Posted on 08/19/2005 5:46:36 AM PDT by SLB
The transition to adulthood used to be one of the main goals of the young. Adulthood was seen to be a status worth achieving and was understood to be a set of responsibilities worth fulfilling. At least, that's the way it used to be. Now, an entire generation seems to be finding itself locked in the grip of eternal youth, unwilling or unable to grow up.
Concern about this phenomenon has been building for some time. Baby-boomer parents are perplexed when their adult-age children move back home, fail to find a job, and appear to be in no hurry to marry. Though the current generation of young adults includes some spectacular exceptions who have quickly moved into the fullness of adult responsibility, the generation as a whole seems to be waiting for something--but who knows what?--to happen.
Frederica Mathewes-Green sees the same phenomenon. In her brilliant essay published in the August/September 2005 edition of First Things, Mathewes-Green describes this new reality with striking clarity.
She begins with the movies. Describing herself as a fan of the old black-and-white classics from the 1930s and 1940s, Mathewes-Green remembers how young actors customarily played the part of mature adults. Actresses like Claudette Colbert and Jean Harlowe were "poised and elegant" onscreen. She notes, "Today even people much older don't have that kind of presence." She then compares Cary Grant with Hugh Grant. The first Grant was "poised and debonair" while the more recent Grant "portrayed a boyish, floppy-haired ditherer till he was forty." She cites reviewer Michael Atkinson, who dubbed today's immature male actors as "toddler-men." As Atkinson describes the distinction, "The conscious contrast between baby-faced, teen-voiced toddler-men movie actors and the Golden Age's grownups is unavoidable."
As Mathewes-Green explains, "Characters in these older movies appear to be an age nobody ever gets to be today. This isn't an observation about the actors themselves (who may have behaved in very juvenile ways privately); rather, it is about the way audiences expected grownups to act." Fast-forwarding to today's Hollywood culture, she observes: "Nobody has that old-style confident authority anymore. We've forgotten how to act like grownups."
Frederica Mathewes-Green is surely correct in seeing this contrast. Gladly, she not only depicts the reality as we now face it--she goes on to explain how we have arrived at such a state of institutionalized immaturity.
As she sees it, "The Baby Boomers fought adulthood every step of the way." In other words, Mathewes-Green points to the parents of this current generation of young adults as the locus of the problem. Speaking of her own generation, she remembers: "We turned blue jeans and T-shirts into the generational uniform. We stopped remembering the names of world political leaders and started remembering the names of movie stars' ex-boyfriends. We stopped participating in fraternal service organizations and started playing video games. We Boomers identified so strongly with being 'the younger generation' that now, paunchy and gray, we're bewildered. We have no idea how to be the older generation. We'll just have to go on being a cranky, creaky appendix to the younger one."
Mathewes-Green's analysis pushes back even further than the baby boomers. She blames the parents of the baby boomers for trying to protect that generation from the realities of a cruel world and a hard life. Having fought and survived the great trial of World War II, they wanted to protect their own young children. "They wanted their little ones never to experience the things they had," Mathewes-Green explains, "never to see such awful sights. Above all, they wanted to protect their children's innocence."
Mathewes-Green is a writer of great ability. Her picturesque imagery makes her point with poetic force. She describes the days "when large families lived together in very small houses" and when "paralyzed or senile family members were cared for at home." When the realities of life were not hidden away, institutionalized, and sanitized, children grew up understanding that life itself is a trial and that adulthood requires a willingness to grow up, take responsibility, fend for oneself, and fight for one's own.
In summary, Mathewes-Green believes that the parents of the 1950s "confused vulnerability with moral innocence. They failed to understand that children who were always encouraged to be childish would jump at the chance and turn childishness into a lifelong project. These parents were unprepared to respond when their children acquired the bodies of young adults and behaved with selfishness, defiance, and hedonism."
In her historical analysis, the parents of the baby boomers attempted to separate childhood and adulthood into two completely separate compartments of life. Childhood would be marked by innocence and adulthood by responsibility. As Mathewes-Green warns: "Be careful what you wish for." Missing from this picture is a period of urgent transition that would turn the child into an adult. What we face now is a generation of children in the bodies of adults.
Understanding the reality of the problem is a first step towards recovery. Nevertheless, mere description is insufficient as an answer to this crisis.
In days gone by, children learned how to be adults by living, working, and playing at the parents' side. The onset of age twelve or thirteen meant that time was running out on childhood. Traditional ceremonies like the Jewish Bar Mitzvah announced that adulthood was dawning. This point would be clearly understood by the young boy undergoing the Bar Mitzvah. "By the time his body was fully formed, he would be expected to do a full day's work. He could expect to enter the ranks of full-fledged grownups soon after and marry in his late teens. Childhood was a swift passageway to adulthood, and adulthood was a much-desired state of authority and respect."
