Have you noticed a certain childishness on the part of our leaders, and many fellow Americans? Explore this trend and look for its causes.
Have you noticed a certain childishness on the part of our leaders, and many fellow Americans? Explore this trend and look for its causes.
Rebel Yelling: The State of Adults in America
March 2024
“At the core of liberalism (progressivism) is the spoiled child — miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic, and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats.”
PJ O’Rourke
“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child, but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”
Paul of Tarsus
Every generation tends to disparage the one that comes after as it ages. Though the following quote may not have been from an ancient source, it pre-dates our era and was probably written in 1907, certainly before 1940.
“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”
In a fun piece by Joe Gillard, entitled “The 2,500-Year-Old History of Adults Blaming the Younger Generation,” the author provides a timeline of such lamentations:
Horace in the 1st century:
“Our sires’ age was worse than our grandsires’. We, their sons, are more worthless than they, so, in our turn, we shall give the world a progeny yet more corrupt.”
Thomas Barnes in the 17th century
“Youth were never more sawcie, yea never more savagely saucie . . . the ancient are scorned, the honourable are contemned, the magistrate is not dreaded.”
And this one from the 1930s.
Remember that this editorial from the Leads Mercury talks about the Silent Generation, or Tom Brokaw’s Greatest Generation, who got through the Depression, won World War II, and matched up with the Soviets, eventually winning the Cold War.
“Parents themselves were often the cause of many difficulties. They frequently failed in their obvious duty to teach self-control and discipline to their own children.” Did the guys at Guadalcanal and Okinawa lack discipline?
And maybe one generation does not despair the next one, but certainly the one after that. Boomers are trashing millennials to the point where the meme “OK Boomer” became a common rejoinder. And Xers, like me, wonder what the heck is wrong with the Zs.
The recent 2024 State of the Union address made me ask what the matter is with the entire nation. It was infantilism from all generations. The evening began or began late because a group of pro-Hamas protesters decided to lie down in front of the president’s motorcade. They clearly felt their cause was so worthy that they would disrupt the proceedings and, of course, as with all these performative exhibitions, the lives of their fellow citizens.
Once there, you had Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Green decked out with MAGA gear as if she had just hit the Panola Pines Plaza Truck stop in Texas to get all of the good merch. Then you had a group of Democratic women cosplaying as suffragettes in support of abortion. Of course, none of these so-called adults could be bothered to learn that the REAL suffragettes like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B Anthony abhorred the practice of abortions. They called it murder. Then you had the Squad, once clad in the Suffragette White, but since Hamas murdered 1,200 Israelis, these belles of the ball were wearing pro-Palestinian blue. Was this a State of the Union Address or The New York Village Halloween Parade?
It did not help that the Republican response, delivered by once rising star Alabama Senator Katie Britt, was delivered in such breathless tones that I wondered if she was a 15-year-old trying for the part of Blanche Dubois in the high school production of A Streetcar Named Desire.
And the star of this grotesque demonstration of the unfitness of our leaders to lead a great nation? That would be Silent Generation Joe Biden (yes, he is so old he pre-dates the boomers). Forget the lies and half-truths exhibited throughout his presentation. Or the Democrats are jumping up and down out of their seats like so many trained seals. Instead, Biden taunted the Republicans in a back-and-forth that was unworthy of both parties. Was this an update on the State of the Union or thuggish fans at a Rugby match? Some thought, incorrectly, that Biden would bring adult behavior back to the White House after the term of his enfant terrible predecessor. Yet Biden’s petulance and taunting looked like a return to bike racks behind the school in 5th grade – the place of settling scores in my old Wisconsin home.
In fairness, I despise the State of the Union Address in its current PT Barnum iteration.
