How does being born in a particular historical time affect our lifespan journey? What about our social class, cultural background, or that basic biological difference, being female or male?

Cohort refers to our birth group, the age group with whom we travel through life. In the vignette, you can immediately see the heavy role our cohort plays in influencing adult life. Susan reached adult life in 1960, when women married in their early twenties and typically stayed married for life. Jamila came of age during the final decade of the twentieth century, when women began to feel they needed to get their careers together before finding a mate. As an interracial couple, Matt and Jamila are taking a life path unusual even for today! Because they are in their late forties, this couple is at an interesting cutting point. They are traveling through life after that huge bulge in the population called the baby boom.

The baby boom cohort, defined as people born from 1946 to 1964, has made a huge impact on the Western world as it moves through society. The reason lies in size. When soldiers returned from World War II and got married, the average family size ballooned to almost four children. When this huge group was growing up during the 1950s, families were traditional, with the two-parent, stay-at-home-mother family being our national ideal. Then, as rebellious adolescents during the 1960s and 1970s, the baby boomers helped usher in a radical transformation in these attitudes and roles (more about this lifestyle revolution soon). Society, as we know, is now experiencing an old-age explosion as the baby boom cohort floods into later life.

The cohorts living in the early twenty-first century are part of an endless march of cohorts stretching back thousands of years. Let’s now take a brief historical tour to get a sense of the dramatic changes in childhood, old age, and adulthood during just the past few centuries, and pinpoint what our lifespan looks like today.

Changing Conceptions of Childhood

At age ten he began his work life helping … manufacture candles and soap. He … wanted to go to sea, but his father refused and apprenticed him to a master printer. At age 17 he ran away from Boston to Philadelphia to search for work.

His father died when he was 11, and he left school. At 17 he was appointed official surveyor for Culpepper County in Virginia. By age 20 he was in charge of managing his family’s plantation.

(Mintz, 2004)

Who were these boys? Their names were Benjamin Franklin and George Washington.

Imagine being born in Colonial times. In addition to reaching adulthood at a much younger age, your chance of having any lifespan would have been far from secure. In seventeenth-century Paris, roughly 1 in every 3 babies died in early infancy (Ariès, 1962; Hrdy, 1999). As late as 1900, almost 3 of every 10 U.S. children did not live beyond age 5 (Konner, 2010; Mintz, 2004).

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The incredible childhood mortality rates, plus poverty, may have partly explained why child-rearing practices that we would label as abusive used to be routine. Children were often beaten and, at their parents’ whim, might be abandoned at birth (Konner, 2010; Pinker, 2011). In the early 1800s in Paris, about one in five newborns was “exposed”—placed in the doorways of churches, or simply left outside to die. In cities such as St. Petersburg, Russia, the statistic might have been as high as one in two (Ariès, 1962; Hrdy, 1999).

In addition, for most of history, people did not have our feeling that childhood is a special life stage (Ariès, 1962; Mintz, 2004). Children, as you saw above, began to work at a young age. During the early industrial revolution, poor boys and girls made up more than a third of the labor force in British mills (Mintz, 2004).

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, enlightenment philosophers such as John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau spelled out a strikingly different vision of childhood and human life (Pinker, 2011). Locke believed that human beings are born a tabula rasa, a blank slate on which anything could be written, and that the way we treat children shapes their adult lives. Rousseau argued that babies enter life totally innocent; he felt we should shower these dependent creatures with love. However, this message could fully penetrate society only when the advances of the early twentieth century dramatically improved living standards, and we entered our modern age.

One force producing this kinder, gentler view of childhood was universal education. During the late nineteenth century in Western Europe and much of the United States, attendance at primary school became mandatory (Ariès, 1962). School kept children from working and insulated these years as a protected, dependent life phase. Still, as late as 1915, only 1 in 10 U.S. children attended high school; most people entered their work lives after seventh or eighth grade (Mintz, 2004).

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the developmentalist G. Stanley Hall (1904/1969) identified a stage of “storm and stress,” located between childhood and adulthood, which he named adolescence. However, it was during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when President Franklin Roosevelt signed a bill making high school attendance mandatory, that adolescence became a standard U.S. life stage (Mintz, 2004). Our famous teenage culture has existed for only 70 or 80 years!

