The Prime of Life

A History of Modern Adulthood

Steven Mintz

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780674047679
• eBook ISBN: 9780674425682
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Adulthood today is undergoing profound transformations. Men and women wait until their thirties to marry, have children, and establish full-time careers, occupying a prolonged period in which they are no longer adolescents but still lack the traditional emblems of adult identity. People at midlife struggle to sustain relationships with friends and partners, to find employment and fulfilling careers, to raise their children successfully, and to resist the aging process.

The Prime of Life puts today's challenges into new perspective by exploring how past generations navigated the passage to maturity, achieved intimacy and connection, raised children, sought meaning in work, and responded to loss. Coming of age has never been easy or predictable, Steven Mintz shows, and the process has always been shaped by gender and class. But whereas adulthood once meant culturally-prescribed roles and relationships, the social and economic convulsions of the last sixty years have transformed it fundamentally, tearing up these shared scripts and leaving adults to fashion meaning and coherence in an increasingly individualistic culture.

Mintz reconstructs the emotional interior of a life stage too often relegated to self-help books and domestic melodramas. Emphasizing adulthood's joys and fulfillments as well as its frustrations and regrets, he shows how cultural and historical circumstances have consistently reshaped what it means to be a grown up in contemporary society. The Prime of Life urges us to confront adulthood's realities with candor and determination and to value and embrace the responsibility, sensible judgment, wisdom, and compassionate understanding it can bring.

CHAPTER ONE

The Tangled Transition to Adulthood

Adulthood no longer begins at age eighteen or twenty-one. Compared to their counterparts in the 1950s and 1960s, the young today take far longer to complete their education, obtain a steady job, achieve financial independence, marry, or bear children. At present, fewer than 20 percent of Americans in their late twenties have completed school, acquired a full-time job, moved away from their parental home, married, and had children, and only a third of thirty-to-thirty-four-year-olds have achieved these markers of adult status. A prolonged transitional period has emerged in which the young are no longer adolescents, but have not yet attained the traditional emblems of full adult status.¹

Nor does the sequence of events marking the transition to adulthood follow an orderly progression from school completion to career entry, residential independence, and family formation. Financial independence, for example, no longer necessarily precedes independent living or cohabitation; nor does childbearing predictably follow marriage. As the normative script of the adolescent-to-adult transition has broken down, the trajectory into adulthood has become more diverse, with profound differences—in length of schooling, age of marriage and childbearing, and rates of unmarried parenthood—developing along lines of class, ethnicity, and immigrant status, even as gender differences have narrowed.

The subjective entry into adult status also takes place more gradually and unevenly than in the early post–World War II era. Some defining experiences, such as sexual initiation, take place much earlier than half a century ago, while others, such as the achievement of financial independence, occur later. Meanwhile, adulthood has come to be defined less by clear rites of passage, such as marriage, college graduation, the purchase of a first house, or the birth of a child, than by subjective feelings of self-sufficiency and autonomy, as well as a sense that one no longer engages in the reckless behavior characteristic of youth.²

The forces behind this shift include the expansion of access to higher education, the increased cost of housing, and the lengthier time that it takes to find an occupation that pays a middle-class income. The post–World War II economic boom allowed young men, even those without a high school diploma, to obtain a job sufficient to support a family by their early twenties. But beginning in the 1960s, as the economy shifted away from manufacturing, a middle-class income increasingly required postsecondary education or another educational credential. In recent years, educational attainment has become a key variable predicting when or if young adults marry and whether their children are born inside or outside marriage.³

Also contributing to the delay is the increased acceptance of unmarried cohabitation, which means that young adults do not need to marry to have a stable sex life, and of a value system that views young adulthood as a time of exploration and self-discovery. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, most single young adults resided in their parents’ home and contributed to their family’s support, a pattern still common among many immigrant groups. But around 1960, a new pattern emerged, as a growing proportion of young adults lived apart from their parents before starting their own families. For many young people, the twenties became the “age of independence.” Physically separated from parents, the young were free to experiment with a variety of living arrangements, including unmarried cohabitation and same-sex partnerships. For all the talk about “boomerang kids,” a smaller proportion of young adults live with their parents than in the past, and those who do reside with their parents tend to do so temporarily, after a job loss or a relationship breakup.⁴

The prolongation of young adulthood has carried profound consequences for parent-child relationships. The family of origin now serves as the primary safety net for young adults. As a result of lengthier and more costly schooling and delayed achievement of a middle-class income, young people in their twenties are far more likely than their predecessors to rely on financial support from their parents. Indeed, a third of the cost of parenting is spent upon children older than age seventeen. Fully half return home for a period of time during their young adulthood. As the transition to adulthood has grown more uncertain, parents now provide scaffolding for adult children in ways unexpected a generation ago.

