistent with organismic, humanistic, and trait perspectives upon positive aging. Parents also had higher levels of positive affect and lower levels of negative affect than their children. In a second, retrospective test of the age-to-autonomy relationship, parents reported more autonomy now compared to their own former selves, in addition to greater life-satisfaction. Finally, autonomy partially mediated the age-to-SWB effects, in both types of test. Overall, results support the proposal that personality functioning typically improves between the college years and middle age, providing normative SWB benefits.