In recent decades, with many of us going to college and graduate school, we have delayed the beginning of adulthood to an older age. Developmentalists (see Tanner & Arnett, 2010) have identified a new in-between stage of life in affluent countries. Emerging adulthood, lasting from age 18 to roughly the late twenties, is devoted to exploring our place in the world. One reason that we feel comfortable postponing marriage or settling down to a career is that we can expect to live an amazingly long time.

Changing Conceptions of Later Life

In every culture, a few people always lived to “old age.” However, for most of history, largely due to the high rates of infant and childhood mortality, average life expectancy, our fifty-fifty chance at birth of living to a given age, was shockingly low. In Maryland during Colonial times, average life expectancy was only age 20, for both masters and their slaves (Fischer, 1977).

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, life expectancy in the United States rapidly improved. By 1900, it was 46. Then, in the next century, it shot up to 76.7. During the twentieth century, life expectancy in North America and Western Europe increased by almost 30 years! (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], Health United States, 2007.)

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The twentieth-century life expectancy revolution may be the most important milestone in human history. The most dramatic increases in longevity occurred about 100 years ago, when public health improvements and medical advances, such as antibiotics, wiped out deaths from many infectious diseases. Since these illnesses, such as diphtheria, killed both the young and old, their conquest allowed us to live past midlife. In the last 50 years, our progress has been slower because the illnesses we now die from, called chronic diseases—such as heart disease, cancer, and stroke—are tied to the aging process itself.

As you can see in Figure 1.1, the outcome is that today, life expectancies have zoomed into the upper seventies in North America, Western Europe, New Zealand, Israel, and Japan. A baby born in affluent parts of the world, especially if that child is female, now has a good chance of making it close to our maximum lifespan, the biological limit of human life (about age 105).

This extension of the lifespan has changed how we think about every life stage. It has moved grandparenthood, once a sign of being “old,” down into middle age. If you become a grandparent in your forties, expect to be called grandma or grandpa for half of your life! Women can start new careers in their early fifties, given that U.S. females at that age can expect to live on average for roughly 32 more years (U.S. Census Bureau, 2012). Most important, we have moved the beginning of old age beyond age 65.

Today, people in their sixties and even early seventies are often active and relatively healthy. But in our eighties, our chance of being disabled by disease increases dramatically. Because of this, developmentalists make a distinction between two groups of older adults. The young-old, defined as people in their sixties and early seventies, often look and feel middle-aged. They reject the idea that they are old (Lachman, 2004). The old-old, people in their late seventies and beyond, seem in a different class. Since they are more likely to have physical and mental disabilities, they are more prone to fit the stereotype of the frail, dependent older adult. In sum, Susan in the vignette was right: Today the eighties are a different stage of life!

Changing Conceptions of Adult Life

If health-care strides during the early twentieth century allowed us to survive to old age, during the last third of the twentieth century, a revolution in lifestyles changed the way we live our adult lives. This transformation, in the West, which has now spread around the globe, began when the baby boomers entered their teenage years.

The 1960s “Decade of Protest” included the civil rights and women’s movements, the sexual revolution, and the “counterculture” movement that emphasized liberation in every area of life (Bengtson, 1989). People could have sex without being married. Women could fulfill themselves in a career. We encouraged husbands to share the housework and child care equally with their wives. Divorce became an acceptable alternative to living in an unfulfilling marriage. To have a baby, women no longer needed to be married at all.

Today, with women making up more than half the U.S. labor force, only a minority of couples fit the traditional 1950s roles of breadwinner husband and homemaker wife (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2014). With roughly one out of two U.S. marriages ending in divorce, we can no longer be confident of staying together for life. While divorce rates are now declining, the Western trend toward having children without being married continues to rise. As of 2013, almost 48 percent of U.S. babies were born to single moms (Hymowitz and others, 2013).

