Posted 10/29/2007 05:19:00 PM by Douglas

Here's a reason kids don't really have an incentive to learn: Adults want to be kids.

Some would call it a sickness, and whether you label it the Peter Pan Syndrome, the Forever Young Syndrome, or Permanent Adolescence all suggest the refusal or inability of adults to act their age. The phenomenon has been well documented of late, but nowhere more thoroughly than in Diana West's new book, The Death of the Grown-up: How America's Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization. The title may smack of hyperbole, but West makes a convincing case that big babies make lousy citizens. My grandparents' generation, for instance, could appreciate St. Paul's meaning when he wrote, "when I became a man, I put away childish things"; nowadays we would consider Paul of Tarsus a wet blanket and a preachy bore. No doubt a Republican too. What is to account for this generational shift?

West begins with the birth of the teen-ager, a historical event that occurred some time round mid-century. Prior to World War II, a clear line of demarcation divided childhood from adulthood. Upon entering puberty most children were pulled out of school and made to pull their weight. In exchange you received room and board and the family staved off starvation for another winter. (That is how it was for my grandparents on their southern Illinois dirt farm, and, so far as I know, that is how it has always been.) Naturally, few adolescents had much in the way of disposable income, nor was there anything even resembling a teen market. All of that changed in the 1950s, as more teen-agers stayed in school -- sometimes through college -- and fewer kids were expected to help with the family finances. Postwar affluence more than trickled down, it showered disposable income on record, magazine and hairspray-buying adolescents, and Hollywood and Madison Avenue took notice. Youth culture was commercialized, capitalized, and institutionalized and overnight a whole low-brow culture grew up round the teenybopper.

Aside from being just another book of how the Boomers ruined the world, I think she's on to something. Now the boomer's kids are faced with (gasp!) adulthood, and fewer seem to be embracing the responsibility. It's not going to be too long 'till there's no one left to run the day care center that is our country.