The Wall Street Journal-20080118-WEEKEND JOURNAL- Taste -- de gustibus- A New Generation Of the Young And the Restless
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WEEKEND JOURNAL; Taste -- de gustibus: A New Generation Of the Young And the Restless
The youth vote is back. With record-level turnout in New Hampshire and Iowa, the 18-to-34 set is being hailed for its involvement in the political process. Sounding more like Rock the Vote than a newspaper of record, the New York Times reported: "It has the feel and look of a transformative moment, this tidal wave of young voters buoying the disparate campaigns of Senators Barack Obama and John McCain."
But are these young folks really about to change the country? Is the generation shown in movies like "Knocked Up" -- the people who made playing video games and watching cartoons a legitimate pastime for people over the age of 13 -- going to lead us all in the next revolution?
The behavior of this generation has spawned a number of recent books, including Diana West's "The Death of the Grown-Up," Jean Twenge's "Generation Me," and such academic studies as "Emerging Adults in America," edited by Jeffrey Jensen Arnett and Jennifer Lynn Tanner. For a better understanding of this cohort, of which I happen to be a part, I turned to Robert Wuthnow, a Princeton sociologist and the author of a new book called "After the Boomers." Surrounded by college students, and the father of three children who are now ages 35, 33 and 27, Prof. Wuthnow, a kind-looking gentleman with a full head of white hair, has long been fascinated by the demographic differences between young adults today and his own generation.
Here are the crucial ones he identifies: When compared with their parents and grandparents, 20- and 30-somethings are spending more time in school, remaining financially dependent on their parents longer, marrying later in life, having kids later (and have fewer of them), and changing jobs and locations more often. As Prof. Wuthnow sees it, this extended adolescence or "emerging adulthood" (a phrase coined by Prof. Arnett in a 2000 article in American Psychologist) is largely a product of longer life expectancies and has both upsides and downsides.
"One of the real positives is that young people are more mature when they get married and become parents," he tells me. And divorce is less common among people who marry when they're older. Marriage for them is the "capstone event," rather than the "starting event," of adulthood, according to Prof. Wuthnow. The later-marrieds wanted to be financially independent -- with a place of their own and a steady job -- and also to have lived with their potential spouse for a while before having a wedding ceremony, he says.
"Another real value" of this demographic change, he notes, "is that people have more of a chance to finish their education and, . . . if they're middle class, a chance to decide from experience what kind of career they want." Of course, all of these choices -- whom to marry, what kind of education to get, what kind of career to pursue -- can also be overwhelming, even paralyzing for young people today.
This "paradox of choice" is one of the downsides of these demographic trends. The other major one, Prof. Wuthnow observes, is the "dependency" that comes with receiving financial support from parents. In any given year, about a third of adults between 18 and 34 receive money from their parents, and half receive free labor (like childcare). According to a University of Michigan study, those getting such support receive an average of about $38,000 during that period of their lives and two years (in 40-hour weeks) of their parents' time. (On a recent episode of her TV show, financial guru Suze Orman advised parents to cut this financial aid out, lest they not have enough money saved for their own retirements.)
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Whatever strings are attached to this kind of support, and Prof. Wuthnow believes there are quite a few, they don't include parents forcing their kids to maintain a religious affiliation. One of the other results of these demographic changes has been a steady decline in church attendance, across geographical, denominational and class boundaries. Religious trends in America have been Prof. Wuthnow's primary focus of study over the past few decades, and his predictions about this generation have been very unsettling for American religious leaders.
Historically, he says, "the single adult in his or her 30s was probably never at church." The kinds of programs and services that religious congregations offer tend to serve children and parents. But the number of 20- and 30-something singles has become much larger, "both in absolute terms and as a proportion of that age group," Prof. Wuthnow emphasizes. In his book, he writes that there are about 300,000 religious congregations in the U.S.; the loss in membership since 1970 (if you divided it evenly) would amount to 21 young adults each. And despite what these singles may say about returning to the fold once they are settled down, Prof. Wuthnow says that only about half do so.
All of this amounts not only to fewer people praying each Sunday but also to fewer men and women volunteering through church programs and learning about religious ideas. And while surveys show that this generation is more tolerant of ethnic and religious diversity, Prof. Wuthnow believes it is mostly a "superficial" acceptance, characterized by ignorance of one's own faith and the beliefs of others.
Still, he is not prepared to accept the pop- culture representation of this generation as frivolous and determined to prolong childhood indefinitely. The people he interviewed were working long hours, trying to establish themselves in careers. And he notes that "they were so serious about figuring it all out that they were experiencing a lot of anxiety making decisions." For instance, the young men and women he interviewed were thinking about marriage early on in their lives (not just hooking up). "They often had fairly serious long-term relationships with someone they didn't end up marrying. That was a great source of frustration and disappointment."
Prof. Wuthnow, who was born in 1946, credits his two daughters and one son with being the impetus for this work. "It doesn't take much from kids to convince a baby boomer that you're a thing of the past." But thanks to Prof. Wuthnow, at least the boomers will know what the future holds.
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Ms. Riley is the Journal's deputy Taste editor.
