In Our Prime (20 page)

Vaillant declared that the Boston
and Harvard men produced the first clinical data that confirmed Erikson's theories about lifelong personality development. He pointed out that annoying adolescent tropes, from acting out to sulky passive aggressiveness, had evolved into mature coping mechanisms like altruism or sublimation. “Such transformation becomes visible only through the vantage point of the prospective study of lifetimes,” Vaillant said. “Once such studies are available, the evidence that defenses could continue to mature into late midlife seemed clear.”

The ability to adapt, Vaillant declared, “is not the product of social class; it is not a product of I.Q.; and it is not a product of years of education. It has nothing to do with the color of our skin or our mother's schooling. Rather, the ingenuity of defenses is as democratic as our sex lives and our ability to play pool. And it has everything to do with increasing age.” Over the course of someone's life, there are pendulum swings in outlook and behavior. Temperament may be more fixed, but character and personality are more flexible. As an adolescent, you might be reluctant to contradict your friends, while as an adult you are comfortable speaking your mind. “
Our self-assurance, our tendency
to criticize our children, our satisfaction with our lot, are highly inconsistent between ages 30 and 70.”

Vaillant also concluded that the Harvard data undermined the fabled midlife crisis. Divorce, unemployment, and depression happen throughout adulthood with roughly equal frequency, he noted. “
If such events occur during the dangerous
, exciting ripening of the forties, we can
pause and say ‘Ah-ha! The midlife crisis, the dirty forties, menopausal depression!' but that is to miss the point. Progression in the life cycle necessitates growth and change; but crisis is the exception, not the rule.”
Looking back, Vaillant's Harvard
men “regarded the period from 35 to 49 as the happiest in their lives and the seemingly calmer period from 21 to 35 as the unhappiest.” The young men who had resorted to what he labeled immature emotional reactions to anxiety (like losing oneself in fantasy) had, by midlife, replaced those with mature defenses like creativity, humor, and altruism. In Vaillant's view, 20- and 30-somethings who anticipate middle age with dread and anxiety are like a 9-year-old boy who finds kissing gross, only to later discover the wonder and excitement of sex as he turns into an adolescent.

On the other side of the country, Glen Elder, a newly minted sociologist, considered the long-term studies that had been under the care of the University of California–Berkeley: the 1931 Oakland study, which revolved around the sample of fifth graders born in 1920–21, and the Berkeley study, which originated with a couple of hundred infants born in 1928–29.

When Elder looked at the older children, he was surprised by how many were able to flourish despite having grown up during the Depression's economic catastrophe. How, he wondered, were these Oakland children able to turn their lives around? Trained as a sociologist, Elder was inclined to look for social as well as psychological explanations. The particular historical circumstances had to be critical, he thought, perhaps even more so than the sequence of life stages that Erikson and others had proposed. In his now classic 1974 book
Children of the Great Depression: Social Change in Life Experience,
Elder argued that individual turning points occur at different ages in response to what is happening in the larger world. A teenager during the hungry years of the Depression might have less in common with a teenager raised in the affluent sixties and more in common with a 50-year-old who grew up during hard times. “
Lives are lived in specific historical times and places
, and studies of them necessarily call attention to changing cultures, populations, and institutional contexts,” Elder wrote.
The Oakland children who were young teenagers
during the Depression fared much better than one might
expect. They were able to understand what was happening and contribute to the household. The military rescued many from poverty and afterward marriage steadied them. This group “experienced the prosperous postwar years and many took advantage of educational benefits from the G.I. Bill,” Elder explained.

Elder later contrasted the Oakland subjects with the younger Berkeley participants, who had spent their earliest, most vulnerable years in the darkest days of the Depression and their adolescence in empty households when fathers were fighting in World War II and mothers were frequently drawn into the workplace. The Berkeley children “hit both the Depression and war years at ‘an untimely point' in their lives, and they followed a path of life-long disadvantage into the later years.”

These long-term studies were a gold mine, but they had flaws. For starters, their creators did not necessarily assume they would continue for decades. Louis Terman, for instance, was thinking about bright children when he designed the questions, not middle-agers. Funding was scarce, limiting the extent of the surveys. Research methodologies and statistical computations were also not as advanced as they are today. The participants may not have accurately represented the population or been randomly selected. Similarly, Vaillant's findings were enlightening, but the experiences of privileged Harvard men could hardly be expected to apply to all Americans.

Elder realized some of these problems as early as
1962, when he worked as a part-time researcher at UC Berkeley figuring out how to code responses from study subjects. What struck Elder was that the information collected did not always match what he and others wanted to know about the participants: “How did they make it to middle age? Did they go into the military, into college? What kinds of careers did they pursue? And what about the impact of social change?”

Before the 1970s, most studies were organized around comparisons. Researchers could scan a list of facts describing a person on his tenth birthday, and then his twentieth, thirtieth, and fortieth, but they did not know why or how he moved from one to the other. The research offered a series of snapshots, not a moving picture. What happened in between was anyone's guess. “The intervening years remained a black box, open to
speculation, not scientific understanding,” Elder said, reflecting on this first wave of work.

Elder was intent on opening that box. Individual psychological development was important, but so were circumstances. Midlife could not be studied in splendid isolation but had to be located in the context of an entire life, grounded in a particular time and place, and situated in a mesh of family and community ties. “
If historical times and places change
, they change the ‘way people live their lives,'” he realized. “And this change alters the course of development and aging. Likewise, changing people and populations alter social institutions and places.”