Like the great (Kevin) Williamson, it is an imperial spectacle. One branch of the government, the first, according to the constitution, does not stand in reverence for the other branch. Third, the judiciary does not need to be hectored in a public format. This travesty needs to be eliminated, and we cannot go back to POTUS sending a letter to Congress fast enough to suit me. That was the practice for 130 years until Woodrow Wilson ended it and began doing SOTU’s live-in Congress. If one takes a political position as the opposite of any Wilson policy, one will surely be on the right side of policy and morality.
But regarding this state of the union, I kept asking myself the same question: Where are the grown-ups? When Matt Gaetz is clad in a sober suit and tie and does not yell at the podium, he personifies adulthood; something is very wrong.
So, is this podcast an AD Tippet rant akin to “Get off my lawn, you stinking kids!” There is always that possibility. After all, I was raised in the 1980s with big hair, Michael Jackson, and George Michael’s Wham! Not exactly the stuff of the Pioneers, Rough Riders, or storming Omaha Beach on D-Day. So, who am I to talk? Instead of personal anecdotes, I will look at some data and demographics.
The first is the propensity for children to be born not just out of wedlock but into single-person homes. According to Pew Research, almost a quarter of U.S. children under 18 live with one parent and no other adults (23%), up from 9% in 1960. And this is more than three times the share of children worldwide who do so (7%). That stat, because it includes 18-year-olds, dates back to 2006. And compare this stat to our past and today. According to NPR, “Almost half of all babies born in the U.S. were born to unmarried women in 2019, a dramatic increase since 1960, when only 5% of births were to unmarried mothers. And it's not because of divorce; today's unpartnered mothers are also more likely to have never been married.”
Is this healthy? In a work published in 2022 entitled “The Power of the Two-Parent Home” by Kevin DeYoung, the author states,
The percentage of white children living in poverty goes from 31% in families with only a mother to 17% in families with only a father, all the way down to 5% in families with a married couple. The same percentages for black children go from 45% (mother-only) to 36% (father-only) to 12% (married couple). We can lament that black children in two-parent families are still 2.4 times more likely to be in poverty than white children (12% v. 5%). Still, we should also observe that white children raised by only a mother are 2.6 times as likely to be in poverty as black children raised by two parents (31% v. 12%).
And even in families where the parents are not married, they are superior to one-person households. “While it’s well-established that married parents are typically better off financially than unmarried parents, there are also differences in financial well-being among unmarried parents. For example, a much larger share of solo parents is living in poverty compared with cohabiting parents (27% vs. 16%).”
Note the massive increase in two parents but unmarried households, yet the dichotomy between the success of these structures vs. married ones. Though, as I have argued vociferously over the years, two is better than one, there is an issue of impermanence. Unmarried tend to switch partners or go periods without any partner. Because marriage is seen as unnecessary to many today, those who do commit tend to commit for the long term. So, there is a clear hierarchy of success: married, unmarried, and single households.
The position of married is better than single, because of simple economics and even more. The expectations put upon a child in a single home are different. One might claim it makes them grow up faster, a refutation of my central argument. But they do not. They grow up without structure, and the put-upon, sole parent often lacks the energy and focus to provide necessary guardrails and discipline. Children seem to be free and innocent creatures, and they are. But they crave structure. They want to know that someone is in charge. Single parents often treat their children as companions and friends. There is no hierarchy, and that is warping.
The second new thing in our Republic is the shrinkage of family size, though this in and of itself is not new. Augustus lamented such a thing millennia ago, creating laws to try and encourage both more Roman marriage and larger families. Today, China’s President Xi, in a clear repudiation of the one-child per family rule instituted in the 1970s, is also trying to create larger families. However, whereas China’s demographic issue was governmental, America’s was more cultural.
According to a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a rapid worldwide demographic shift is expected to occur, which might affect the care economy moving forward. According to the study, family sizes are expected to shrink by 35% in the “near future,” which could upend the family structure and care economy for aging individuals and children alike.
One of the most common explanations, and it seems fairly plausible, is that women entering the workforce choose to have children much later than previous generations, thus capping the number of children. Additionally, the accessibility and variety of contraceptives make it much easier to regulate the having of children than in prior decades or centuries. Yet, the problem with this conjecture is that smaller families are more of a 150-year trend than one from the last 50.