Today's patterns of schooling do not, in the main, appear to produce a similar result. Instead, the educational process continues to coddle, reassure, and affirm young people without regard to their assumption of adult responsibilities. This approach, Mathewes-Green explains, prepares children "for a life that doesn't exist."
When a generation is continuously told that its options are limitless, its abilities are boundless, and its happiness is central, why should we be surprised that reality comes as such a difficult concept?
Mathewes-Green points to the delay of marriage as the most interesting indicator of what is happening. As she notes, the average first marriage now unites a bride age 25 with a groom age 27. "I'm intrigued by how patently unnatural that is," Mathewes-Green observes. "God designed our bodies to desire to mate much earlier, and through most of history cultures have accommodated that desire by enabling people to wed by their late teens or early twenties. People would postpone marriage until their late twenties only in cases of economic disaster or famine--times when people had to save up in order to marry."
Is the current generation of young adults too immature to marry? Mathewes-Green insists that if this is the case, it is only because the older generation has been telling them they are too immature to marry. Does early marriage lead to disaster? Mathewes-Green is ready to prescribe a dose of reality. "Fifty years ago, when the average bride was twenty, the divorce rate was half what it is now, because the culture encouraged and sustained marriage."
Look carefully at how she describes the personal impact produced by this pattern of delayed marriage: "During those lingering years of unmarried adulthood, young people may not be getting married, but they're still falling in love. They fall in love, and break up, and undergo terrible pain, but find that with time they get over it. This is true even if they remain chaste. By the time these young people marry, they may have had many opportunities to learn how to walk away from a promise. They've been training for divorce."
Rarely does one article contain so much common sense, moral wisdom, and promise. The way to recovery surely must start with a rediscovery of what adulthood means and a reaffirmation of why it is so important--both for the society and for individuals. Adulthood must be tied to actual, meaningful, and mature responsibilities--most importantly, marriage.
There is reason for hope. Many in this new generation demonstrate a willingness to buck the trend. They are the new pioneers of adulthood, and they will be uniquely qualified to influence their own peers and to reshape our own culture. Taking marriage seriously as a life-long commitment, they will be more inclined to raise children who will understand what it will take to live as adults in our time of confusion. They will understand that eternal youth is not a blessing, but a curse.
For further reading, see Dr. Mohler's commentaries, "The Generation That Won't Grow Up," and "Looking Back at 'The Mystery of Marriage,'" Parts One and Two. Audio of "The Mystery of Marriage" address is available here.
You do realize that those household income figures are based on single-income families in the 1970s and two-income families in 2005? In other words, just the baseline requires twice the work now as it did then to achieve parity, and it comes at the cost of removing parents from their childrens' lives.
This is hardly surprising. It is the primary philosophical/ideological conflict in Western civilization since the late eighteenth century: the conflict between traditionalist culture and Romantic culture. It is one of the things I highlight in my Literature course.
All ideologies or philosophies are based on assumptions. Even the most basic logical structures (the syllogism: If A=B & B=C then A=C) depend on premises for their conclusions. Go back far enough in the logical process, and the premises have to be assumed, rather than proved. This tends to be one of the bases for the evolution vs. creationism arguments... the premises that they start from makes any agreement on conclusions impossible.
For most of the history of the West, certain premises about the fundamental nature of human beings have prevailed. Traditional culture began from the basic belief that humanity is born in sin, or fundamentally flawed with the capacity for evil. Part of this assumption is based on Judeo-Christian religious values (see "original sin"). When you assume this about humanity, certain attitudes and beliefs MUST follow. If humanity is fallen, then the job of parents becomes one of training children to be proper adults (restricting their natural "evil" impulses), and the job of society is to protect its citizens from the harm that may inflict upon each other. The Founding Fathers subscribed to this view, as they based our government on the belief that no one could be trust with power... that we are all imperfect and flawed beings.
However, starting with Jean Jacques Rousseau, and finding a powerful voice through poets and philosophers in Europe, another culture grew to challenge traditionalist culture. It started from the basic assumption that man was a tabula rasa, a clean slate, and that a child represented true innocence. Once you assume this, you must then logically progress to views that hold (as did Rousseau) that it was adults (who had been unfortunately warped by their maturation) and the society that they built that robs children of their innocence (hence the "noble" savage of Romantic literature... unwarped by "modern" culture). So, unlike the traditionalist who sees the primary purpose of childhood to be to prepare the child for his life as an adult, the Romantic saw childhood as a time of innocence that every person should aspire to return to.
Or, in brief, to call a liberal (the lineal descendants of the Romantics) child-like is a compliment to them... they see children as being the purest of beings. This is why emotion is so important to them, as it is the primary decision-making tool of a child. And it is why we constantly look at liberals and want to tell them to "grow up"...
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We all felt we had an important role to play, even if it was just catching dinner down by the creek with a cane pole and a few worms.
When you are 9 or 10, bringing home dinner is a point of pride, even if you do have to clean it!
