by Ada Calhoun
11 Ted Halstead, “A Politics for Generation X,” Atlantic, August 1999.
12 The average child in 1979 scored lower in confidence assessments than 81 percent of kids in the mid-1960s. Jean M. Twenge, Generation Me (New York: Free Press, 2006), 69.
13 James Poniewozik, “All-TIME 100 TV Shows: The Day After,” Time, August 11, 2014.
14 S. J. Kiraly, “Psychological Effects of the Threat of Nuclear War,” Canada Family Physician 32 (January 1986): 170–74.
15 Tom McBride, “The Mindset List of Generation X,” Mindsetlist.com, May 15, 2017.
16 Daniel Burstein, “How Much Millennials, Gen X, and Other Age Groups Trust TV Ads When Making a Purchase Decision,” MarketingSherpa.com, August 22, 2017.
17 “Slinky—It’s a Wonderful Toy—It’s Fun for a Girl and a Boy,” YouTube.com. Retrieved August 16, 2018.
18 Kevin Gilbert, “Goodness Gracious,” from the album Thud, 1995. Posted on YouTube December 1, 2008. Retrieved August 28, 2018.
19 “Nature of President Clinton’s Relationship with Monica Lewinsky,” Section I.A.5, Washington Post online. Retrieved July 7, 2018.
20 MTV Video Music Awards, September 14, 1984.
21 Cynthia Heimel, Sex Tips for Girls (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 123.
22 Tad Friend, “Do-Me Feminism,” Esquire, February 1994.
23 Katherine Rosman, “At the College That Pioneered the Rules on Consent, Some Students Want More,” New York Times, February 24, 2018.
24 “Patience,” Guns N’ Roses, 1989. Retrieved from YouTube May 29, 2018.
25 Erin Blakemore, “Big Bird Narrowly Escaped Death on the Challenger Mission,” History.com, January 26, 2018.
26 “Challenger Disaster Live on CNN,” 1986. Retrieved from YouTube May 29, 2018.
27 Beatings in public schools were explicitly permitted by a 1977 US Supreme Court ruling. Corporal punishment is still legal in many states but has declined since Gen X was in school. Melinda D. Anderson, “Where Teachers Are Still Allowed to Spank Students,” Atlantic, December 15, 2015.
28 Joe Keohane, “The Crime Wave in Our Heads,” Dallas News, March 23, 2010.
29 The Crimes Against Children Research Center has identified this decline as one of the most significant data points in recent years. Lisa Jones and David Finkelhor, “The Decline in Child Sexual Abuse Cases,” Juvenile Justice Bulletin, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, January 2001.
30 Since 1990, sexual abuse has declined by 63 percent and physical abuse by 56 percent. And that is a nationwide trend, appearing in many studies and from many sources. Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. Child Maltreatment Research, Policy, and Practice for the Next Decade: Workshop Summary (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2012).
31 Halstead, “A Politics for Generation X.”
32 Jeff Shesol, “Fun in Politics? As If,” Washington Post, March 2, 1997.
33 Third Millennium (Douglas Kennedy et al.), “Third Millennium Declaration,” in John Williamson et al., eds, The Generational Equity Debate (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
34 Michele Mitchell, “Lead or Leave Has Left,” NPR.org, March 14, 1996.
35 “Billionaires for Bush … or Gore,” DemocracyNow.com, July 31, 2000.
36 George Packer, “Decline and Fall: How American Society Unraveled,” Guardian, June 19, 2013.
37 V.J. Felitti, R.F. Anda, et al., “Relationship of Childhood Abuse and Household Dysfunction to Many of the Leading Causes of Death in Adults: The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study,” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 14 (1998): 245–58.
38 Jane Stevens, email to the author, July 10, 2018. Stevens, founder and publisher of ACEsConnection.com, said she didn’t know of any studies comparing ACEs through generations, but she encouraged me to reach out to the ACEs Connection community of twenty-four thousand members, which I did.
39 Kimberly Konkel, a member of ACEs Connection, email to the author, July 17, 2018.
40 “Suicide Rates for Males and Females by Age in the United States (2016),” National Institute of Mental Health website. Data Courtesy of CDC.
41 “Leading Causes of Death (LCOD) by Age Group, All Females—United States, 2015,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
42 Felitti, Anda, et al., “Relationship of Childhood Abuse and Household Dysfunction to Many of the Leading Causes of Death in Adults.”
43 On women and high ACE scores see, for example: Donna Jackson Nakazawa, Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology, and How You Can Heal (New York: Atria Books, 2015). You can check your own ACE score at AcesTooHigh.com.
44 William Mahedy and Janet Bernardi, A Generation Alone (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1994), 32.