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The timeline at the bottom of this page illustrates the twentieth-century shifts in life expectancy and family life, as well as charting the passage of the mammoth baby boom as it moves through life. In later chapters, I’ll pay special attention to the late-twentieth-century lifestyle revolution—highlighting single parenthood, the trend toward having stepchildren, exploring gay and bisexual relationships, and shedding light on the changing family roles of women and men. While this text does divide development into its standard categories (infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and later life), I’ll also devote a chapter to emerging adulthood—that life stage many of you are in right now. In the later-life section, I’ll continually emphasize the distinction between the young-old and old-old (being 60 is miles different physically and mentally from being 80 or 95) and focus on the issues we face as the baby boomers flood into their older years.

But, as history is always advancing, let’s end this section by touching on two twenty-first-century transformations: The first is a permanent change in how we relate; the second temporarily affects the economic path we take as adults.

From Relating in the Real World to Residing in Cyberspace: On-line Relationships

Meet the Alvin family…. Sandra, a former journalist … has over 800 followers on twitter and keeps an elaborate … blog; their 16-year-old daughter Zara is a fanatic Facebook user—464 friends right now—and she also uses Pinterest for “pinning and sharing photos”….

(quoted in Van Dijck, 2013, p 3)

Julia, … a Sophomore at a … public high school turns texting into a kind of polling. After Julia sends out a text, she is uncomfortable until she gets one back: “I’m always looking for a text that says, “Oh I’m sorry” or “Oh that’s great.” Without this feedback, she says, “It’s hard to calm down.” Julia describes how painful it is to text about her feelings and get no response: “If … they don’t answer me … I’ll text them again “are you mad? … Is everything Ok?”

(adapted from Turkle, 2011, p. 175)

How many of you feel the urge to check Facebook or your cell phone as you are reading these lines? Perhaps, like Sandra, you have followers on Twitter or keep a personal blog, or can relate to Julia’s anxiety when you text and don’t get an immediate response.

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Cell phones and texting instituted what one expert (Van Dijck, 2013) has labeled our twenty-first century “culture of connectivity,” by tethering us to our significant others every moment of the day. Then that early-twentieth-century advance in technology, called Web 2.0, accelerated this revolution, by allowing us to interact 24/7 with strangers around the globe (Van Dijck, 2013). In particular, Web 2.0 fostered the development of social networking sites, such as Facebook, that permit us to broadcast every feeling to an expanding array of “friends.”

How has Facebook transformed romantic relationships? Does bullying on-line differ from real-life bullying, and can texting (or sexting) reveal our inner lives? Stay tuned for subsequent chapters when I showcase studies delving into the impact of the on-line revolution on how we relate.

From Living in an Expanding Economy, to Facing Financial Hardship: The Great Recession

I was laid off from my job on April 1st. I’ve used up all my retirement funds and savings. I have never seen anything this bad in this country.

(Sandra K, Cleveland Heights, Ohio)

Welcome to the Great Recession of 2008, which began with the bursting of an 8-trillion-dollar-housing bubble, producing sharp cutbacks in U.S. consumer spending, followed by a loss of 8.4 million jobs within the following two years (Economic Policy Institute [EPI], 2011). The Great Recession has caused us to rethink standard adult markers, from retirement to leaving home for college (see Chapters 10 and 13). It has weakened our historic American faith in constructing a secure middle-class life. As this storm rolled in, it uncovered a festering problem called income inequality—the widening gap between the superrich and everyone else (EPI, 2011; Wilkinson & Pickett, 2009).

As I’m writing this chapter (in early 2015), the economy has improved in the United States and many European nations. Will the economic landscape turn truly sunny as you are reading these pages? Whatever the answer, our economic situation has an important impact on our journey through life. How exactly does being affluent or poor affect how we develop and behave?

This question brings up the role of socioeconomic status (SES)—a term referring to our education and income—on our unfolding lives. As you will see throughout this book, living in poverty makes people vulnerable to a cascade of problems—from being born less healthy, to attending lower-quality schools; from living in more dangerous neighborhoods, to dying at a younger age. Not only do developmentalists rank individuals by socioeconomic status, but they rank nations, too.

Developed-world nations are defined by their wealth, or high median per-person incomes. In these countries, life expectancy is high (Central Intelligence Agency [CIA], 2007). Technology is advanced. People have widespread access to education and medical care. Traditionally, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, as well as every Western European nation, have been classified in this “most affluent” category, although its ranks may be expanding as the economies of nations such as China and India explode.

