For his part, Mroczek also buys the theory that as we age we get happier largely because our brains learn how to regulate our emotions better. “Frankly, I think we just rewire our brains as we get older,” he says. “You learn to handle things. It’s related to time but it’s unconscious. Your brain decides, on some level, to look at the world differently.”
There’s no question that what we do—how we live—alters our brains. Although for years it was taken as gospel that the brain was largely fixed by adulthood, that gospel has been dispelled. Ever since a Canadian researcher took his adult lab rats home to run around in his house and later found that those rats were considerably smarter than the rats left behind in their boring cages, neuroscience has systematically upended the idea that the adult brain cannot change its structure or improve how it works. It can and does. What we do changes the architecture of our brains. It’s called
neuroplasticity
and it’s the underpinning of everything we now know about the brain.
Both animal and human brains are plastic, mutable. Experiments with rats, dogs, and monkeys have found that those in “enriched and stimulating environments” (for a rat that means toys and rat pals in their cages) wind up with bigger brains, more connections, and are, on every test imaginable, much smarter than those living lonely, mundane lives.
In humans, too, there’s now ample evidence that the adult brain reorganizes and continues to develop. Our brains have evolved to be as nimble as possible. Since brains do not necessarily know what type of environment they’ll find themselves in as they go along, they have to be able to adapt to survive. Now-famous studies of London taxi drivers and expert violin players found that areas in their brains devoted to spatial reasoning (taxi drivers) or fingering strings (violin players) grew larger as the drivers drove through London streets or the musicians played. We’ll come back to this idea, and the larger topic of neuroplasticity, in part 2.
Whose Empty Nest?
In some ways, it’s easy to see how we got the picture of middle age wrong for so long. As I’ve mentioned, we had never encountered this particular beast before. In fact, that other great myth of middle age—the empty nest syndrome—is also now considered to be largely fiction.
Every year, Karen L. Fingerman, forty-one, a psychologist also at Purdue University, starts her lectures by asking incoming fresh-men how they think their parents are doing now that their children are in college. Every year, the students say they must be “devastated” by their absence.
But nothing could be further from the truth. When science actually looked at how parents were doing when their kids left, researchers found that they were doing just fine.
Again, I admit that I fell for this one, too. Not long ago, I went to a meeting of a book club I’ve been a member of for years. Most of the women in the group had kids who were a few years older than mine and had recently left for college. I expected to find the group in a deep funk. But instead, the women were complaining about how
often
the kids were calling them. “I had to tell my daughter to stop calling me at work, that I have work to do,” one woman said. They missed their kids and loved seeing them when they were home, but because the kids were, as one mother said, “doing what they’re supposed to be doing,” the parents felt good, not bad. They were proud—and busy themselves. “Empty nest syndrome? Ha,” said one. “I miss them, sure. But I have a
lot
to do.”
In fact, in her own research, this is exactly what Fingerman, along with others looking into this area, has discovered. Studying mothers and daughters, Fingerman found that both seem to do better once they are under different roofs, even if one is a dormitory roof. They’re happy in what they’re doing and, with all that “teenage tension gone out of the relationship,” much happier with each other, too. “Some girls in their early twenties actually wax poetic about the good relationship they have with their parents,” Fingerman says.
Certainly, there can be a sense of wistfulness as we find our houses without the high energy and verve of growing teenagers, but the empty nest
syndrome
was simply made up because popular culture somehow needed, as Fingerman says, a “female counterpart” to the midlife crisis, which was geared mostly toward men.
But no one has ever been able to find a true empty nest syndrome in a scientific way. Instead, even among women who devote all their time to raising their kids, studies find mostly a “great deal of satisfaction” when the kids become independent. “They feel they have done a good job and they suddenly have the freedom to do new things. They feel great,” Fingerman says.
There is a tendency in psychology to pigeonhole all manner of life events. But why some events are singled out and not others is a mystery. When I spoke with Fingerman, she had just dropped off her child at kindergarten for the first time and wondered why there wasn’t a syndrome name for that: The “First Kid in Kindergarten Syndrome.” Or, having overheard her colleagues fret about their newly licensed sixteen-year-olds driving in the winter, she wondered, “Why don’t we have a label for that, the ‘Parents of Kids Driving in the Snow Syndrome’?”
In fact, at midlife volatility diminishes because more is settled. When she looks at her own students in their twenties, Fingerman says, she sees considerably more depression and upheaval than she sees among her own age group.
“They are more emotional and things are just bigger in their lives,” she says. “It’s natural. Things can go badly for me, maybe I don’t get a grant funded, but, look, I have tenure, I still have a job. For these kids there are so many unknowns and bad things can seem so big. As we get older, I really do believe we get better at emotional regulation. I can learn to avoid high-stress situations. We just get better at that.”
There are other benefits of the empty nest that I had not even thought about myself, but, on reflection, are true, too. Victoria Bedford, a psychologist at the University of Indianapolis, has found that as children leave home, parents often find a bright spot none ever expected: They reconnect with their siblings. It’s as if, after living hectic lives, people look up and say, “Hey, I know I have a brother out there somewhere.”
As Bedford says: “This is true with men and women. Sibling relationships are always important but when the kids are gone you are more settled and have time to connect with your sibling. And we’ve found that people actually do.”
As I thought of this, I realized that that, too, had happened in my own life. I had lived for many years in New York, far away from where I grew up in California, and my older brother was in Phoenix. We’d see each other once a year, but he was busy as a teacher and a coach and I was busy with newspapering. Then, as often happens, when our father was dying in California, my brother and I spent days and nights at the hospital, then cleaning out and selling a house. I was reminded that my brother is one of the nicest and funniest people I know and realized how much I missed him. Since then, we e-mail all the time, he calls my daughters, and we try to visit each other more often. Since I last knew my brother best when we fought in the backseat of the car on family trips, this grown-up sibling relationship has been one of the nicest things that has happened in my middle-aged life.