45 “Selling to Gen X Parents” slide in “Generation X” PowerPoint, Scouting.com. Retrieved July 12, 2018.
46 “Fred Rogers: Look for the Helpers.” Retrieved from YouTube, February 12, 2019.
47 “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood: 1969 Senate Hearing.” Retrieved from YouTube, September 19, 2018.
48 “Fred Rogers Talks About Tragic Events in the News.” Retrieved from YouTube, July 7, 2018.
49 David Sedaris has written that in middle age everyone goes crazy over one of two things: our diet or our dogs. David Sedaris, “Leviathan,” New Yorker, January 5, 2015.
50 Brené Brown says women do one of three things: move away from the shame (shrinking), move toward the shame (overfunctioning), or move against the shame (try to make the other person feel shame). Brené Brown, “Listening to Shame,” TED2012, Ted.com, minute 15.
51 Bryn Chafin, LMSW, interview with the author, June 12, 2018.
2: The Doldrums
1 Lauren E. Corona et al., “Use of Other Treatments Before Hysterectomy for Benign Conditions in a Statewide Hospital Collaborative,” American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 212, no. 3 (March 2015): 304e1–304e7.
2 Boomers had an average of eleven sexual partners. J. M. Twenge, R. A. Sherman, and B. E. Wells, “Changes in American Adults’ Sexual Behavior and Attitudes, 1972–2012,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 44, no. 8 (November 2015): 2273–85.
3: The Caregiving Rack
1 Dorothy A. Miller, “The ‘Sandwich’ Generation: Adult Children of the Aging,” Social Work 26, no. 5 (September 1981), pp. 419–23.
2 A 2018 Pew study found that 12 percent of US parents are also caring for an adult. Gretchen Livingston, “More Than One-in-Ten U.S. Parents Are Also Caring for an Adult,” Pew Research Center, November 29, 2018.
3 Jennifer Senior, All Joy and No Fun (New York: HarperCollins, 2014), 9.
4 Claire Cain Miller, “The Relentlessness of Modern Parenting,” New York Times, December 25, 2018.
5 More fun stats: Today, 70 percent of mothers with children under the age of eighteen are in the workforce, with both parents employed full-time in close to half of households with a mother and a father. Twenty-four percent are raising children alone. Gretchen Livingston, “7 Facts About U.S. Moms,” Pew Research Center, May 10, 2018.
6 Lyman Stone, “One Way to Boost Fertility: Babysit Other People’s Kids,” Institute for Family Studies, January 24, 2018.
7 Katrina Leupp, “Depression, Work and Family Roles, and the Gendered Life Course,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior, October 20, 2017. This study makes use of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth.
8 M. Lino, K. Kuczynski, N. Rodriguez, and T. Schap, Expenditures on Children by Families, 2015. Miscellaneous Publication no. 1528-2015, US Department of Agriculture, Center for Nutritional Policy and Promotion, 2017.
9 Melissa Korn, “Schools Post Record-Low Acceptance Rates,” Wall Street Journal, March 30–31, 2019.
10 Lydia Saad, “Children a Key Factor in Women’s Desire to Work Outside the Home,” Gallup.com, October 7, 2015.
11 Barkley and FutureCast, Millennials as New Parents: The Rise of a New American Pragmatism, September 2013.
12 Gr
etchen Livingston, “More Than a Million Millennials Are Becoming Moms Each Year,” Pew Research Center, May 4, 2018.
13 Eli J. Finkel, The All-or-Nothing Marriage (New York: Dutton, 2017), 137–38.
14 This is, for example, how Ethan Hawke’s character describes his marriage in Before Sunset (2004).
15 Stephanie Pappas, “Why Supermoms Should Chill,” Live Science, August 20, 2011.
16 Anna Pallai, interview with the author, March 14, 2017.
17 John Mulaney, The Comeback Kid, Netflix, 2015. Text is here: scrapsfromtheloft.com.
18 Richard Schlesinger, “Sesame Street … for Adults Only?” CBSNews.com, January 17, 2008.
19 This cartoon explaining the mental load went viral: “You Should Have Asked,” emmaclit.com, May 20, 2017.
20 American Time Use Survey Summary—2017 Results, Bureau of Labor Statistics, June 28, 2018.
21 Kim Parker and Gretchen Livingston, “7 Facts About American Dads,” Pew Research Center, June 13, 2018.
22 “Raising Kids and Running a Household: How Working Partners Share the Load,” Pew Research Center, November 11, 2015.
