Back to Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development… He describes the seventh stage, what is often called middle adulthood (approximately 40 to 65 years old), as a period in which there is—or should be—a focus on supporting and assisting the next generation, the beginning of passing on the torch. Parenting and grandparenting are two ways this is enacted. Meanwhile, “middle adults” are simultaneously contending with their stage’s central conflict: generativity versus stagnation.
Our times are no doubt different from Erikson’s, of course. And we’ve been thinking about exactly what is passed along during middle adulthood, and how it’s affected by the times—often radically different from one generation to another. For instance, how are middle adults’ psychosocial messages affected by an economic depression or recession? Folks who lived through America’s Great Depression were frequently thrifty, sometimes anxious; yet often, their children turned out to be risk-takers.
People in middle adulthood offer those who are following them a mix of messages and varied types and degrees of support. Parents usually want their children to have it even better than they did themselves, and to live the best lives they can…but of course, it cannot be just their children. Some lucky grandparents get a second chance at passing on their knowledge and providing support, this time with advantages of more age, experience, and wisdom than during the first go-round.
A recently televised discussion about unemployment, the recession, the impossible cost of education—and young people’s dismal prospects without it—raised serious questions about our generation’s priorities and generativity. If education and training are not universally put within the reach of our young, then as a country we will not have done our critical job of supporting and assisting them. Erikson characterizes middle adulthood’s basic conflict of generativity versus stagnation as one which our government must heed. Without education and training, competition in the world is difficult, to say the least, and it is not just the younger generation that stagnates: so does the older generation, and so does the country.
0liver & Barbara