Why do we want them to stay kids?

Beverly and I have had many conversations about this issue, although she beat me to blogging about it, probably because she is more frustrated with it than I am.  I find it interesting that when I did a web search on the concept of prolonging adolescence, I found much written about it, mostly blaming economic changes in modern society or larger education requirements.  In fact, although I saw many snarky comments from how annoying it was to have their kids dependent too long, I saw few taking any of the blame themselves.  It was someone else’s fault, and maybe a little bit the fault of their kids.

So, I’m a parent, middle-aged, and I want to know – what do we “adults” get out of keeping our children from becoming adults?  Because we are to blame, at least partially, and we must be getting some return for both the very real expense and the irritation, real or overinflated, that we complain of.  And because I think that blaming it all on the times we live in is just a little too convenient, and far too irresponsible.

So, the pundits say, times are hard economically. Really? Like they never have been before?  With a few exceptions, there seems to have been a panic/recession/depression about every three years for the entire history of the United States.  Yes, some were relatively mild or only effected some sectors of the economy.  But many were quite deadly to employment, and some were very long (it is argued that the Long Depression lasted from 1873 to the late 1890s, and was certainly the longest economic contraction in U.S. history).  So why is this current recession somehow stopping people who should be young adults from reaching for financial independence in ways that previous ones did not?  Especially when this trend of prolonging adolescence was noted in the 1950s (right around the start of the longest economic boom in American history) and has been in the public consciousness since the 1980s, before the economic boom of the 1990s.

Higher education is very expensive today, and graduation with a load of debt is not uncommon.  Of course, I graduated in 1982 with a load of debt (for the time), so it isn’t exactly a recent development to have to pay for your degree for years afterward.  And many experts say that claims of student debt at graduation are overinflated.  Some will argue that now a much higher level of education is required, that the undergraduate degree has become nearly worthless in the job market.  However, I am becoming more and more convinced that much of this is simply hot air blown by the universities that are out to expand their revenue stream.  For some interesting ideas on the subject, check out this Room for Debate from the New York Times.

So, what is the fault of us parents?  Well, first, that we enable our children through guilt.  It goes back to the reason that so many become the helicopter parents of today, always hovering over their children’s lives, not allowing them to make mistakes or if they do slip one past us, making sure that they don’t take the full consequences of their actions.  I think this all goes back to our guilt about the American Dream (yes, really).  You see, we have all been fed some version of the American Dream.  We want our kids to live better than we did, the same thing that our parents said they wanted for us.  That used to mean more opportunities, maybe a better education, a shot at a better job and then the bigger house and more stuff.  But our generation added a big load of guilt to it, somehow connected to the fact that we can’t all be super-parents.  We can’t promise a better life economically, because there is a finite distance ours kids can progress beyond us in opportunity.  An since we want to be the perfect parents, and deliver that American dream, one way to assuage the guilt is to not see our kids suffer the startup pains of that better life, even if we did.  We don’t want our kid living in a cockroach infested apartment in the worst neighborhood in town while they work that first, low paying job.  We don’t want them dealing with not being able to afford a car, or panicking over paying the rent, or going hungry because they don’t get paid until Friday and they ran out of food on Wednesday.  We may have done it, even be a little proud of it, but we feel like we are bad parents if our kids have to.

We seem to have forgotten that this early struggle is a kind of coming of age, a rite of passage of the type that young people have always gone through.  It is supposed to teach us to make careful use of our resources, that you have to work hard to gain material things, to value the finer things as we come to afford them and to gain that sense of shared hardships with other young working people like us.  We are so concerned with keeping our children safe, so guilty about not being the perfect parents of our fantasies that we ignore how well hardship instructs.

I also do believe that many parents allow their children to extend their adolescence because they want to extend their own parenthood.  The silence of the empty nest and the sudden harsh realization that middle age is fleeing by them can be held off for a few more years by letting the kids stick around after college.  They grimace even while they are enabling their twenty-somethings to continue a dependant life.  They complain that their kids eat everything in the kitchen, but never tell them to buy their own food or go hungry.  They wince at the late nights and drunken weekends, but do nothing to prevent it.  Some parents try to make rules, of expect rent, but many let the kids live a life of ease and lack of responsibility with no real attempt to change it.  Because as long as they kids are there, they are still needed, still vital as parents, still the ones in charge (even if that is only an illusion).

As for the part our kids play in this, it is both calculated and learned, using parental guilt for gain and holding onto a lifestyle that they don’t want to lose.  They have learned their lesson well; if mom and dad want to shelter them they might as well gain the maximum benefit.  As many have made college a four-year extension of high school social life, with bigger parties and more sex, so they want to make young adulthood more of the same.  Why sweat making an independent life for yourself when it is far more comfortable living off mom and dad while keeping the high life you have become accustomed to?  Years of suffering?  No, keep the nice car, and the pocket-money, the decent food and the nice clothes.  Screw waiting for things, you are entitled to those things now!  Sure, you occasionally have to dodge a well-meaning adult trying to get all serious with you about life, but you’ve spent years dodging such things.  And they are all such suckers for the earnest agreement and the promise to get more serious soon.  And you will get serious some day, when you get too old to have this kind of fun.

