The book The Death of the Grown-Up:
How America’s Arrested Development is Bringing Down Western Civilization by
Diana West is one of the best, and most informative, books I have ever
read. Eight years after reading the book and writing this two-part weblog
in April/May 2009 I find the words even truer than I did back then.
Allen Raynor Weblog:
The Death of the Grown-Up (Pt. 1)
(April 29, 2009)
Where have all the adults gone? Sound
like a strange question? Well it is not really as far-fetched as it might
seem. In a book entitled The Death of the Grown-Up: How
America’s Arrested Development is Bringing Down Western Civilization,
author Diana West shows how the phenomena we now see in western culture is an
anomaly when compared with the patterns of all of history. This is not, a
Christian book per se, and if the author is a Christian it is not
told. She is merely a keen observer of what has, and is, taking
place. The following comes from the first chapter of the book:
Once, there was a world
without teenagers. Literally. ‘Teenager,’ the word itself,
doesn’t pop into the lexicon
much before 1941. This speaks volumes about the last
few millennia. In
all those many centuries, nobody thought to mention ‘teenagers’
because there was
nothing, apparently to think of mentioning.
In considering what I
like to call ‘the death of the grown-up,’ it’s important to keep
a fix on this fact; that for
all, but this most recent episode of human history, there
were children and there were
adults. Children in their teen years aspired to
adulthood; significantly,
they didn’t aspire to adolescence. Certainly adults didn’t
aspire to remain teenagers.
That doesn’t mean youth
hasn’t always been a source of adult interest: Just think
in
five hundred years what
Shakespeare, Dickens, the Bronte’s, Mark Twain, Booth
Tarkington, Eugene O’Neill,
and Leonard Bernstein have done with teen material.
But something has
changed. Actually, a lot of things have changed. For one thing,
turning thirteen,
instead of bringing children closer to an adult world, now launches
them into a teen
universe. For another, due to the permanent hold our culture has
placed on the
maturation process, that’s where they’re likely to find most adults.
This generational
intersection yields plenty of statistics. More adults ages eighteen
to forty-nine, watch
the Cartoon Network than watch CNN. Readers as old as
twenty-five are buying
‘young adult’ fiction written expressly for teens. The
average video gamester
was eighteen in 1990; now he’s going on thirty. And no
wonder; The National
Academy of Sciences has, in 2002, redefined adolescence as
‘the period extending
from the onset of puberty, around twelve, to age thirty.’ The
MacArthur Foundation
has gone farther still, funding a major research project that
argues that the
‘transition to adulthood’ doesn’t end until age thirty-four.
This long, drawn-out
‘transition’ jibes perfectly with two British surveys showing
that 27 percent of
adult children striking out on their own return home to live at
least once; and that 46
percent of adult couples regard their parent's’ houses as their
‘real’ homes. Over in
Italy, nearly one in three thirty-somethings never leave that
‘real’ home in the
first place. Neither have 25 percent of American men, ages
eighteen to
thirty. Maybe this helps explain why about one-third of the fifty-six
million Americans
sitting down to watch SpongeBob SquarePants on Nickelodeon
each month in 2002 were
between the ages of eighteen and forty-nine.
(Nickelodeon’s
core demographic group is between the ages of six and eleven.)
These are grown-ups who
haven’t left childhood. Then again, why should they?
As movie producer and
former Universal marketing executive Kathy Jones put it,
‘There isn’t any clear
demarcation of what’s for parents and what’s for kids. We
like the same music, we
dress similarly.’
How did this
happen? When did this happen? And why? More than a little
cultural
detective work is required to
answer these questions. It’s one thing to sift through
the decades looking for
clues; it’s quite another to evaluate them from a distance
that is more than merely
temporal. We have changed. Our conceptions of life have
changed. Just as we may
read with a detached non-comprehension how man lived
under the divine right of
monarchs, for example, it may be that difficult to relate to a
time when the adolescent
wasn’t king. (Diana West; The Death of the Grown-Up;
chapter 1)
My purpose here is, by no means, to put down young people between 13 and 19
years of age who are, by today’s standards, “teenagers.” The real problem
is that adults are often not mentoring these young people into full adulthood,
but instead are all-too-often teaching by their example that one really does
not have to grow up. It is a sort of “Peter Pan” syndrome which
finds eternal bliss in immaturity. As we consider Scripture, we find the
need to be mature and be responsible emphasized again and again. Paul
wrote in 1 Cor. 13:11, “When I was a child, I spoke as a child; I understood as
a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish
things.” Being a child is a wonderful thing, when you are one, but
when you are really an adult, it is far from cute! Something to think
about!