23 Claire Cain Miller, “Men Do More at Home, but Not as Much as They Think,” New York Times, November 12, 2015.
24 Marta Murray-Close and Misty L. Heggeness, “Manning Up and Womaning Down: How Husbands and Wives Report Their Earnings When She Earns More,” Social, Economic, and Housing Statistics Division, US Census Bureau, June 6, 2018.
25 Richard V. Reeves and Isabel V. Sawhill, “Men’s Lib!” New York Times, November 14, 2015.
26 “I Don’t Want to Be the Breadwinner in My Marriage Anymore!” Dear Sugars, NPR, December 3, 2016.
27 Caregiving in the U.S. 2015, National Alliance for Caregiving and the AARP Public Policy Institute, June 2015. The report also found that 62 percent of what are called higher-hour caregivers (meaning more than twenty hours a week) are women. Fifty-nine percent of these caregivers felt they had “no choice in taking on their caregiving role.”
28 “Gen X Women: Flirting with Forty,” J. Walter Thompson Intelligence, Slideshare.net, May 19, 2010. Retrieved August 5, 2018.
29 Donald Redfoot, Lynn Feinberg, and Ari Houser, “The Aging of the Baby Boom and the Growing Care Gap: A Look at Future Declines in the Availability of Family Caregivers,” Insight on the Issues 85 (August 2013), AARP Public Policy Institute. Also worth noting: some 28 percent of caregivers also have a child under the age of eighteen living in their household. And 60 percent are employed. The average duration of caregiving is four years, though 24 percent of caregivers wind up in the role for five years or more. Caregiving in the U.S. 2015, National Alliance for Caregiving and the AARP Public Policy Institute, June 2015.
30 “Caregiving Costs to Working Caregivers,” MetLife Research, June 2011.
31 Caregiving in the U.S. 2015, National Alliance for Caregiving and the AARP Public Policy Institute, June 2015.
32 Chuck Rainville, Laura Skufca, and Laura Mehegan, “Family Caregiving and Out-of-Pocket Costs: 2016 Report,” AARP Research.
33 Amy Goyer, interview with the author, August 8, 2017.
34 Brendan Finn, Millennials: The Emerging Generation of Family Caregivers, AARP Public Policy Institute, May 2018.
35 “FMLA Is Working,” Department of Labor, 2013 factsheet.
36 Katy Hall and Chris Spurlock, “Paid Parental Leave: U.S. vs. the World,” HuffingtonPost.com, February 4, 2013.
37 “Stress in America: Uncertainty About Health Care,” American Psychological Association, January 24, 2018.
38 Emily Cooke, “In the Middle Class, and Barely Getting By,” New York Times, July 9, 2018.
39 Michael Shermer, “The Number of Americans with No Religious Affiliation Is Rising,” Scientific American, April 1, 2018.
40 Emma Green, “It’s Hard to Go to Church,” Atlantic, August 23, 2016.
41 Tom Beaudoin, Virtual Faith (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998), 25.
42 Chris Mooney, “More and More Americans Think Astrology Is Science,” Mother Jones, February 11, 2014. According to General Social Survey data compiled by the National Science Foundation, around 40 percent of Generation X sees astrology as “very” or “sort of” scientific.
43 Text to the author from Mira Ptacin, May 27, 2018.
44 According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, in the United States the percentage of need being met is less than a third. Designated Health Professional Shortage Areas Statistics, Bureau of Health Workforce, Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), US Department of Health and Human Services, as of December 31, 2017. Retrieved from KFF.org August 9, 2018.
45 Min Jin Lee also discusses this in the introduction to the new reissue of her novel Free Food for Millionaires (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2018).
4: Job Instability
1 The truck should clearly be called Wheels of Cheese.
2 Nikki Graf, Anna Brown, and Eileen Patten, “The Narrowing, but Persistent, Gender Gap in Pay,” Pew Research Center, April 9, 2018.
3 Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that women’s median weekly earnings are highest for women thirty-five to forty-four and slightly less for women forty-five to fifty-four. Men’s earnings, not surprisingly, are higher than women’s in all age groups, including these Gen X–heavy cohorts, but it’s notable that earnings are higher for men forty-five to fifty-four than for men thirty-five to forty-four; there’s no plateau for men. Women’s and Men’s Earnings by Age in 2016, BLS.gov, August 25, 2017.
4 Claudia Goldin, “How to Win the Battle of the Sexes over Pay (Hint: It Isn’t Simple),” New York Times, November 10, 2017.
5 Stephen J. Rose and Heidi Hartmann, Still a Man’s Labor Market: The Slowly Narrowing Gender Wage Gap, Institute for Women’s Policy Research, November 26, 2018.