Elder started by looking at a group of men in the early years of middle age, but his research led him to widen his frame and fit middle age into a larger panorama. The problem with theories that divided a human life into stages was that they missed the connective tissue. Erikson was sensitive to history and culture, but his Eight Stages of Man did not account for them. Elder wanted to construct a theory that would.

Other social scientists, including Bernice Neugarten, expressed similar reservations about age-based stages that uniformly proceeded in an orderly progression. She had only to look around. Feminism was propelling middle-aged women in new directions. Social strictures surrounding the timing of sex, marriage, parenthood, and careers were loosening. Better health and longer life spans were altering the customary path toward old age.
In 1974, the same year that
Children of the Great Depression
appeared, Neugarten labeled the cluster of active, engaged people between 55 and 75 the “young-old” and distinguished them from the middle-aged and the “old-old.” The emergence of the “young-old” was interfering with the familiar social clock, which she predicted would eventually help create “an age-irrelevant society.” Neugarten built on Erikson's seminal work but eventually moved beyond a rigid notion of sequenced steps. “
The psychological themes and preoccupations
of adults, although they are often described by psychologists as occurring in succession do not in truth arise at regular moments in life, each to be resolved and put behind as if it were a bead on a chain,” she observed. “It is therefore a distortion to describe the psychology of adulthood and old age as a series of discrete stages, as if adult life were a staircase.”

Other kindred spirits also stepped away from the staircase. Pioneering psychologists like K. Warner Schaie and Paul Baltes, to name just two, were already at work constructing a more encompassing alternate theory of lifelong development.

The person who ultimately brought many of these leading thinkers together in the 1970s was Bert Brim, the man who would later spearhead the world's largest study of middle age.

The original members of the MacArthur Foundation's Network on Midlife, 1992. Bert Brim, top row, far right.

Stage theories are a little like horoscopes
. They are vague enough so that everyone can see something of themselves in them. That's why they are so popular.

—Bert Brim

The research revolution that gained momentum in the 1970s among social scientists studying the middle decades culminated in 1989 with the creation of the MacArthur Foundation's nearly $10 million, ten-year investigation into midlife. Sundry theories about middle age had been floating through academic circles and the popular culture for nearly a century: it was the prime of life, it was a depressing low point; it was stagnant, it was crisis-ridden; it was ruled by genetics, it was governed by circumstance. None, however, had been scientifically verified. Finally, here was a comprehensive, scientific, and interdisciplinary search for hard evidence that could clear away the thicket of conflicting assumptions.

The ambitious undertaking was largely the work of Bert Brim.
Seated at his dining room table
in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, Brim, now retired, talked about the path that led him to become the impresario of research on middle age. He was born in 1923 in Elmira, a small town in the northeastern part of New York, the baby of the family and the first boy after three girls. He enrolled at Yale, but left in 1943 when World War II spread to America's shores to join the air force and fly B-24s, the cumbersome long-range bombers. Brim, lean with white hair, paused for a moment as he remembered his days soaring over the Pacific more than sixty-five years ago. “Sometimes you look back at your different selves,” he said, peering through the glass patio doors at the Long Island Sound as if searching for the younger Brim. “I don't recognize that self at all.”

Brim returned to Yale after his military service and pursued his plan to become a novelist. He finished a tale of wartime adventure and, filled with confidence, took the train from New Haven to Grand Central to deliver his freshly typed manuscript to Random House's midtown office.

“Put it on that stack behind you,” the receptionist said, pointing to a mound of tumbling boxes, envelopes, and towers of paper already creeping up the wall. A polite rejection soon followed.

He put aside his aspiration to be the next Fitzgerald and got a PhD in sociology at Yale in 1951. Later, he joined the staff at the Russell Sage Foundation, a nonprofit devoted to strengthening social science methods and theory, and became its president in 1963. Brim wondered how children internalize the values and behavior of their family and community. As he watched his young subjects, he realized that their
parents were going through a similar process of socialization, learning how to be mothers and fathers. Adults increasingly claimed his attention, and as president of Russell Sage, a post he held until 1972, Brim directed research dollars toward establishing middle age as a bona fide field of study. One seed he planted was at the nonprofit Social Science Research Council, which organized committees to focus on cutting-edge topics. In 1973, he chaired a panel on Work and Personality in the Middle Years. This committee and others that followed gathered leading scholars like Paul Baltes and Glen Elder, who were trying to devise a better model to explain the continual process of growing up.

The approach that ultimately took shape has come to be known as life course or life span development theory. Despite many variations, at its core is the idea that human development is flexible and never-ending.
Over a lifetime, shifts
in behavior and personality are powered by an unpredictable combination of biology, timing, choice, chance, relationships, history, and geography—the decision to move to a city, the unplanned third child, an unforeseen financial bubble or military conflict.

None of these elements is particularly surprising. Common sense would lead most people to the same conclusions, but as a theory the notion was messy and unwieldy, spilling over the boundaries of any single discipline and any defined age group, characteristics that made it extremely difficult to research, test, or prove. Over time, however, it has capsized our understanding of how human beings develop.
In 1998, the psychologist Anne Colby
called the establishment of life span theory “one of the most important achievements of social science in the second half of the 20th century.”