Urbane Sprawl

By the time my grandfather was my age, he had already long finished fighting in World War II — flying dozens of missions in Italy, saving a younger man’s life, and parachuting into enemy territory after being shot down. Before that, he’d worked as a welder and a soda jerk to help his parents support his six younger siblings while still graduating from high school. After returning to the US, he’d started a successful business, married my grandmother, and had a child.

By the time my mother was my age, she had protested the Vietnam War, lived in Italy for two years, hitchhiked through Europe — spending one night in jail and another at the decade’s largest rock concert on the Isle of Wight. She’d been proposed to by half-a-dozen men, she’d had a near-affair with a famous writer (who I’ll leave unnamed), and she’d moved into an abandoned church where she started her own art gallery.

Yesterday, I woke up at 2 PM, watched Law & Order and The People’s Court, went to dinner with friends, and finished up the night with a new episode of Gossip Girl. While I writhed on my brother’s futon wishing that Vanessa would just stay out of Blair’s way, my friend gently reminded me that I was almost 23, and that when my grandfather was my age, etc…

The “greatest generation” fought World War II, came back, got married, had kids in a baby boom, and drove America to prosperity and peace; their boomer kids led sexual and civil rights revolutions, countered their culture, and protested for peace; their children are now adults, swimming through their “odyssey years” of extended adolescence, faced with crises of apathy and irony and the most challenging political problems in memory — global terrorism and global warming.

These generational differences are not new. What is notable, though, is that we are not just facing unique challenges. We are facing unique challenges while living, paralyzed, in the long shadows of our parents’ and grandparents’ generations.

We are the third child generation.

Like young children in big families, we are constantly measured against our predecessors — in our case, the generations of our grandparents and parents. When they were our age, they were drafted and sent to war; they were sitting in and standing up.

Sibling order psychology has had a few small moments over the last few years, first surrounding the publication of NYU sociologist Dalton Conley’s book, “The Pecking Order,” then around the release of a study about inter-family IQ differences. Overall, though, it’s a field without much luster. But I think the insights of sibling order psychology could help us understand the particular conundrum faced by we “millennials.”

We are enjoying the fruits of our boomer parents’ prosperity, taking our 20s to really figure out what we want to get out of life. David Brooks’s article is key to understanding this phenomenon:

The odyssey years are not about slacking off. There are intense competitive pressures as a result of the vast numbers of people chasing relatively few opportunities. Moreover, surveys show that people living through these years have highly traditional aspirations (they rate parenthood more highly than their own parents did) even as they lead improvising lives.

But this odyssey is constantly interrupted and jarred by our awareness of past generations’ productivity. Imagine if the gods kept telling Odysseus that his older brothers had gotten back to Ithaca in just five years — why is it taking him ten?

“Third child syndrome” is a vicious circle, with our odyssey-term pursuit of self-actualization thwarted by our self-awareness. I’m not sure what birth order experts would say, but I would guess that this actually happens in families: if the oldest is doing her medical residency, and the second is touring with his band, it might take the third child longer to figure out her way — and, as she takes time to figure it out, I can see her unsettled by seeing her siblings settle into their lives.

Beyond the mind games, our country is expending resources on these older generations — through the Social Security we will have to pay for, for instance — in the same way that large families are prone to favor older children with their own limited resources. For all the talk of marketers and the media focusing their efforts on capturing the 18-34 demographic, or teens and tweens and pre-tweens, the federal government is spending $608 billion this year on Social Security, $386 billion on Medicare, $209 billion on Medicaid — and just $56 billion on education. (Though of course, as my economist brother points out, local and state governments are primarily responsible for education spending.)

Maybe this is just an overextended metaphor, but perhaps we can better understand our generational identity crisis with the help of sibling order psychology.

From The Times:

“Younger siblings are more likely to take chances,” Dr. Sulloway added, and to challenge the status quo in creative ways.

Maybe we, as a generation, are taking big chances — using the odyssey years to take risks towards achieving meaning or fulfillment — and maybe our third child status will help us challenge the status quo.

(Sidenote: I’m convinced that third child syndrome is unique to our generation and not simply a timeless theme that I’m egoistically complaining about. Before the industrial revolution, generational narratives were cyclical rather than linear: children hit life milestones around the same ages as their parents and spent their lives in similar ways. Not until the twentieth century was the concept of adolescence invented. Add to intense progress the distinct generational identities that came with WWII and the baby boom, and we have three very clear children — the first two successful and well-defined, the third struggling for an identity.)