The average number of people per household was 5.55 in 1850, 4.54 in 1910, and 4.11 in 1930. It was already 3.33 in 1960; this year, it is expected to be 2.61. So, family size is much smaller than in the past, and it is getting smaller still.
Would this not mean that a harried parent can now devote more time to children? Two problems with that. First, the extra time enabled by less children means more focus on those children. Second, without siblings, the attention that a child does get is laser focused. And in a single-parent household, with a single child, there is something I call super onlys. The usual parent-child relationship is warped because the parent does not want a child; they want a companion, a friend. Even an only child in a two-parent household must compete with the other spouse. Not in a single-parent environment.
The next new trend is something that was foreign to the ancients and medieval, and only partially realized by most people today: leisure time. Getting to the 10-minute mark in any conversation is difficult before one of the parties proclaims how busy they are. But that depends on how you define busy. Before 160 years ago, when most people’s drinking water was carried in from well in buckets, food was not pre-made but garnered from raw wheat or chicken eggs; the roof leaked. There was no one to call; you did it yourself. When your clothes ripped, you did not go to Wal-Mart or Amazon and order a replacement; you fixed the clothes yourself. That was busy.
Today, what is busy? According to Pew Research, “Among employed U.S. adults aged 25 to 64 and married, husbands spend about 28 hours per week on leisure.” For the math challenge, that is 4 hours per day—not working or commuting, but messing around. It is a little less for women, but not much less. Americans spend over $80 billion on sports entertainment, tens of billions on video games, and nearly $60 billion on gambling. It is not as if the benighted American people are toiling in fields, working six days a week on 12-hour shifts at the glue factory, or sweating it out in coal mines. Comparisons to the elites of the Ming Empire or Romanoff Russia are inapt. For the great majority of the population, Americans have more choices about what to do with their time than generations of humanity have ever dreamed possible.
So, the argument is that with all this leisure, cannot a parent spend time establishing a genuine parent-child relationship, time to provide that critical structure and discipline? Again this does not lead to that establishment but rather the time is used on maximizing little Susie’s full potential. Psychologists have long warned that children’s lives are overscheduled, undermining their ability to develop non-academic skills they’ll need in adulthood, from coping with setbacks to building solid relationships. Now, a trio of economists say they’ve been able to calculate some of these psychological costs.
In a new data analysis published in the February 2024 issue of the Economics of Education Review, three economists from the University of Georgia and the Federal Reserve Board found that students are assigned so much homework and signed up for so many extracurricular activities that the “last hour” was no longer helping to build their academic skills. Instead, the activities were harming their mental well-being, making students more anxious, depressed, or angry.
Parents should use this leisure time for unscheduled, impromptu activities. Now, their lives are busy, but here is the critical change: the busyness is around the child, not around the parent.
The fourth change is the Government. About a dozen years ago, an Obama administration scheme equipped poor people with cell phones to encourage entry into the digital age. One woman clamorously screamed, “An Obama Phone, An Obama Phone!” In her mind, the phone came directly from the former president. Of course, her fellow taxpayers funded the project. To her, it was a gift from a beneficent president. Children rarely understand the process by which a parent goes to work, earns money, gives some of that money to the grocery store, and brings home food. Like the “Obama” phone, the food appears to the infant like magic.
One of the many pernicious effects of government is removing the cause and effect of how things are produced and consumed. Citizens are shielded from the costs; thus, we have student debt cancellation or, in a more odious term, forgiveness. What this is really is cost transference. On a certain level Bernie Sanders understands the concept of transference, he just wrongly believes it should come from some nebulous inhuman blob he calls “the rich.” A child however does not understand the economic. From their perspective food, heat, clothes, and other goods simply appear. They do not consider the work, the pay, the purchase, or distribution and carry that belief into adulthood.
