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Chapter 1
The Age of Adjustment: Twenty to Forty Years
One of the best places to begin studying the family life cycle according to the family systems theory (Capps, 1983; Carter and McGoldrick, 1988) of human development is with a marriage and the creation of a family. For most people, this happens during young adulthood. Robert Kegan (1982), a psychologist, characterizes the self during this stage of life, when individuals are claiming to author their own lives, as the institutional self. Obviously, much is yet to be learned about the struggle to achieve adulthood. I call this stage of life the age of adjustment.
Actually, only a little interest has been shown in adult development until quite recently. This is in spite of the fact that we spend only one-third of our lives growing up and two-thirds of them growing old, being adults.
When I was a doctoral student at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary beginning in 1961, there was a course taught by Dr. Donald Minton titled "The Psychology of Adulthood." He was just starting to teach this new course and I was his teaching assistant. He and I dug like mad to find anything on the subject in the library. The seminary has a huge library but there was little to be found about adult development. Erik H. Erikson (1903-1994), with his publication of Childhood and Society in 1950, was the most influential developmental theorist of the time. One psychologist said the lack of interest in adulthood is because of the dread of middle age. Psychologists had not yet become interested in exploring this area. Fortunately, much more interest has been shown recently.
Let me mention three authors among the scores who have written on this topic. The best known is Gail Sheehy. She has been widely read since Passages was first published in 1974. In fact, it was on the best-seller list for a long time. Many people have read two of her other books (Sheehy, 1995, 1998), especially people approaching middle age. But she has much to say to adults throughout the range of adulthood. Sheehy is not a psychologist; she is simply a journalist who has gathered a lot of material from others who have studied adult development. She has pulled together the available knowledge and put it in a nice, readable package.
The second author is Roger Gould, a psychiatrist who wrote a book titled Transformations (1978). The third author is a psychologist, Daniel Levinson, who along with his research associates wrote The Seasons of a Man's Life (Levinson et al., 1978) and The Seasons of a Woman's Life (Levinson and Levinson, 1996).
The Seasons of a Man's Life
Dr. Levmson was a professor of psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine. When he went there he decided to study adulthood, got a research grant, and pulled a team of scholars together. He selected a group of forty male subjects very carefully. The forty men fell into four vocational groups of ten each. There were ten biologists, ten novelists, ten workers or wage earners, and ten executives. Fifteen percent of the forty were rural and urban poor. Forty-two percent were working lower middle class. Thirty-two percent were middle class and ten percent were the wealthiest class. The subjects were between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five when he began his study. He has followed them through the years and interviewed them regularly, from time to time, as they grew older. Thus, he tried to select forty men who represented all men in society (see Figure 1.1). Later he and his wife, Judy, selected fifteen business women, fifteen female faculty members, and fifteen homemakers for their study of the seasons of a woman's life (Levinson and Levinson, 1996, pp. 201, 202).
What Levinson calls the "nonovice" period roughly corresponds to the age group that I cover in this chapter and call the age of adjustment. It has three distinct periods. He calls ages seventeen to twenty-two the "Early Adult Transition." Roger Gould, in his book Transformations (1978), suggests that people develop and rely on a
FIGURE 1.1. The Seasons of a Man's Life
kind of slogan to get through each age bracket. For people in this period, the typical slogan is "my parents can guarantee my safety." Young people do seem to live that way: "I really don't have to worry; my parents will get me out of jail; they'll get me in another college; they'll get me a loan; they'll pay off my bills," and so on.
The second of these novice phases is ages twenty-two to twenty-eight, which Levinson calls "Entering the Adult World." Gould says that the slogan or myth for people in this age group is, "I'm nobody's baby now" and "a spouse will guarantee happiness." The shift in dependence now is from the parent to the spouse.
The last of these age brackets is twenty-eight to thirty-three. Levinson calls this the "Age Thirty Transition." Gould's slogan is, "Life is a simple, manageable proposition" (I can handle it). This slogan indicates less dependency on someone else but still an unrealistic view of life, which is not all that simple and not that easy to manage.
