In her book, The Death of the Grown Up: How America’s Arrested Development is Bringing Down Western Civilization, Diana West has addressed an issue that is becoming more and more obvious, namely the demise of the intentional pursuit of adulthood and the rise of adolescence as the ideal existence. Below is blurb from West’s 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 Brontës, 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.2 Readers as old as twenty-five are buying “young adult” fiction written expressly for teens.3 The average video gamester was eighteen in 1990; now he’s going on thirty.4 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.5 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.
West has received both favorable and unfavorable reviews for the work. You can read all of the Amazon postings here.
