September 27, 2007

Nationally syndicated radio talk show host Albert Mohler recently interviewed author and columnist Diana West about her new book “The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development is Bringing Down Western Civilization.” 

Albert Mohler: I have to tell you I was anticipating your book. One of the major issues of my own writing and lecturing is about this “delayed adulthood”—this extension of adolescence. How in the world did this happen? 

Diana West: I think it’s been a long time coming and I think it’s something a lot of us recognize but have that same question, “How did this get started?” I think that a lot of it has to do with the period immediately following WWII—the 1950s, not the 1960s as is commonly thought. We had a period of economic boom. We had a brand new youth market that was created in response to a lot of money in the pockets of children—actually preceding the Baby Boom—and you see a transfer of cultural authority going from adults to young people at that time. This, of course, was only emphasized once the Baby Boomers started to come of age and go to college with what we see in looking back at the 1960s.

Albert Mohler: One of the things that most concerns me about this history is that you have the development of this new species known as the adolescent—a term that until Stanley Hall started using it wasn’t even really known to Americans. The old distinction was between child and adult, but now there’s this third creature, this adolescent, and then we start warehousing them in high schools.

Diana West: Right. It’s interesting that you use that term [warehousing] because, of course, the great, large, enormous public high school is a relatively new feature of common life. These large high schools—and junior high schools, too—brought kids into a world where they were dominated by other kids and the adult influence was suddenly literally very small and that’s another factor in some of this development.

There was also a new sense that adolescence was a period not just to grow through, but really something to focus on and to treat as a be-all and end-all period of our existence. And I think when you talk about this third creature—the adolescent—I think, unfortunately, it’s where we’re “pushing our kids too soon” and it’s where we’re leaving ourselves long after we grow out of it. So it’s almost like we’re morphing into a large adolescent being.

Albert Mohler: And at least socially, psychologically and spiritually speaking a lot of people are not growing out of it at least until their 30s.

Diana West: Well, hopefully they finally emerge. There’ve been some scientific studies where they’re actually trying to name “34” as the end of adolescence, which is kind of mind-boggling.