Emotional dependence, too, persists. Technology has made it easier for parents to stay connected to their young adult children, but technology has also made it more difficult for some parents to let go. Many parents stay deeply involved in their children’s lives even as their kids enter college. These enduring ties, though welcomed by many parents, are nonetheless a mixed blessing. Young people who maintain daily contact with their parents via cell phone, email, and social networking sites are less likely to perceive themselves as adults. Separation from parents is critical for maturation, and for a growing number of the young, psychological independence is achieved more slowly than in previous generations.⁵

The changes that have occurred in the transition to adulthood have provoked anxiety, apprehension, and alarm. A common complaint is that today’s twenty-somethings, coddled as children, are aimless, irresponsible, and emotionally immature. Stuck in a perpetual adolescence, they supposedly avoid commitment, spurn entry-level jobs, and are caught in a limbo state of prolonged adolescence, selfishness, self-indulgence, and deferred responsibility. The young, we are told, are entitled, narcissistic exploiters of their parents’ good will—and inevitably so, given hovering helicopter parents who infantilize their offspring and raise their material and career expectations to unrealistic levels. Popular culture speaks disparagingly of the “failure to launch” and of over-aged Peter Pans mired in a state of “arrested development.”

These complaints are not new. Condemnation of the younger generation is among this country’s oldest traditions. The criticisms, however, have varied with each generation and have been wildly contradictory. Seventeenth-century ministers such as Thomas Cobbett vilified the young for acting “proudly, disdainfully, and scornfully toward their parents.” During the 1950s, adults were haunted by images of switchblade wielding juvenile delinquents and brass-knuckle armed gangs making trouble for the hell of it. But adults were not satisfied when these “Rebels without a Cause” gave way to waves of young adults flashing peace signs and organizing against social injustice. Contemporary pundits deride the young for relying too much on their parents’ advice and direction and being insufficiently self-motivated.⁶

In a society that suffers from a foreshortened historical memory, it is easy to forget that the perception of the twenties as an unsettled, anxious, and uncertain period of life has a long history. Every generation, at least since the early eighteenth century, has had to contend with insecurity and self-doubt in the process of seeking rewarding work or a romantic partner. A century ago, the social critic Randolph Bourne, himself in his twenties, described how “in our artificial civilization many young people at twenty-five are still on the threshold of activity.” In the 1960s, the psychologist Kenneth Keniston, drawing on the ideas of Erik Erikson, described this period as a time of “identity exploration” and alienation. What is distinctive today is that many young people enter adulthood carrying heavy levels of debt and facing an increasingly competitive economy in which employers’ expectations of experience and credentials have escalated.⁷

A historic transition in the passage to adulthood is occurring across the developed world. Indeed, delayed entry into adulthood independence is even greater in Italy and Japan than it is in the United States. The Japanese voice disgust about “parasite singles” and blame mothers, in particular, for failing to raise independent children. In Italy, where 37 percent of thirty-year-old men have never lived away from home, many speak of a “cult of mammismo,” or mamma’s boys. In every postindustrial society, delays in the transition to adulthood have evoked alarm.⁸

Thus, it is reassuring to recognize that a protracted transition into adulthood is not a new phenomenon. After Henry David Thoreau graduated from Harvard at the age of nineteen, he was hired as a school teacher, only to resign two weeks later. He then intermittently worked in his parents’ pencil factory, served as a tutor, and shoveled manure. As we shall see, vacillation, doubt, uncertainty, and lack of direction have long characterized early adulthood. Except for the brief period following World War II, it was unusual for the young to achieve the markers of full adult status before their mid- or late twenties. Between the seventeenth century and the late nineteenth, those in their teens and early twenties occupied a lengthy transitional stage called “youth,” shifting back and forth between residence in the parental household and work experience outside their home.⁹

Today’s young adults are experiencing a momentous transformation in the path to a successful job and family life. As recently as 1970, half of all women were married by the age of twenty-one to husbands who tended to be about two years older. With real wages rising rapidly for men, even for high school dropouts, but few opportunities for women to achieve economic independence, there was little reason to shop around, whether for a long-term job or a long-term mate. If you were a young man whose parents could not afford to send you to college, it made sense to go to work immediately and grab the first job you were offered. If you were a young woman, getting married was often the best investment you could make in your future.¹⁰

But the old model of plunging directly into independent adult living no longer functions well. In fact, it is the young people who try to follow the 1950s model who have the toughest time establishing stable and productive lives. It is not necessarily that young people spurn entry-level jobs. It is that entry-level jobs are too often dead-end jobs. The pay gap between college graduates and everyone else has been widening steadily. And even among college graduates, the best jobs usually go to those who can afford graduate school or an unpaid or low-paid internship or training period.