Developing-world countries stand in sharp contrast to these most affluent world regions. Here people may not have indoor plumbing, clean running water, or access to education. They even may die at a young age from “curable” infectious disease. Babies born in the poorest regions of the globe face a twenty-first-century lifespan that has striking similarities to the one developed-world children faced more than a century ago.

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Residents of developing nations often have shorter, more difficult lives. Still, if you visited these places, you might be struck by a sense of community you might not find in the West. Can we categorize societies according to their basic values, apart from their wealth? Developmentalists who study culture answer yes.

Collectivist cultures place a premium on social harmony. The family generations expect to live together, even as adults. Children are taught to obey their elders, to suppress their feelings, to value being respectful, and to subordinate their needs to the good of the wider group.

Individualistic cultures emphasize independence, competition, and personal success. Children are encouraged to openly express their emotions, to believe in their own personal power, to leave their parents, to stand on their own as self-sufficient and independent adults. Traditionally, Western nations score high on indices of individualism. Nations in Asia, Africa, and South America rank higher on collectivism scales (Hofstede, 1981, 2001; Triandis, 1995).

Imagine how your perspective on life might differ if becoming independent from your parents or honestly sharing your feelings was viewed as an inappropriate way to behave. How would you treat your children, choose a career, or select a spouse? What concerns would you have as you were facing death?

As we scan development around the world, I will regularly distinguish between collectivist and more individualistic societies. I’ll highlight the issues families face when they move from these traditional cultures to the West, and explore research relating to the major U.S. ethnic groups listed in Figure 1.2.

As you read this information, keep in mind that what unites us as people outweighs any distinctions based on culture, ethnicity, or race. Moreover, making diversity generalizations is hazardous because of the diversity that exists within each nation and ethnic group. In the most individualistic country (no surprise, that’s the United States), people have a mix of collectivist and individualistic worldviews. Due to globalization, traditionally collectivistic cultures, such as China and Japan, now have developed more individualistic, Western worldviews.

If the census labels you as “Hispanic American,” you also are probably aware that this label masks more than it reveals. As a third-generation Cuban American, do you really have much in common with a recent immigrant from Mexico or Belize? Given that people arrive in Western nations from hundreds of culturally different countries, does it make sense to lump people into a small number of ethnic groups? Still there is one distinction at birth that hasn't changed since we evolved as human beings. It's called being born female (having two X chromosomes) or being born male (having an X and a Y).

Obviously, our culture’s values shape our development as males and females. Are you living in a society or at a time in history when men are encouraged to be househusbands and women to be corporate CEOs? The transgender liberation movement offers a compelling 21^st century lesson that the “old model” that chromosomes are destiny doesn't fit the facts about human life. Still, throughout the world, females outlive males by at least two years (World Life Expectancy, 2011). And, as you will see throughout this book, our gender pathways are a bit different from birth through old age.

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Are boys more aggressive than girls? When we see male/female differences in caregiving, career interests, and childhood play styles, are these differences mainly due to the environment (societal pressures or the way we are brought up) or to inborn, biological forces? Throughout this book, I’ll examine these questions as we explore the scientific truth of our gender stereotypes and spell out other fascinating facts about sex differences. To introduce this conversation, you might want to take the “Is It Males or Females?” quiz in Table 1.1. Keep a copy. As we travel through the lifespan, you can check the accuracy of your ideas.

Now that you understand that our lifespan is a continuing work in progress that varies across cultures and historical times, let’s get to the science. After you complete this section’s Tying It All Together review quiz below, I will introduce the main theories, research methods, concepts, and scientific terms in this book.

Question 1.1

1. You would have a good chance of dying during childhood.

2. You might be severely beaten by your parents.

3. You would start working right after high school.

4. You would not have an adolescence.

C. There was no real high school in the eighteenth century.

Question 1.2

Rosa is more likely to be physically disabled than Ramona. Rosa is old-old; Ramona is young-old.

Question 1.3

Carlos was more likely to have divorced, probably entered the workforce at an older age, and got married later than his grandfather. Carlos probably had more years of education than his grandpa.

Question 1.4

collectivist; individualistic

Question 1.5

Your answers here will all vary.