Abstract
In Blurring the Boundaries: The Declining Significance of Age, Jack Levin (2013) argues that the lines of age connected to major life events (e.g., first sexual encounter, marriage, retirement) experienced significant change during the last half century. He looks to tie these (and other) changes “ . . . back to the turbulent 1960s” (p. 2).
The 1960s saw the coming of age of the first generation of baby boomers. “Americans born immediately after World War II through 1957” (p. 10) possessed “ . . . a much more general relaxation of rules (p. 10) and a “ . . . present time orientation” (p. 11). Some of these changes are positive; for example, reducing “rules traditionally involved in the maintenance of the bias and bigotry against vulnerable groups” (p. 21). Other changes are more problematic; for example, increasing “noise pollution” (p. 11), “grade inflation” (p. 12), “cheating” (p. 16), and the “ . . . most significant development . . . a growing lack of ethics” (p. 20).
A loosening of gender roles occurs during this time, leading women to pursue higher education and careers. Female college graduates began to outnumber male college graduates in 1985 (p. 30). Another change includes the elevation of “A Cult of Youth” that contributes to ageism, translating into older displaced workers experiencing “ . . . a significant decline in salaries when they find another job” (p. 45).
Perhaps most significant to Levin is the way in which the spread of the 1960s Baby Boom culture contributed to a transformation of “time norms” (p. 52). This generation delayed age of first marriage, age of first childbirth, and, for many, high school and college completion and retirement. More workers and citizens experience an elongated adolescence or “ . . . a new stage of life called emerging adulthood” (p. 65).
In a society wherein capitalists look to exploit every fad, Levin argues that businesses encourage boomers “ . . . to favor consumerism as a means for self-expression and personal fulfillment” (p. 75). Competition for boomer consumers gave rise to seven-day week/24 hour-a-day retail business model. It also resulted in more profanity and sex in the media, the growth of cheating as a norm, grade inflation, and professors who perform rather than teach. “Ironically, the expressive and laissez-faire predilections of the youthful baby boomers later on came to be encouraged and supported by the very instrumental economic concerns they had despised” (p. 78).
Levin’s most pressing issue is the way in which the cultural transformations born of the aging boomer generation have transformed the experience of childhood. As time norms have been relaxed for other ages, so to have they been relaxed for children and youth. According to Levin, as gender roles changed, and first marriage and first childbirth delayed; we see an increase in middle school sex, eating disorders, and bullying at younger ages. This is correlated with the evaporation of childhood discipline as evidenced by a decline in the support for spanking (p. 89) and “ . . . the onset of institutionalized concern for student rights” (p. 90) which “ . . . undermine the moral authority at school” (p. 91). A loosening of time norms also resulted in an increasing number of juveniles being tried and incarcerated as adults (p. 94).
In his review of other “Factors Contributing to the Erosion of Childhood” (p. 98), Levin points to puberty starting earlier, the “ . . . sexualization of children . . . ” for commercial gain (p. 99), and the use of sex and violence among the mass media to enhance box office sales (p. 102). When an increasingly sexualized and violent media is paired with an increasingly unsupervised youth, should we be surprised when “ . . . the teen crime rate as well as the teen pregnancy rate peak during the afternoon” (p. 105)?
When I read this book I was reminded of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock (1970) with its grandiose projections of a transforming world only loosely tied to empirical data and William Julius Wilson’s well-research work the Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions (1978). Like Toffler’s Future Shock, Levin’s Blurring the Boundaries is a grandiose attempt to dissect macro social transformation in a manner that predicts the future. Like Wilson’s Declining Significance of Race, Levin works to weave in substantial empirical data to support his thesis.
Levin thesis that an aging baby boom cohort and its culture transformed social norms and social structure is a grandiose claim. It is a hypothesis that he supports with statistics from a myriad of U.S. agencies and a wide range of social scientific studies. But the statistics are at times less firmly connected to pieces of his argument than we see in the work of Wilson. And though Levin works to support his work with empirical data, at times it tends toward the hyperbole Toffler consistently serves up in Future Shock.
Lack of strong empirical support and tendencies toward hyperbole is especially evident in what may be Levin’s most critical chapters, that is, those dealing with the erosion of childhood. In asserting that “ . . . oral sex may fast becoming the new ‘midnight kiss’” (p. 84), we are provided statistics from a single 2005 study. Here data for a single time period serves as evidence of a “fast becoming” trend. Similar one-shot data point to eyeliner use by girls under 12, and dieting by girls of age 9 and 13 (p. 86) designate trends. Levin states that teen pregnancy numbers “exploded” (a hyperbolic term) “over the decades” (p. 85) and signify growing teen sexual activity (when actually teen pregnancy rates are an indirect measure at best of teen sexual activity). And the numbers that could be shared to support trends in teen pregnancy, that is, the longitudinal data, are sadly missing.
Similarly, no longitudinal data is presented to support the thesis that bullying is moving toward a younger and younger age (p. 87). And no evidence is offered to support the statement that “parental discipline has declined . . . ” (p. 90) which is put forward as evidence that the baby boomer’s laissez-faire attitude toward authority translates into a parenting style, which contributes to an increase in cheating, sexual activity, incivility, vulgarity, and crime.
I leave the book thinking of it as work in progress. A noted social scientist put forth an ambitious theory about the causes of significant social transformations in modern U.S. society. He assembled some empirical support for his thesis but more is needed to convince me, and perhaps other readers, that his thesis is correct.
The work may be useful to classes studying social change, social movements, and the 1960s. It may also be used for research exercises in methods classes wherein students could be asked to critique the work for its use of data to support a thesis. It could also be used for a secondary data exercise wherein students could be asked to gather additional empirical support for the book’s thesis.
I have one final comment. It is important to note a problem with the baby boom birth data provided on page 10. In his discussion of the number of births during the baby boom, we are told that there were 27,000 births in 1946; 23,000 in 1956; and 17,000 births in 1965. Obviously these numbers are incorrect as they depict a misting rather than a boom of births. I contacted the author about these numbers, asking whether they represented a rate rather than a yearly total. He assured me they would be corrected before the next edition.