The other stultifying effect of government is a trade of liberty, of choice, for a false veneer of security. This month, we have seen talk of shrinkflation. It is as if a grown adult cannot check a box, read a weight, or know which company is providing value and which is not. In this case, we are not asking people to do something complex like select an oncologist but rather pick out a box of cereal. In the infantilization game, the master player is always someone like Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown, or Kamala Harris, assuming they can run your life better than you can. The Nanny State is meant to be a pejorative but is unerringly accurate. The problem is their charges are adults.
When we combine these four factors of single or transient parents, small families, leisure time devoted to children, and magical government support, we have the recipe for one of the most deleterious trends of our time and something unique to our current generations: the child is not only the center of the family but in many regards its ruler. Child kings, from King Tut to King Richard II Henry VI of England often make poor rulers and, eventually, poor adults.
As noted in the Save My Family blog:
Kids, at any age, aren’t mentally capable of using their power wisely and for their own good. If they get everything they want and when they want it, this creates a deep sense of anxiety.
An example would be if you were teleported from your comfy SUV to the cockpit of a Boeing 737 airplane and asked to land the thing. Your first reaction would be panic, followed by anxiety. You would not be qualified, trained, or have the professional maturity to do the job.
The difference is that I’m old enough to know that I was over my head, whereas kids usually can’t make that distinction. That may not be the perfect analogy, but you get the idea. Kids crave reasonable and loving boundaries, limits, and guidance. And it’s your job as the parent to put those in place.
This result is increasingly reflected in two American phenomena: the first is the infantilization or, at best, the juvenilization of our society, and the second, an outgrowth of that, is the desire on the part of too many Americans to be the rebels, the revolutionaries, the ones who challenge the man, are part of the resistance, fighting the regime, and overturning the apple carts.
After all, they have been feted, celebrated, enthroned, and enshrined from birth. Parents organize their schedules around the kids, not the other way around. The parent’s best friend is not Ned, the neighbor, Sal from the Elks Lodge or Leroy from the Union Hall; it is little Billy. Morgan’s best friend is her daughter Zoey, not her college roommate. And no best friend would be the most logical, their marital partner. Single and unmarried partnerships are flexible and transient. The relationship with their child is a permanent aspect of their lives, and in era with few community or religious ties and work from home now a staple, sometimes the only permanent social relationship.
Any child raised in this fashion does not learn the word no, which is a parent’s ally but is treated today as the enemy. The child gets to decide where to go, what to do when talking, and what to and when to eat. Since they have no real sense of what an adult is, they fail to become one themselves. Because many children never see how married adults interact, they are ill-equipped to become one themselves.
All of this mean we are becoming a nation of Peter Pans, pushed to grow up early but never really growing up at all. Peter, though god knows how old he really was, was the rebel cawing at authoritative figures. There is a reason why in Peter Pan productions the same actor plays both patriarch Mr. Darling and Captain Hook. They both represent the same thing, adulthood and Aauthority.
Regardless of age, Americans are forever young at heart, or at least immature. Americans rarely serve in the military and experience true depredation. Yet, they parade around as if they were Spartacani fighting the Roman Empire for their liberty, William Wallace yelling Freedom as he is disemboweled, Nathan Hale lamenting his only life to give, or the Marines raising the flag on Mount Suribachi. Of course, most of us are none of these things.
This is the odd chemistry at work. Elizabeth Warren wants to run your life, which can only be achieved by controlling the levers of government, yet she thinks of herself as an outsider. The American people want to be heard on all manner of subjects, to live our best lives, and to experience our own personal truths. Still, we disdain any sense that we ourselves can be stewards of our own experiences, shapers of our destiny.
