Life Stages

Life Stages. Research on the historical meaning and importance of different life stages is relatively recent, A growing interest in family history from the early 1960s on resulted in studies of the evolution of childhood, the progression to adolescence and young adulthood, and the transition from adulthood to old age. The development of specialized subfields devoted to the status and roles of the youngest and oldest members of society produced a greater understanding of the aging process.

An important landmark in the study of specific life stages was the 1962 English translation of Philippe Ariés's Centuries of Childhood. In western Europe prior to the sixteenth century, Ariés argued, children were quickly socialized into the adult world; childhood, he contended, was a concept that evolved only in recent centuries. Although few historians shared Ariés's nostalgia for a time when children enjoyed greater freedom but few institutionalized protections, his view of childhood as in many ways a social construction proved very influential.

Childhood and Adolescence.

Historians of colonial America generally portrayed childhood as a period lasting no later than the age of eight. At this relatively young age, most children began a sort of apprenticeship that encompassed their integration into the religious, social, and economic world of adults. Early research on colonial New England also indicated that the strong affective bonds that typically characterized parent‐child relations in the late twentieth century were conspicuously absent. However, this depiction of childhood in early America has undergone some revision. Research on the Chesapeake region indicated that parents outside Puritan New England were more likely to have stronger emotional attachments to their children. Other scholars argue that even in New England, relations between parents and children were probably closer than once thought.

Nonetheless, childhood has clearly changed in profound ways over the past three centuries. The nineteenth century, for example, witnessed the increasing acceptance of childhood vulnerability and the need to protect children from undesirable moral influences. This recognition contributed to the expansion of compulsory public‐school education, Progressive Era child labor legislation, and social welfare services designed to deal with delinquency, poverty, and child abuse.

The reasons' for these changes remain under discussion. Some research, for example, has focused on demographic effects, linking the apparent lack of affection for children in early America to high child mortality. According to this view, the relatively high death rate among children resulted in a psychological reaction whereby parents avoided deep emotional attachments to offspring who quite possibly would not survive to adulthood. Large family sizes, a consequence of women continuing to give birth past the age of forty, meant that many families ultimately contained children ranging from infants to young adults. This tended to blur the distinction between the various stages of early life that eventually became sharply distinguished.

Other scholars link the emergence of childhood as a distinct life stage to the Industrial Revolution. While the necessity of training a skilled industrial workforce contributed to the expansion of formal schooling as an important part of childhood, the demise of family‐based economies made the early socialization of children the exclusive domain of mothers. This transition, some argue, increased awareness of the emotional value of children.

Demographic and economic change also played a more indirect role in the development of modern childhood. The reform movements of late nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century America were in many ways a response to increased levels of immigration, urbanization, and industrialization. A key component of the Progressive Era was the emergence of specialists—medical and health professionals, educators, social scientists, and social welfare advocates—who increasingly used specific age groupings as an organizing framework. In addition, many of these professionals focused on the problems and developmental needs of children.

The recognition of adolescence as a specific developmental stage shows how specialists played a role in the evolution of modern childhood. Early in the twentieth century, psychologists popularized the notion that the onset of puberty marked the beginning of a stressful time in terms of identity formation. The discovery of adolescence—often dated from the publication of a book of that title by the psychologist G. Stanley Hall in 1904—played a major role in reorganizing the lives of American teenagers. Compulsory high‐school attendance and the growth of youth organizations added adult‐sanctioned structures not present before. This fundamental change helped lay the groundwork for the development of a pervasive youth culture in the twentieth century.

Although these changes in American childhood were profound, their timing varied. The need to contribute to the family economy is often credited with lower school‐attendance rates for many ethnic groups and working‐class youths during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The lack of facilities and racial segregation resulted in lower school attendance among African American children, especially in the South. Gender differences in education were also evident. Young women's education was seen as preparation for their anticipated role as homemakers and mothers. Although gendered socialization (as well as the influence of race and social class) remains influential, by the post–World War II period, these distinctions generally diminished.

Ironically, even as the experience of childhood became more homogenized, childhood as a protected stage of life eroded over the last decades of the twentieth century, as children were exposed to mass‐media depictions of sex and violence and the rise in divorce forced many children to confront adult realities at relatively young ages. In addition, two distinct child‐rearing models based largely on social class emerged. Middle‐ and upper‐class parents strove to provide a nurturing environment including access to better educational facilities. This achievement‐oriented style contrasted with that of parents who lacked the means, time, or energy to improve their children's probability of success later in life.

Much of the impetus for achievement‐oriented parenting came from research done by developmental psychologists and social scientists, and from the central assumption that a child's environment and experiences have profound effects on later life. Glen Elder's Children of the Great Depression (1974), an important historical study using this approach, examined the impact of the Depression of the 1930s on the lives of successive cohorts of California children. Elder's research model, often referred to as the life‐course approach, influenced historians studying life stages. According to this model, the timing of significant life‐defining transitional events—leaving home, leaving school, marriage, and entry into the labor force—varies from individual to individual, and also according to gender, class, and culture, and the timing of a specific event in turn affects the timing of subsequent events.