During this entire novice stage there are four developmental tasks, which Levinson discovered by interviewing his subjects. The first of these is the process of forming a dream. His male subjects began to form a dream concerning what they wanted to do with their lives. Several of them were pushed back from their dreams by their circumstances. Their parents might have said, "Look, you could never get accepted into a veterinary school because of your grades." Or parents might have said to a young man who wants to get a doctorate and teach in a university, "We don't have that kind of money; that is too many years." The high school counselor and math teachers may tell a young man they really don't think he has the capability to become an engineer. Some have to abandon the dream or alter it.
On the other hand, an individual may be pushed toward a dream that actually belongs to the parents. This is most common among farmers and physicians. If Dad is a farmer or physician, the son is (statistically) most likely to follow in his footsteps. It happens in all vocations sometimes. Some men get into careers that do not hold any personal interest for them. Jobs have a way of locking a person in with increasing wages or salaries, growing benefits including retirement, and seniority. It is an awfully big choice to decide to bail out.
Levinson found among his subjects that the people who were able to build their lives around their dreams had a much better chance for happiness, satisfaction, and self-fulfillment than the ones who, for one reason or another, could not or would not pursue their dreams.
The second developmental task Levinson found among his subjects was the formation of a mentor relationship. A mentor is a person who will support and facilitate the realization of the dream. A mentor is a kind of mixture of a parent and a peer. The mentor relationship may develop at the work setting in the person of a boss or senior colleague, someone who has been on the job for awhile. It can develop in a graduate or professional school situation with a senior faculty member. The mentor gives the younger man "a leg up" in climbing the professional ladder. Young ministers usually refer to some older minister with more experience as their "father in the ministry." The older minister takes an interest in the younger minister and may, for instance, write letters of reference, supervise counseling, advise concerning church problems, and so forth. It works similarly in any vocation. The mentor is a great deal of help in enabling the younger person to get ahead in his vocation or to show what he can do.
The relationship with the mentor lasts on the average from perhaps as little as two to three years to as many as eight to ten years. Finally it does come to an end. It may end because one of the two moves away or dies. It may end because of a conflict between the two. This typically occurs because the younger person wants to push ahead with a new idea and the mentor is not supportive of it, so the two disagree and part company. The mentor is quite important in helping a young person to launch a career.
Josef Breuer served as a mentor for Sigmund Freud. Breuer was fourteen years older than Freud and well established and respected in medicine. He was extremely generous in making loans to Freud, which eventually reached a staggering total of 2,300 gulden. Breuer was an intellectual patron to Freud as well. He introduced Freud to the case of Fraulein Anna O. and the cathartic method or talking cure. Freud eventually persuaded Breuer to collaborate with him on their book, Studies on Hysteria (Breuer and Freud, 1936). Freud seemed to be primarily responsible for ending their mentorship because Breuer disagreed with his claim of a sexual etiology for all neuroses. Breuer's daughter-in-law told a story of walking with Breuer and seeing Freud approaching. She said Breuer instinctively opened his arms but Freud passed by, pretending not to see him (Oring, 1997, The Jokes of Sigmund Freud).
In my case, my father in the ministry also became my father-in-law. He was my pastor and he gave me opportunities to preach. The church sponsored a weekly service at the local county jail and I preached there often. He talked to the associational Director of Missions about me and recommended me to the Mentor Baptist Church near Springfield, Missouri, which became my first pastorate. More often than not, there is a mentor for the person who fulfills his or her dream.
Forming a vocation is the third developmental task discussed by Levinson. Choosing a vocation is too narrow a concept. In my own experience, I chose the ministry and at the time the only thing I knew about the ministry was the pastorate. As the years have gone by, I have functioned in a number of areas within the ministry. During my college years I was interested in evangelism. I served as a pastor while studying for the master of divinity degree. During my doctoral studies, I became interested in chaplaincy, counseling, and teaching. When I finished my resident studies at the seminary, I had two opportunities: a pastorate and a chaplaincy position. I chose the latter out of a conviction of stewardship: others were as well prepared as I to serve the pastorate, but I had been privileged to accumulate specialized training for the chaplaincy and to begin a program of clinical pastoral education. So, I accepted the position as director of the Department of Pastoral Care and Counseling at Baptist Memorial Hospital in Kansas City. Ten years later, with the same conviction, I accepted an invitation to teach in the two Departments of Medical Humanities and Family Practice at Southern Illinois University School of Medicine. It was a progressive, innovative school, and I was one of the first ministers hired as a full-time faculty member by a medical school. At the time I entered my vocation, this sort of thing was unheard of. When I first set my foot on the road to ministry, I had no notion about what I ultimately would come to do. Nearly any vocation, once a person develops it, is much broader than previously thought.
