Life Cycles Take Turns For The Better
Western culture from antiquity to the present has sought to divide human life into ages and stages. From the beginning of this century to the middle of the 1970s, the marker events of life - graduation, first job, marriage, first child, empty nest, retirement, widowhood, even death - tended to occur for most people at predictable points. The ages 21 and 60 or 65 came to define the boundaries of participation in the adult world. But since the publication of my book “Passages” in 1976, age norms have shifted and are no longer normative.
Consider:
Nine-year-old girls are developing breasts and pubic hair.
Nine-year-old boys carry guns to school.
Sixteen-year-olds can “divorce” a parent.
Thirty-year-old men still live at home.
Forty-year-old women are just getting around to pregnancy.
Fifty-year-old men are forced into retirement.
Fifty-five-year-old women can have egg-donor babies.
Seventy-year-old men reverse aging by 20 years (with human growth hormone).
Eighty-year-olds run marathons.
Ninety-year-olds remarry and still enjoy sex.
What’s going on?
In the space of one generation the shape of the life cycle has been altered. People today are leaving childhood sooner, but are taking longer to grow up and much longer to die. Puberty arrives earlier by several years than it did at the turn of the century. Adolescence is prolonged for the middle class until the end of the 20s, and for blue-collar men and women until the mid-20s, as more young adults live at home longer. True adulthood doesn’t begin until 30.
Most baby boomers, born after World War II, do not feel “grown up” until they are into their 40s. Unlike members of the previous generation, many late-baby couples or stepfamily parents will be battling rebellious children while they themselves wrestle with hormonal and psychic changes that come with middle age.
For the first time most people in advanced societies can expect to live into the late afternoon of life. Twothirds of the gains in life expectancy accomplished since the human species emerged have come in this century!
The following statistic has been suggested by the latest epidemiological studies:
A woman who reaches age 50 today - and remains free of cancer and heart disease - can expect to see her 92nd birthday.
The average healthy man who is 65 today can expect to live until 81.
That most middle-aged and “young-old” Americans today still have a living parent is a change in family dynamics with no precedent in history. The president of a nursing home in Milwaukee reflected on the amazing changes she has seen: “Twenty years ago I’d see 40-year-olds bringing in their 60-year-old parents. Now I’m seeing 70-year-olds bringing in their 90-year-old parents.”
I’ve learned many things during the seven years it took to create “New Passages,” but the one overriding conclusion is this: There is no longer a standard life cycle. People are able to customize their life cycles.
We are on the brink of discovery. In Willa Cather’s “O Pioneers!” it was the open land of the American West that gave drive and purpose to so many lives. At the dawn of a new century it is the adult life cycle itself - stretching it, taming it, bringing it under control, making it yield its riches - that beckons us all, women and men alike. This is the new human frontier.
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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Gail Sheehy Universal Press Syndicate