And so the dance goes on.  Parents, fearing their kids will grow up and trying to keep them kids, and the supposed young adults shying away from actual work and hardship because a life wrapped in soft down by their parents has ill-prepared them for it.  Because they have become too used to comforts, to immediate gratification, and too detached from actually working for what they want or waiting until they can afford it and making due with what they have.  And we all wonder what will happen to the current generation, when they will finally find themselves.  We don’t want to face the fact that by extending adolescence beyond any practical limits, we have damaged them and our culture. Or that perhaps adolescence has just become a prolonged childhood, not the bridge to a young adult life of independence and responsibility.  As much as I hate to agree with Newt Gingrich “We have to end adolescence as a social experiment. We tried it. It failed. It’s time to move on. Returning to an earlier, more successful model of children rapidly assuming the roles and responsibilities of adults would yield enormous benefit to society.” Maybe we all need to grow up a little.

P. Lake

 

Prolonging Adolescence

Everywhere I look there are the unmistakable signs of a culture that values youth above much else, perhaps to such an excessive extent that it tosses aside responsibility, maturity, independence, even self-reliance. This change has been a slow progression over the years, seeping from one generation to the next, but it seems that the consequences are becoming too massive to ignore for much longer.

Walking down the hall in a college academic complex I hear a “young” girl, around the age of twenty, on the phone with a parent telling them to schedule a doctor’s appointment for her. Eighteen year olds who live in dorm rooms, legally noted as adults, bring their laundry home each weekend to be done by their mothers and there are weekly grocery deposits from home so that they do not have to buy their own food. I am familiar with a disconcerting amount of people from the ages of sixteen to twenty that have never had a job. And yet, most teenagers and young adults reap the benefits of adulthood, benefits only hard work, independence and maturity could once bring – driving and owning a car, going to college, moving out of home, partying, living extravagantly.

I am not using these young adults as the scapegoat; there are deeper reasons we, as a society, have gotten to this point, both obvious and hazy ones. Parents, while they are not completely responsible, are part of the problem. If they believe their children are younger longer, they too can remain younger longer, evading the troubles of empty nest syndrome, middle age, even old age. I hear parents all the time complaining about their children who just “won’t grow up” while wearing a condescending grin – really, they are more than happy to make little Billy’s bed, despite his twenty-one years of existence. Generations prior there was an almost compulsive need for independence once a person turned eighteen; individuals wanted to move out and get started with their lives, separate from their families and the comfort of their home town. Now it seems individuals yearn for the opposite; the current generation is more than happy to sit around and gain the rewards of home life, while pretending to be full-fledged adults – driving the car parents pay the insurance on, living in the apartment or dorm room parents pay the fee for. Yes, some of this is attributed to the growing expenses of living, why people as old as thirty just do not have the money to make it on their own. But there is a difference – wanting to get out vs. wanting to remain coddled. If one lives at home but works hard to make the necessary money needed to move out and start a life at least the urge is there. Unfortunately, I see so many teenagers and young adults who are not even cognizant of their dependency – they seem happy to continue on the infectious cycle of childhood after legal adulthood.

Perhaps the age limitations only make it worse; eighteen year olds know that the law considers them adult but they see no validation. Yes, they can serve in the military and vote for the president but they cannot smoke a cigarette or drink a beer. This implies a contradictory message – one is old enough to choose a president and die for their country but not old enough to have a sip of beer. I recently learned that a student can not fill out the FAFSA until twenty-four years of age, rather than eighteen – they cannot claim themselves as independent from their parents until six years after they are legally considered adults and can be arrested and reprimanded accordingly. They are bound to their parents through health insurance and legalities. If that is not the tell-tale sign of a country that enables dependency and postpones adulthood I am not sure what would be. What happened to a world where young adults worked to put themselves through college at eighteen, a world where a twenty year old would choose living in the slums over living in the comfort of their childhood home, just to know they are free and self-reliant; more importantly, a world where eighteen year olds wanted to be adults and were given the right to be, not punished for it?

 

B. Penn

Summer Fades

Since Beverly’s post about the fall compared that season rather unfavorably to summer, I wanted to post my own feelings about summer in response.

Summer is indeed the season of long, slow days.  It is in this excess of time that I find its wonder, because those days are long and full of infinite possibility.  Days in the winter are short, darkness lingers far too much and they feel so hurried.  Fall is the season of last chances, of the rush to gather our memories and ensure our needs against the coming of winter.  Spring is a time of fevered growth and competition, of desperately trying to find a place to live and grow.  Only summer gives the time to reflect, our needs fulfilled and our life stable, a time to sit back and relax in comfort as the languid days drift by.

Each summer morning has that smell of promise, the excitement of the coming day wrapped in cooler air as the light trickles in.  There is a slight pause in a summer morning, the feeling of an empty space soon to be filled in by the sights and sounds of a splendid day.  Possibilities and choices stretch out before us, beckoning us to try new experiences or to revisit old and comfortable ones. As the day warms, we move forward, not frantically but at a measured pace, sure we have the time to get our fill of experiences and situations.