How else to explain the support of our two leading presidential candidates conducting themselves like 12-year-olds, though in Trump’s case, a self-respecting tween would never stoop to the inane nicknames he has uncorked lately. And their followers act likewise. On January 6th, Trump expressed his disapproval and disagreement about the results of the 2020 election. Like an orange-haired Veruca Salt, he stomped his foot. I Want the presidency Daddy and I want it nowwwww! But he whined to a crowd who also disagreed with the results, so like a massive mobbish tantrum, these 180-pound toddlers threw a fit-in our nation’s Capitol.
Mobs are always unreasonably infantile by nature, but this one was in America, and this attack had never happened before. Even before Jan 6, we had the BLM riots. Bad things were done to people 150 years ago or to a guy in Minneapolis, so I am justified in looting this store in Chicago. Wait What? Maybe if we had handed out lollipops to the protesters the rioting would have been abated?
And has there been a politician less self-aware, like the EMO teen Joseph Biden? From his 1980s plagiarisms to his bluster at the Clarence Thomas hearing to his swearing at the Affordable Care Act signing ceremony. You could see Obama cringe when Joe leaned in close, and like a child who had just learned a new cuss word had to say it was a big F-ing deal. Biden is that classic kid from the pool who is always yelling “look at me, look at me!” as they do something very unextraordinary.
And how about Biden’s inability to do what every Democrat, heck, some of his Republicans, would beg him to do: step down and let a new generation take over. Like a tempestuous 2-year-old who just lost his Ted Ted, “The White House is mine, mine, mine,” you can hear the Biden toddler scream.
Trump routinely rails or wails might be the more appropriate term against the so-called elite. So, let’s look at Trump’s bio. He was born to an extremely wealthy, well-connected New York City real estate developer. He was sent to expensive private boarding schools. He attended an Ivy League university. He has built eponymously named buildings throughout the world. He hobnobbed with the rich and famous (and the infamous in the case of Jeffery Epstein). He did cameos in TV shows and movies. He then hosted his own reality show on one of the significant networks owned by the largest cable company in America. Oh, and he was president of the United States.
Trump is not of the elite; he is the elite of the elite. Yet it is he who screams about Deep States and Swamps and conspiracies as if he were not a part of any of it. It was as if there was Jimmy Stewart’s rock-solid, honest Jefferson Smith trying to fight the man. A New York Real Estate Billionaire who went to Penn and hosted a show on Comcast’s NBC IS the man. Yet remember how I said Biden demands attention? Trump is the four-year-old who interrupts adults when they are talking but no on corrects him, no one tells him to wait his turn. He are about to elect a man who does not need the White House, he needs a massive time out or better yet, a severe spanking.
And we now have prominent political figures like the aforementioned Greene and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. In the latter case her policy pronouncements of knowledge of her job after six years continues to sound the 8th grader of who no teacher or parent said sit down, learn something and think before you speak.
Here is the paradox. Like the 14-year-old who many on the left think is capable of determining their gender and deciding to have life-altering reproductive surgery, American children are in charge. Yet the irresponsible, imprudent authority being vested in our children creates a sense of anxiety and mental struggle. We have 20 and 30-somethings (and even 70-somethings) who simultaneously think they are rebels struggling for liberty while ceding it at crucial points in their lives. They want to be adults when it suits them but revert to childhood when faced with adversity.
Though they are now adults, they are trapped in the psychology of wanting the advantages of choice but not really desiring the accompanying responsibilities. They have been given the former, but not educated to manage the latter. Children always “act out” against their parents. They are testing their bonds of responsibility and feeling their way towards eventual independence. But strong parents provide that safety net. A teen violates curfew but is grounded when caught. Eventually, they will understand that the curfew is for their benefit, and when they are in charge of their own lives, they will not stay out until all hours. They become adults, not rebels. Imagine a 16-year-old with no curfew; he can stay out until he likes. And so, he can when 25 but does not understand the value of the parental prohibition. He will still look for those parents, though now call it the establishment, the man, the elite. And he will fail to discern a true leader from the grifter, as we have seen in 2024. He is a man-child and not ready for the world. The attitude of a child in a adult’s body is a damning thing for men and women and for society.