Jun 19, 2002

The Reappearance of the Generation Gap

by Steve Barrera

Writing in The Christian Science Monitor, Marilyn Gardner notes that, between her generation and her parents', there existed a gulf in attitudes, sensibilities, and activities that is lacking between her generation and her children's. In an article titled The Disappearing Generation Gap, she describes how parents and children today listen to the same music, wear the same clothes, and share the same interests. Rather than commanding obedience from their children - as we may assume Gardner's parents did from her when she was a child - today's parents adopt a more casual, mentoring approach to raising their offspring.

The social movements of the 1970s mark the point in time when the generation gap began to close, Gardner continues, citing family researchers. The resulting intimacy, unknown between the Boomer children of the 1950s and their strict "do as I say and not as I do" G.I. Generation parents, has its downside. Gardner writes, in part quoting Professor Robert Billingham: "Many parents started making decisions based on what their child wanted. 'The power shifted to children.'" Parents, apparently, have lost their authority.

Gardner's article ends with some encouraging comments from parents and professionals. One mother takes heart that openness allows her to prepare her children for a youth culture more dangerous than the one in which she came of age. Billingham speaks optimistically of "swinging toward a balance, where parents once again are viewed as parents, and not as peers..." This is a balance which he presumably believes will be reached in his lifetime. If he does believe this, he is wrong.

It is not possible that Boomers will ever claim the prestige enjoyed by the G.I. Generation. Nor is it possible that the relationship between Boomers and their teenaged children can ever be like the G.I.-Boomer parent-child relationship. The reason is that the archetypes in the two cases have reversed roles.

The middle-aged parents of the 1950s were authoritarians; the famous generation gap of the 1960s formed when their offspring rebelled against rules imposed for no apparent reason. Today's middle-aged parents are moralists; their young offspring form the Millennial Generation, who face a society so splintered culturally that there is hardly any significance in rebellion.

The authority of Boomers derives not from their achievements or their bearing, but from their unique role as the "original rebels" of our time. By tearing away from their parents' control, and inventing a new culture for themselves and younger generations, they have become the values leaders in a new generational cycle.

Boomers are raising Millennials in a manner that matches the persona they developed under G.I. tutelage. Still obsessed with meaning and distrustful of rules, they seek to inculcate values without denying independence. Millennials look to their parents for understanding of the purposes of life, but can hardly be expected to turn to them for the solutions to the problems of life. In a world where adults clearly have no control over events or capacity to maintain order, they will turn to each other to find the rules by which America can become, once again, as secure as it was in the stodgy old days of the 1950s.

The mantle of secular authority worn by the G.I. Generation is being handed to the Millennials. The Boomers can never wear it, only redesign its appearance to the world. This is the true, prescient meaning of Billingham's statement, "the power shifted to children." There is no Boomer-Millennial generation gap because the two generations are joined in the mission of transforming the inchoate revolution of the 1960s and 1970s into a practical regime to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century.

Only when the Millennials are themselves raising teenagers, with their Boomer parents revered in memory but unavailable to consult when the all-important question "why?" is asked, will there be another generation gap like the one Marilyn Gardner remembers.

© Steve Barrera and Generation Watch 2002-2007. All rights reserved.