CLINGING CLOSE TO NURSE

Against Eternal Youth (Frederica Mathewes-Green , First Things, August/September, 2005)

The well-meaning parents of the 1950s confused vulnerability with moral innocence. They failed to understand that children who were always encouraged to be childish would jump at the chance and turn childishness into a lifelong project. These parents were unprepared to respond when their children acquired the bodies of young adults and behaved with selfishness, defiance, and hedonism.

The World War II generation envisioned a sharp contrast between childhood and adulthood: Childhood was all gaiety, while adulthood was burdened with misery and toil. The resulting impulse was to place children in a hermetically sealed playroom. Childhood, once understood as a transitional stage, was now almost a physical place—a toy-filled nursery where children could linger all the golden afternoon. Parents looked on wistfully, wishing their dear children could stay young forever.

As they say: Be careful what you wish for. When conservatives get nostalgic for the Ozzie-and-Harriett parenting of the 1950s, they should remember how the experiment turned out. The children got older, but they never grew up. They continued to show the same self-centered and demanding behavior that had fit so well with their parents’ desire to pamper and protect. They continued to expect that life would be arranged to please them, as it had been in the playroom. They ridiculed their parents’ values, slept around, and trashed all forms of authority.

Of course, when all the authorities have been trashed, the world doesn’t feel very secure. Anxiety hangs over a culture when adults act like children. The Baby Boomers rejected not just grownup life but grownups. They rejected the parents who had worried so much over them. If something looked like what grownups would do, Boomers wanted no part of it.[...]

Future historians will have to sort out our plight—how a whole generation could forget to grow up, while still attempting to raise a younger generation and lead the most powerful nation in the world through times of war and terror. The skills of adulthood are not ones we know how to use. Being kittenish, or obscene, or adorably perplexed—we can do that. But gathering the gravity and confidence that signals full maturity is beyond our capabilities. It’s not youth that passed us by, but adulthood.

In Chaim Potok’s wonderful novel, The Chosen, a brilliant Hasidic teenager grows up with a pious father who will not speak to him and acts like he isn’t there. The story tracks his unsurprisingly painful difficulty in understanding and coping with this. At the end, the mystery is resolved in an extremely poignant reconciliation when the father tells him that, when he was very young, he (the father) could see he was brilliant but that he was also selfish and hard-hearted. After much prayer, the father made the heartbreaking decision to deprive him of his father’s love so he would know and come to understand the pain of others around him. The book ends with the boy beginning his studies to be a psychologist–one with an obviously fierce sense of vocation.

The fact that it is almost impossible for the modern mind to see this as other than outrageously cruel and abusive is an indication of how the self-indulgent, inward-looking life is so prized by our culture and has come to define our notions of maturity, courage and strength.