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.
It would be a surprise if it were true. But by any objective measurement AFAIK (income, housing, working conditions, leisure time, travel, disposable income, etc…) each generation in Americans still has it easier. But “quality of life” leaves all kinds of subjective criteria open for speculation.
My guess is that you are a "man".
Keeper.
Waaah!! I am unhappy, and it is all your fault!!
Go talk to somebody who cares what you think, kid.
To paraphrase a very stupid old song, "Growing up is very hard to do."
Obviously, you are part of the problem. This country will be blessed to have you and yours pass into the next world, so that those of us that remain can clean up the mess.
I try. I daily get on my knees and ask God to make me the man that my wife and children deserve.
I agree with you one hundred percent. The "experiment" in "public" education is over, and has been for some time. The hypothesis that "public education" would turn out to be valuable has been disproven.
What If There Are No Adults?
You get the Clintons.
I disagree. By objective measurements the post-boomer generations are quantifiably worse off than those who came before them. How many years' income does it take to buy a home? To pay for education? How many children can a family afford to have? The first two numbers are way up, and the latter one is way down. Aren't those the key indicators of quality of life?
Encouring kids to turn gay will increase average disposable income, but doesn't increase quality of life for anyone.
God's Lonely Man
It's going to get harder. Considering the temptations facing todays youth, it's a wonder that any of them even live to age 20. I feel so sorry for them. No guidance at all, which leaves them vulnerable and frightened. They are left to deal with life at it's most basic animal response.
A sure sign that you are a man. God bless.
Until you factor in the wages--$1.65 an hour.
The difference was that my parents saved money, bought the things they could pay cash for, did without, or got it used. "Credit" was only for desperate emergencies, and only if the savings would not cover, which they usually did.
We actually wore hand-me-downs.
We had one TV (black and white), no wall-to-wall carpeting, and my dad had exactly one new car, which he later sold as an unjustifiable extravagance--at a profit.
We didn't throw it away, we fixed it up.
If we could do the work ourselves, we did, and we found out there was darned little we could not do.
Mom stayed home and raised us, so there was no daycare to pay, she cooked, so there were no "convenience" foods, and we hunted, fished, and raised a lot of our own food. She taught us to read before we went to school, spent time with us whether it be reading Shakespeare or baking cookies. And she taught us life's basic moral lessons, often to the percussive 1-2-3 of swats on the non thinking end of our spinal column.
We spent time with our elders (Grand Parents, great Aunts and Uncles), and were taught to respect them, not only 'just because' they were our elders, but for the wealth of knowledge and wisdom they had accumulated in their lifetimes.
We took care of our "old folks" and didn't dump them in a home.
Yep, if you didn't get that, you were robbed!
The changes took place when feminists convinced women that working for wages was preferable to working at home with their family. Once that hit the tipping point, inflation made the two wage-earner family less an option than a necessity.
When the new Left convinced people there was a "generation Gap" and started labelling generations so they could enforce it.
Puberty used to bring the sort of rebellion that got the young out of the nest, mainly because the parents would not tolerate the kids getting it on in the other room. If you wanted to satiate those hormones, get a job, get married, get your own place. Children out of wedlock were not acceptable, abortion was worse.
Others ducking the draft (Vietnam) got so many college degrees (often in relatively useless "disciplines"--they were maintaining a deferrment, not seeking an education) that the H.S. Diploma became devalued, much as the Bachelor's Degree has become today.
At the bottom of it all, though, the driving force is selfishness. The selfishness that comes from never having had hardship. The selfishness that sees "new" as better and indispensible, rather than just expensive. The selfishness that places ostentation ahead of need, and the latest style ahead of utility.
No Depression, no WWII, and so many only saw Vietnam as something on the tube that the war really only affected those who fought it or had family or friends who did.
Not anything like ration coupons for gasoline and tires my folks had to deal with. When the people do not sacrifice anything, it is easy for them to ignore or even denigrate the sacrifices of others.
It is the roaring twenties all over agoin, only the P/E ratios on the stock market are multiples of what they were in 1929.
Only a desperate or pampered and complacent culture has the luxury of spinning into decadence and self destruction. That pampering, I am afraid, will change.
So gird your loins, get out of debt, save some money, 'cause you ain't seen nothing yet. Better to have a hovel paid for than end up in the street.
Teach your children well, lead by example, and maybe your children will have it better.
We are raising some of our grand kids now, and we are teaching them as we were taught. They really are the future, and the great hope for this country.
As for me, I don't ever expect to retire, but it isn't all about me, after all.
True, but I prefer that over androgeny.
We embraced responsibility and thrived on the status it gave us in our community.
Nowadays you are prohibited by law from starting to do most of that sort of work until you are 18 or older.
If you want mature, responsible, adults, you have to let the children accept responsibility. If you prevent that and then hand them "self esteem" without accomplishment as a substitute, little good will come of it.
If you show them selfishness as a paradigm, do not be surprised if they turn out to be selfish and fail to mature. Why grow up when you can sponge off your elders?
BUMP to your comments!
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