Allen Raynor Weblog:
The Death of the Grown-Up (Pt. 2)
(May 6, 2009)
Last time we began to lay out the problems Diana West
identifies in her book The Death of the Grown-Up. She continues by
presenting some of the history which has brought us to the present day.
She writes…
About a hundred years ago,
Booth Tarkington wrote Seventeen, probably the first
novel about
adolescence. Set in small-town America, the plot hinges on seventeen
-year-old William Baxter’s ability
to borrow, on the sly, his father’s dinner jacket,
which the teenager wants to
wear to impress the new girl in town. In other words,
it’s not a pierced tongue or
a tattoo that wins the babe: it’s a tuxedo. William dons
the ceremonial guise of
adulthood to stand out – favorable – from the other boys.
That was then. These
days of course, father and son dress more or less alike, from
message emblazoned T-shirts
to chunky athletic shoes, both equally at ease in the
baggy rumple of eternal
summer camp. In the mature male, these trappings of
adolescence have become more
than a matter of comfort or style; they reveal a
state of mind, a reflection
of a personality that hasn’t fully developed, and doesn’t
want to- or worst, doesn’t
know how.
By now, the ubiquity of the
mind-set provides cover, making it unremarkable
indeed, the norm. But
there is something jarring in the everyday, ordinary sight of
adults, full -grown men and
women both outfitted in crop tops and flip-flops,
spandex and fanny-packs,
T-shirts, hip-huggers, sweatpants, and running shoes.
The Rolling Stones’ most famous hit is perhaps the unspoken mantra of this
generation - I Can’t Get No Satisfaction. There is incessant
chasing after things which offer the hope of real satisfaction - fitting in,
internal happiness, etc. Many young girls, for instance, genuinely feel
that if they could just become more like Brittany Spears they could truly be
happy. West goes on to write:
In a world where distinctions
between child and adult have eroded, giving rise to a
universal mode of behavior
more infantile than mature…belly bare, and buttocks
wrapped like sausages.
At one time, so sexually charged a display by a child would
have appalled the adults
around her; now ‘Baby Britneys’ – and their legion –
delight their elders, winning
from them praise, Halloween candy, even Girl Scout
music badges.
“Common decency” is not so common anymore. We are not talking merely
about dress, but about a whole lifestyle which has seemingly arisen out of
nowhere. Well, everything is from somewhere. As you might have
predicted money is the bottom line. The phenomena we see today stems from
coming to see ‘teenagers’ as a group in which to market products. In that
sense, teenagers have become pawns in a big, ugly game. Think of all the
products which are specifically marketed to those between 13 and 19 years of
age. Magazines, books, clothing, cars, video games, grooming products,
music, electronic equipment, food, and the list goes on and on. Teenagers
are in that sense “victims” of the times and culture. Make no mistake, it
is in the best interest of those who make and market products targeting teens
to expand the teen years, so to speak. That is why men in their
thirties and forties, for instance, have become such a large demographic target
for the video game industry.
Who bears the responsibility here? The adults, of course, however we are
now a few generations removed from children moving directly into adulthood so
we are essentially asking effectual adolescent parents to control their adolescents!
It is like the fox watching the henhouse or the government investigating
itself!
What can we do? Is there any hope? Absolutely there is,
but only if we recognize the problem and resolve to do something about
it. We must break the cycle if there is to be any relief from
the cycle! We desperately need parents to act like parents not just
“buddies” to their kids. We need good behavior modeled for our teens in a
non-threatening way. Most of all, we need Godly principles taught in the
home. Too many parents mildly rely on a youth pastor, or Sunday School
teacher to make up for years of Biblical neglect in the home. It is like
asking someone to relocate Mt. Everest with a shovel! We need adults
teaching young adults how to be adults! If you are at least
one of the following we need your help – parent, grandparent, church-member, or
an adult of any age. We are in desperate need of good role-models.
Will you be one?
In Christ,
Dr. Allen Raynor, Pastor