Marriage and Adulthood.

The transition to adulthood, most historians believe, proceeded more gradually in the past. In 1900, men and women typically left home, married, and established independent households later in life. Gradually, young adults accomplished these transitions at younger ages, with this trend accelerating after World War II. By the end of the twentieth century, most young adults accomplished the transition to adulthood in a far shorter period of time than they had a century earlier.

Why did the transition to adulthood become a more rigidly age‐defined process? One theory is that in the past the timing of these transitions was articulated more by the family's collective needs. Children remained at home because they had an obligation to contribute to the family income. In addition, marriage and the establishment of an independent household were often contingent on attaining a minimum resource level, which for the urban working class could be a lengthy process. Over the twentieth century, as the economic well‐being of most families became less dependent on the contributions of children, young adults increasingly accomplished these transitions not because of collective family needs, but rather according to specific age norms. However, the post‐1970 era saw a slight reversal of this trend. As postsecondary education became a more protracted process, young men and women tended to leave home at later ages, and the marriage age increased. Nonetheless, the experience of young adulthood (like that of childhood and adolescence) was acutely affected by an increasing age consciousness.

Old Age.

The development of a more age‐regimented society also affected older Americans. In the preindustrial past, according to a widely held view, the elderly enjoyed an exalted status. In agrarian‐based, traditional economies, they maintained control of land and were repositories of knowledge acquired over a lifetime of productive work. In colonial America, historians have found, the elderly enjoyed a respected place in society but were often a focus of generational conflicts over family and community authority and the transfer of economic assets. By 1900, however, the elderly were no longer seen as merely older adults, but rather as a distinct group with special needs. Like children, they drew the attention of reformers and social scientists who claimed that many older Americans suffered from poverty and isolation from their kin.

Recent historical research suggests that the alarmist warnings concerning the state of the elderly at the end of the nineteenth century were exaggerated. Little evidence exists that their economic position was deteriorating. Older men maintained high labor‐force participation rates, while home ownership (often the result of relatively high rates of savings) provided many widows with an important economic asset. In addition, most older Americans lived with kin—either a spouse or, in the case of widows and widowers, an adult child.

Nonetheless, the perception that the elderly needed public assistance instigated a variety of lobbying efforts on their behalf, which contributed to the passage of the Social Security Act in 1935. The provisions for old‐age assistance reduced poverty among the elderly, but it also set in motion two significant trends. Although earlier reformers had claimed that industrialization had increased unemployment among older men, labor‐force participation rates among the elderly declined sharply after the 1930s. Social Security benefits also significantly affected the living arrangements of the elderly. Whereas in 1900 most formerly married elderly men and women lived with an adult child or other relative, by the end of the twentieth century most lived independently in single‐person households. Social Security began this trend, some researchers believe, by providing widows and widowers with the resources to maintain an independent residence after the death of a spouse.

Demographic trends have also profoundly affected the lives of older Americans. A lower age at marriage and declining fertility rates (specifically the ending of childbearing at earlier ages) combined with increased life expectancy resulted in the so‐called empty‐nest syndrome: the increasing time span experienced by parents after their youngest child leaves home. Increased longevity also contributed to a fundamental population shift, with approximately 13 percent of the American population over the age of 65 in 1990, compared to 4 percent a century earlier. In their multiplying numbers, the elderly became a potent force in American politics through various lobbying organizations. Although the United States remained a youth‐oriented society as the twenty‐first century began, the needs and concerns of the elderly, including the provision of health and retirement services, had important economic implications and seemed likely to loom even larger in the future.
See also American Association of Retired Persons; Birth Control and Family Planning; Child Rearing; Colonial Era; Death and Dying; Demography; Depressions, Economic; Disease; Health and Fitness; Housing; Marriage and Divorce; Medicare and Medicaid; Professionalization; Psychology; Puritanism; Romantic Movement; Social Science; Welfare, Federal; Women in the Labor Force; Work.

Bibliography

Glen H. Elder Jr. , Children of the Great Depression, 1974.
Joseph M. Hawes and N. Ray Hiner, eds., American Childhood: A Research Guide and Historical Handbook, 1985.
John Demos , Past, Present, and Personal: The Family and the Life Course in American History, 1986.
David Van Tassel and Peter N. Stearns, eds., Old Age in a Bureaucratic Society: The Elderly, The Experts, and the State in American History, 1986.
Howard Chudacoff , How Old Are You?: Age Consciousness in American Culture, 1989.
John Modell , Into One's Own: From Youth to Adulthood in the United States, 1920–1975, 1989.
Carole Haber and and Brian Gratton , Old Age and the Search for Security: An American Social History, 1994.

Ron Goeken