Summer afternoons are hot and still, but under that lazy façade there is still a world of movement.  Plants and animals go about their daily business without the frenzy of spring or the desperation of fall, moving through the timeless paces of the world in balance.  It is a time to read in the shade, to watch clouds roll past, to listen to the tiny rustle of life in its millions of guises, to hear the roar of surf while surrounded by golden light. It is when living is soft and we regain our energy to face the fleeing days of fall and the harshness of the winter that must always come.

Summer evenings are short, the fading light punctuated by fireflies who stand in the summer stars of the later night.  Crickets fill the darkness with sound, and the heat of the day dies, if only a little.  The cool air beckons us to long walks in the moonlight, to fish on a lake with the sound of water as our only companion, to sit on a deck and listen to the air slither through the shadowed leaves, to watch a campfire dance and cast long shadows across the surrounding green.

Yes, late summer is old and dusty, like a well used and lived-in house that badly needs some cleaning and straightening up.  It is full of old memories, of joy and melancholy, of success and regret.  It is stuffed with bric-à-brac, much of which has outlived its purpose and is now cluttering up every available surface. It seems to lumber along, held back by the weight of the things it is surrounded by. That is what the fall is for, a house cleaning that makes the world seem like new again. But I would not lose the experience of doing all that living, and that is what summer is for me.

P. Lake

“Seasons of mist and mellow fruitfulness!”

For many Autumn is noticeable because of the mutability of the seasons. There is a seemingly sudden shift from Summer to Fall; bright shades of greens turn to burnt oranges, reds, and browns; the crescendo of animals and people outside singing, playing, and basking in the sun fades into the quiet, plaintive melody of Autumn coolness. Summer is long and often arid – the days, even hectic ones, seem to have an indolent nature in their core – and it seems as if the gravity of the heat ushers in a universal siesta. I, myself, regardless of my busy nature, seem to pause with the season; it is a hiatus from normal life, a gap which recedes before me and then, slowly, slowly, it is over and I can once again open my eyes and see the world clearly; I can blink away the sleepiness of the heat. Summer lingers. Autumn begins and ends in a single flash; it is transient, and for this reason, evermore beautiful. I have seen and heard countless metaphors referring to summer as youthfulness and Autumn its adversary, old age. The more I reflect on this comparison the more I realize how fervently I disagree. Fall is youth. Yes, perhaps Fall brings with it a seriousness often associated with maturity but this is a miscalculation – the boldness of Autumn is overstated, vibrant colors only seen once a year, chilly days which breed alertness and boundless energy. Summer, Summer is so old and so tired; it seems a chore everyday to produce so much heat, and the humid nights go on and on.

To Autumn! May your days be filled with energy and life; may oranges, maroons and reds pervade your senses; may you challenge accepted notions – do not fret over Summer’s end, it shall be back again with the blink of an eye. Cling to Fall, for it shall seem like years before it graces us again.

Beverly Penn

Autumn Closing In?

Image via Wikipedia

The coming of autumn has always given me mixed feelings. While I welcome the crisp weather and the renewed sense of energy that it gives me, I also feel the weight of all the things that didn’t come to pass over the summer.  I love the beauty of the autumn colors but regret the dying of the summer’s lush greens. I wait for the cleansing of what seems a tired and dusty nature, yet wince at the reminder that winter always comes.

The kids go off to start a new school year, people clean out their basements and garages, the crops are harvested and life picks up its pace.  It is a season of so many beginnings, fresh starts for a new season. Behind it though, I can feel the oncoming endings pressing forward, the season of death and change that will bring new life.

The day becomes more solemn and serene
When noon is past; there is a harmony
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,
Which through the summer is not heard or seen,
As if it could not be, as if it had not been!

Hymn to Intellectual Beauty – Percy Bysshe Shelly

For me, the fall always brings reflection on the past and a more contemplative mood. I love walking through the autumn woods and thinking of the past. It is the season when history feels the most present for me, both my own and the larger past of the world. Memories have an almost painful clarity, and often things I haven’t considered in years leap back into my mind with a noisy insistence. I can understand why Samhain was the beginning of the Celtic year and appears in folklore as a time of the beginning of new undertakings and when the future may be divined.

“I woke last night to the sound of thunder
How far off I sat and wondered
Started humming a song from 1962
Ain’t it funny how the night moves
When you just don’t seem to have as much to lose
Strange how the night moves
With autumn closing in”

Night Moves – Bob Seger

Middle age has brought its own color to autumn, with all the allusions that have always been made to the season as the transition to old age.  I guess the sweetness of the time that is now visibly running out becomes clear, just as the fall weather reminds us of the hard winter to come, or the brilliance of the autumn leaves makes us remember the pale green of spring and the vital emerald of summer.  A last, brief flourish of light and color before the long, cold darkness.

“Oh, it’s a long, long while from May to December
But the days grow short when you reach September
When the autumn weather turns the leaves to flame
One hasn’t got time for the waiting game”

September Song – Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson

Here’s to making the most of autumn!

P. Lake