The mentor phenomenon is quite different for women since fewer mentors are available for them. Female mentors used to be particularly scarce, but recently their numbers have increased. When a man takes an interest in advising and guiding a young woman, there is often an erotic interest as well, which complicates the relationship.
Margaret Hennig in her Harvard doctoral dissertation (1970), studied twenty-five high-level women executives. She found 100 women presidents and vice presidents of large corporations listed in Who's Who in America. All had a strong attachment to a particular male boss early in their careers. She selected twenty-five of these women and traced their lives stage by stage. Each one was a first-born in her family. Around age twenty-five they all decided to put their careers ahead of marriage and a family. For the next thirty years they remained with the same firms and were promoted along with their mentors. Around age thirty-five all of them took a moratorium for a year or two. They look a long, hard look at themselves and their goals. Almost half of them married professional men during this time.
Dr. Hennig also selected a control group who got stuck in middle management and compared their characteristics with her study group. She noted that the fathers of the women in the control group treated their daughters exactly as though they were sons, even calling them boy's names. These women formed only "buddy" relationships with bosses. They did not take a mid-thirties moratorium to reevaluate their lives. None married. They did not get promoted to the top.
The fourth developmental task Levinson found in the lives of his male subjects was that of finding a special woman. The young man with a dream found a special woman who would help him pursue that dream. This special woman was like a mentor in some ways and could, in fact, even be the mentor, but that was not often the case. She supported the young man emotionally as he pursued his dream and may even have supported him financially. This special woman was not necessarily his wife, but usually was his wife. She might have been a teacher or a close friend. For some men she was an older guide, critic, or sponsor. For the novelists, she was sometimes a financial sponsor who would contribute money to give the man time to write. The special woman for some of these men was a transitional figure, especially if she was not the wife. Among professionals, wives supported the men until "liftoff (the obtaining of the professional degree), but then were soon dropped (often divorced) like the first stage of a space rocket. But the special woman was a very important figure who helped enable the man to fulfill his dream. This is the way that men get started in adult life.
Women's Lifestyles
That is not the trend for women, who create their adult lives in a different way. Gail Sheehy in Passages (pp. 293-347) describes six life patterns for women. She talks about women who become caregivers. Before this century most women gave a priority to caregiving. This is still the choice of many young women. They find a man to love, bear children, and raise and care for them.
Other women choose the lifestyle of a nurturer who defers personal achievement. This is somewhat different. These women choose first of all to be caregivers or nurturers, but they keep in mind during marriage and child rearing that later they want careers of their own. These women begin college and may finish their degree and even work for a year or two. But they set aside careers to marry and have children, fully planning to resume their professions after the children have started school or left home. These women dedicate seven to twenty-five years toward helping their children advance their lives, while keeping their personal career goals and achievement in mind. They simply give nurturing the priority in their lives. These are the women who go back to school in midlife. Nursing schools often prefer to accept women in this age group over younger women. Nursing facilities invest a lot of energy into young women, many of whom are nurturers who defer achievement and drop out of nursing soon after they graduate. Older nurturers who defer achievement go to work after graduation and work without interruption for the next twenty-five years.
A third lifestyle for women is the achiever who defers nurturing. These women postpone marriage and motherhood to spend six to ten years completing their professional preparation and establishing themselves in careers. These women definitely plan to get into nurturing later in life. Around age thirty, before losing the physiological ability to bear children, these women declare a moratorium in their careers and give nurturing the priority. Some women in this category are super-achievers such as Margaret Mead, the sociologist who established a wide reputation for herself as an anthropologist and then had her children. Barbara Walters of television fame and actress Sophia Loren are other examples.
Another li...