6 Claire Cain Miller, “When Wives Earn More Than Their Husbands, Neither Partner Likes to Admit It,” New York Times, July 17, 2018.
7 “America’s Highest Paying Jobs See Women Underrepresented,” LinkedIn.com, March 29, 2017.
8 The State of the Gender Pay Gap 2018, PayScale.com, 2018.
9 Faith Guvenen, Greg Kaplan, Jae Song, and Justin Weidner, “Lifetime Incomes in the United States over Six Decades,” NBER working paper no. 23371, April 2017.
10 Julia Pimsleur, CEO of the children’s language-learning company Little Pim, founded the Double-Digit Academy in 2013. Through lectures, workshops, and her book, she seeks to help female entrepreneurs raise money for their companies and get to a million dollars in revenues. As of research from 2011 to 2014, only 2 percent of women-owned firms reach a million in revenues. Pimsleur is trying to get the proportion of venture capital going to women to at least 10 percent. Elaine Pofeldt, “How Women Can Build Million-Dollar Businesses,” Money.com, September 30, 2015.
11 “List: Women CEOs of the S&P 500,” Catalyst.org, January 24, 2019.
12 Justin Wolfers, “Fewer Women Run Big Companies Than Men Named John,” New York Times, March 2, 2015.
13 Nationally 37 percent: Lydia Dishman, “The Overlooked Benefit Gen X Workers Need,” Fast Company, May 7, 2018. Globally 51 percent: The Global Leadership Forecast 2018. Stephanie Neal and Richard Wellins, “Generation X—Not Millennials—Is Changing the Nature of Work,” CNBC.com, April 11, 2018.
14 Andrew Balls, “The Flattening of Corporate Management,” in “The Flattening of the Firm: Evidence from Panel Data on the Changing Nature of Corporate Hierarchies,” National Bureau of Economic Research working paper no. 9633. Retrieved from NBER.org June 20, 2018.
15 Lauren Sherman, “Hudson’s Bay Company Announces 2,000 Job Cuts, Including Senior Management,” BusinessofFashion.com, June 8, 2017.
16 Gen X leaders had an average of only 1.2 promotions in the past five years, compared with 1.6 for Millennials and 1.4 for Boomers. Global Leadership Forecast 2018. Neal and Wellins, “Generation X—Not Millennials—Is Changing the Nature of Work.”
17 “MetLife’s 17th Annual
U.S. Employee Benefit Trends Study: Thriving in the New Work-Life World,” March 2019, 20.
18 Stella Fayer, Alan Lacey, and Audrey Watson, STEM Occupations: Past, Present, and Future, BLS.gov, January 2017.
19 Alexis Krivkovich et al., “Women in the Workplace 2018,” McKinsey.com, October 2018.
20 Liana Christin Landivar, “Disparities in STEM Employment by Sex, Race, and Hispanic Origin,” Census.gov, September 2013.
21 Eileen Appelbaum, email to the author, June 10, 2018.
22 Eileen Appelbaum, What’s Behind the Increase in Inequality? Center for Economic and Policy Research, September 2017.
23 Women and Work in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, World Economic Forum, 2016. Retrieved from reports.weforum.org November 3, 2018.
24 Lauren Stiller Rikleen, “Older Women Are Being Forced Out of the Workforce,” Harvard Business Review, March 10, 2016.
25 Teresa Ghilarducci, “Why Women over 50 Can’t Find Jobs,” PBS NewsHour, January 4, 2016.
26 Dionne Searcey, “For Women in Midlife, Career Gains Slip Away,” New York Times, June 23, 2014.
27 Natalie Kitroeff, “Unemployment Rate Hits 3.9%, a Rare Low, as Job Market Becomes More Competitive,” New York Times, May 4, 2018.
28 Julia Angwin, Noam Scheiber, and Ariana Tobin, “Facebook Job Ads Raise Concerns About Age Discrimination,” New York Times, December 20, 2017. In March 2019, Facebook announced that it would stop letting employment advertisers target specific age groups. Noam Scheiber and Mike Isaac, “Facebook Halts Ad Targeting Cited in Bias Complaints,” New York Times, March 19, 2019.
29 Steve Cavendish, “The Fight to Be a Middle-Aged Female News Anchor,” New York Times, March 11, 2019.
30 William Safire, “On Language: Downsized,” New York Times, May 26, 1996.
31 Margot Hornblower, “Great Xpectations of So-Called Slackers,” Time, June 9, 1997.
32 “Generation X: Overlooked and Hugely Important,” Center for Work-Life Policy press release for: The X Factor: Tapping into the Strengths of the 33-to-46-Year-Old Generation, Center for Work-Life Policy, September 16, 2011.
