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Is life getting better? In certain respects, the answer is an obvious and unambiguous “Yes.” On average, we lead longer, healthier lives. Most Americans are wealthier and better educated than their parents.
But progress is not so clear cut in other areas.
Take friendship. Standards of intimacy and mutuality have risen, and due to social media, adults stay in regular touch with many more friends than in the past.
But a highly mobile, work and family-centered society undercuts the essence of friendship: Frequent face-to-face conversations and regular opportunities for shared experiences.
Another example involves marriage. Expectations for intimacy, communication, and sharing have never been higher. Even though men continue to lag behind women in such areas as childcare, housework, emotional work, or organizing the family’ social life emotional work and maintaining contact with relatives, husbands are far more involved in day-to-day household functioning than was true a generation ago.
But because of the demands of work, many couples are ships passing in the night, spending less time interacting with each other or with shared friends than their 1950s counterparts. And despite the demands for gender equity in apportioning family roles and responsibilities, couples tend to gravitate toward a more traditional (and uneven) division of labor after children are born.
Despite high rates of divorce, single parenthood, and out-of wedlock births, by most measures children are doing better than ever. Adolescents are less likely than their parents to smoke, take drugs, or become pregnant. Juvenile crime rates have fallen, school achievement has improved, and college attendance has climbed substantially.
The explanation is straightforward. Today's parents are better educated than their predecessors. Fathers are more nurturing. Mothers, in general, are happier and more fulfilled. In addition, lower birthrates mean that parents can devote more resources to the children that they have.
Yet in several important respects, the young are surely worse off. Children have less access to free spaces outside the home. They have fewer opportunities for free play and fewer ways to demonstrate their growing maturity and competence. Even in the area of children's health, where the gains are most obvious, more children now suffer from chronic illnesses, congenital health problems, and physical and psychological disabilities than in the past.
Then there is another facet of childrearing. Today’s parents are more likely to befriend their children and to invest more time and material resources than ever in various forms of enrichment and entertainment. Rather than expecting their children to love them and conform to their wishes, there is a tendency for parents to seek their children’s love and feel an obligation to entertain them and ensure they are not bored or unhappy.
But at the same time many parents fail to give their children much autonomy. Instead, they live through their children and treat them as projects to be perfected, while too often regarding other people’s children as problems or competitors.
Rather than thinking about historical change in terms of progress or decline, it is better to focus on trade-offs. Worthwhile gains scarcely ever occur without losses. Pluses are almost always accompanied by minuses.
By focusing on trade-offs we can avoid what Stephanie Coontz has rightly called the “nostalgia trap”: the belief that life is going to hell in a handbasket and that the past was preferable to the present.