Bedford, at sixty-one, reports that she has no empty nest doldrums and doesn’t know anyone else her age who has them, either. One of her daughters, she says, was a “terrible teenager” and now they have a “wonderful relationship. Your children become more like peers and it is great,” she says. “There is no question that I am happier now in midlife. And I have not seen anyone upset about an empty nest. Not in the least.”
So why did earlier depressive ideas persist for so long? Were theories of midlife crises, with their red Porsches and pretty young things, nothing more than, as one researcher insisted, a “collective fantasy by white men
for
white men”?
Carol Ryff, who leads the MacArthur Foundation’s middle-age survey, says that the midlife crisis probably applied to only a narrow group of men, during a narrow span of time—those who had returned from World War II, rushed into family, house, and kids, and then, having caught the 7:05 train for twenty years, woke up and wondered what they were doing.
“Maybe all this was true for a very small group,” Ryff told me. “These are men whose lives were disrupted. They went off to fight the war that interrupted their careers and their pursuits, and then they came back and jumped quickly into things. They felt they had to catch up with marriages and jobs. And then, when they reached fifty, they looked up and said, ‘Hey, is this the life I really wanted?’ ”
In fact, it’s surprising how flimsy the evidence—scientific, biological, or empirical—is for these strong beliefs that have crept into our life narratives. The first reference I could find to the empty nest syndrome was from a small pilot study published in June 1966 in
The American Journal of Psychiatry
. The study, called “The Empty Nest: Psychological Aspects of Conflict Between Depressed Women and Their Grown Children,” was based on sixteen women whose children had left home and who were depressed. And the study’s authors decided there was at least a “temporal relationship” between the two.
“In our depressed patients, it appeared that cessation of child rearing influenced the content of symptoms presented and that in cases of women who had ended child-rearing functions, there was almost always some degree of conflict between them and their adult children.
“Based on these observations, we undertook to study the empty nest syndrome, defined as the temporal association of clinical depression with the cessation of child rearing,” the authors wrote.
These patients, however, were not only a tiny group but were also hardly representative. For one thing, they were all sufficiently depressed to be hospitalized in the Massachusetts Mental Health Center. Those with the most severe symptoms, as the researchers conceded, were all “foreign born or first generation Americans who clung to the traditions of their countries of origins and had achieved a median of only nine years in school. They had married while still teenagers and had started their families almost immediately and were socially very withdrawn having few or no friends or interests outside the home.”
From that skewed sample, which the authors themselves said provided proof of nothing, was hatched this empty nest idea that has refused to die—for decades. The first mention of it that I could find in popular literature appeared in a 1972 article in
Ladies’ Home Journal
in an interview with Pat Nixon in the White House, who was shown modeling spring fashions. The profile said that Pat “likes to take a positive approach,” and that “Even the empty nest syndrome hasn’t seemed to hit her. She seems genuinely delighted by both of her daughters’ marriages.” Pat Nixon, in her own way, was simply voicing what science is now confirming. In middle age, if we’re lucky to be healthy and alert, we start to take a decidedly positive approach—just like Pat.
Youth Culture’s Taint
But old myths die hard and our current culture is not helping, either. Richard A. Shweder of the University of Chicago, in trying to explain why we got such a dour view of our path through life, puts considerable blame on our Western society, which continues to stress “physical and mental decline.”
In a wonderful book of essays called
Welcome to Middle Age! (And Other Cultural Fictions)
he points out that in other cultures middle adulthood is not defined by “back pains,” but is instead marked by increased status as people gain “family position and social responsibilities.” In many Hindu households, Shweder says, referring in part to his own work and to that of Usha Menon of Drexel University, there is not even a concept of midlife and no word for it. Instead, they have the word
prauda,
which means “mature adulthood, which begins whenever a married woman takes over the management of the extended household and ends whenever she relinquishes control and social responsibility to others.”
One of the most interesting of Shweder’s essayists, Margaret Gullette, a resident scholar at Brandeis University, believes that in our culture we remain victims of the “ideology of decline” that is “raining over us.”
We have allowed ourselves to be “aged by culture,” taught to think of our lives in simply an “age graded” way, based on the misguided sense that “the body fails at midlife and this bodily failure matters more than anything else,” while the positive aspects of aging, “maturity, competence, compassion, etc.,” are not “coded as age associated.”
As she sees it, such views persist primarily because they serve well those who want to keep us buying “wrinkle creams.”
“Midlife decline ideology,” she writes, works to “enclose us in self doubt, embarrassment, shame, humiliation, despair. It fosters narcissism. By learning to concentrate on an ‘aging’ body, the twentieth century midlife subject learns how isolated and helpless he or she is.”
And while this might sound a bit harsh, it makes perfect sense to many of the people I spoke with who are going through middle age in the twenty-first century.
Susan Nowlin of Bloomington, Indiana, for instance, says that as she reached middle age it seemed as if the world had a preset agenda for her: When she turned sixty, she thought she should retire as a teacher because that was what the “culture was pushing.” But then rules were changed in her district and she could not retire—and it was the best thing that could have happened to her.
At sixty-one, she is still teaching English to 150 middle school students in Bloomington. She walks thirty-five minutes a day, recently bought a DVD so she could learn weight lifting, plays bridge, and is planning on writing a novel. And when she is not doing any of those activities, she goes out to dinner and a movie with her husband, sixty-three, an industrial psychologist, and they, she says, “laugh a lot and have a ball.”