The young people who do best are those who do not leap out of the nest too soon. Postponing marriage, childbearing, and permanent commitment to a single job actually increases one’s chances of having a rewarding career and a lasting marriage. But doing so without parental assistance has become increasingly difficult. The people who are most likely to succeed are those who can rely on their parents to help them make their way through the costly process of completing their education and taking low-wage jobs or internships to improve their resume. Parents’ contacts and social networks can also help young adults find an entry- level job. Young adults increasingly depend on parents to support them as they learn advanced job skills and cope with the rising cost of housing.¹¹

Understanding these challenges puts the notion of “helicopter parents” and “boomerang kids” in a new light. Whatever the excesses of some parents, it turns out they have good reason to be standing by with a rescue rope as their children try to make their way through the overgrown and traditional paths to adulthood that may no longer secure employment. The twenties have replaced the teens as the most risk-filled decade. Problematic behavior—binge drinking, illicit drug use, unprotected sex that leads to disease or unplanned pregnancies, and violent crime—peaks during this age, and missteps during these years can impose lifelong penalties. Parental support can play a crucial role in preventing their offspring’s lives from going severely off track.¹²

From the vantage point of history, it is clear that the transformations that have occurred in the passage to adulthood are only the most recent examples of shifts that have taken place several times before. A series of historical myths surround the transition to adulthood: that it took place much earlier and more seamlessly in the past; that before the twentieth century, most young people followed in their parents’ footsteps; and that, accordingly, the transition was smoother and less wrenching than it has recently become. In fact, each of these is profoundly misleading.

Contrary to what many people assume, the overwhelming majority of young people in the past did not enter adulthood at a very young age. To be sure, a few did achieve positions of responsibility while exceptionally young. Alexander Hamilton became General George Washington’s aide at the age of seventeen. At the outbreak of the Revolution, Henry Knox, a leading general, was twenty-six, and James Madison and Gouverneur Morris were both twenty-five. Early in the nineteenth century, some observers, such as the British naval officer Captain Frederick Marryatt, were convinced that young Americans achieved independence at a much younger age than their European counterparts. Marryatt claimed that “At fifteen or sixteen, if not at college, the boy assumes the man, he enters into business, as a clerk to some merchant, or in some store. His father’s home is abandoned, except when it may suit his convenience, his salary being sufficient for most of his wants. He frequents the bar, calls for gin cocktails, chews tobacco, and talks politics.” But Captain Marryatt’s observations were not actually accurate. During the early nineteenth century, young men in their teens and even twenties tended to swing between periods of relative independence and phases of dependence when they returned to the parental home.¹³

Nor did most young women and men follow effortlessly in their parents’ footsteps. Given constant changes in the economy, replicating parents’ lives has generally not been an option. Despite the assumed immobility of the preindustrial world, geographical movement was widespread, and most migrants to the American colonies arrived in their late teens or twenties. As early as the late seventeenth century, land shortages near the Atlantic coast forced many young men to migrate westward if they wished to farm. If they wanted to stay near their birthplace, many had to find some other occupation. During the early nineteenth century, the breakdown of the apprenticeship system meant that young men had to identify new paths into skilled crafts or business.¹⁴

Neither did marriage and childbearing take place at an especially young age. With the exception of the early post–World War II era, most young people did not marry until their mid-or even late twenties or early thirties—that is, at about the same age as today. Even in the colonial era, young men generally had to delay marriage until they received an inheritance, which usually took place after a father’s death. The essential point is that the decade stretching from the late teens to the late twenties has long been a period of uncertainty, hesitation, and indecision.

Take, for instance, the life of John Dane, a tailor, who was born in Berkhampstead, England, around 1612. Around the age of eighteen, his father, a harsh disciplinarian who had severely beaten the boy in the past, thrashed him with a stick, prompting the son to leave his parents’ home to seek his fortune. Carrying just “2 shurts,” his “best suit,” and a “bybull” (Bible), young Dane began a period of wandering from town to town. Over the next several years, he encountered many temptations from harlots, threats from thieves, and misadventures with vagabonds. But through...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Preface
• Prologue: The Voyage of Life
• 1. The Tangled Transition to Adulthood
• 2. Achieving Intimacy
• 3. I Do: The Evolution of Marriage
• 4. I Don’t: Alternatives to Marriage
• 5. The Trials of Parenting
• 6. Finding Fulfillment in Work
• 7. The Angst of Adulthood
• Epilogue: Reclaiming Adulthood
• Notes
• Credits
• Index