Working on the farm helped, though it was my Grandfather's farm, just a half mile through the woods.
Dad did not farm, but he took us hunting and fishing a lot, was involved in the community (as was mom), and taught us that we could do virtually anything if we wanted to take the time to learn. He was fearless about building something, working on an engine, whatever needed to be done. He would get the manual and figure it out, if he did not already know how.
The family business (or a family project) just might bring that relevance back.
We are remodeling our house (built in 1912) around ourselves while living there (one room at a time), and involving our live-in grand children--mostly girls (and those who do not live with us) as much as possible, within their abilities and interests.
They are interested, more so than in watching TV.
They are not only picking up skills, which translate to self confidence and self respect, but they are feeling a part of something bigger than any one of us individually. It really makes a difference.
William Golding had the answer to this one.
I really don't get guys like Sam Walton. You work your entire life to create a succesful business and make yourself wealthy, and yet you do not enjoy the fruits of your labors. What's the point? He could have kept on living in that crappy house and not had to go through the effort and toil of creating Wal-Mart.
He was worth over $9 Billion then. Their kids got 0, none, nada help from dad as they entered adulthood.
That's just stupid, and incredibly selfish. One of the things that smart rich families do in this country is use their wealth as a foundation for giving their next generation a leg-up. What is the point of creating that wealth if it does not benefit your family? Sure, your kids learn some lessons about the values of hard work. But they would learn much more valuable lessons if dad used his wealth as a way to get them top-notch educations and advantages over their peers.
It is a uniquely (wrong-headed) American notion to make one's children start from scratch with every generation.
Your remodeling project and how you're involving the kids sounds wonderful. I wish I had done more of that when my children were in the elementary & junior high years. As it was, when my kids were old enough for paid jobs, it was VERY hard to get them to do that-- I had to push and nag, push and nag, and deprive them of money, but I did it! ;) Both worked full-time every summer and part-time during much of the school year.
You would be amazed how many parents just allowed their teens to drift & play, working very little or not at all. Heck, I know one young man who wasn't forced to work by his parents until the summer after his freshman year in college-- almost 20 years old. And, I know lots more who worked only very intermittently and very little. For quite a while my daughters thought I was really mean (and stingy) on this issue.
But, now my daughters (18 & 19) like working-- they like their increasing financial independence and they even like how it helps to structure their time. Both will be in college this year, and both will also work part-time. Meanwhile, they've drifted away from the friends who still mostly just hang out, and found other friends who are also progressing towards adulthood.
Welfare roles are much smaller than they were a decade ago.
That’s part of why I said "So assuming everything’s equal, which it’s not but there are inequalities favoring both sides,".
I could list several details supporting claims that homes and incomes between now and then make them both more and less expensive than the dry numbers indicate. But for a variety of reasons, respectfully, I don’t think discussions between people with their minds made up, heals dug in and ignoring counter evidence accomplishes much.
Life’s short. Best regards.
I bet that you haven’t had to hire a plumber or electrician lately. And if they are good, and sober, they can be a boss making 6 figures before their kids hit college.
"That's why I don't get excited when the Bush administration brags about the low unemployment rate. People are employed alright...and making less than half of what they were. "
Would it change your mind if I showed you figures indicating that real median wages have been steadily rising?
I guess it all comes down to whether you find the modern lifestyle to be a higher quality of life than the one that previous generations of Americans lived. I don't. And as someone who would like to live a traditional type of life, with moral values, intact families, and kids, the institutional and cultural conditions are far harder today than they were when the WW2 generation passed the torch.
I suppose if I wanted to bugger men in highway restrooms, then I might consider today's conditions to be higher quality.
You could be right. Walton said the money was just a side-product of doing what he loved doing (running a business). He didn't need it in his day to day life. As far as the kids, there may not be a good ansswer. Like I said, Paris Hilton contributes nothing to her family or organization, other than wasting money. Too much too soon. Bill Gates seems to have the right idea: He says his kids will only get $5 million apiece when they reach adult age. That is certainly enough to live on and start an empire with, but how do you keep from spoiling them into useless dregs when you personally control such enormous capital? It's a very unique problem for the uber wealthy only.
Strange that you’ve ended two of your 5 post to me with such an out of the blue reference to homosexuality.
In every generation there was, are and will be people ignoring their generations faults and proclaiming the next to be going to hell in a hand basket. People often see what they want to see.
It's not out of the blue at all. I think it is, symbolically, the epitome of where the boomer generation has led us as a nation. If you assume a deviant, destructive lifestyle, then the modern life is of higher quality. If you have a traditional lifestyle, then the modern life is not.
If all you see is what you want to see, ignoring the problems of the past generations, and you see is black, then I expect you’ll conclude that.
And if parents tried to require school aged children to do a couple of hours of serious chores every day, or go to bed without dinner, the parents would be charged with child abuse, and the children hauled away by "social services".
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