Asides

Interview on The Death of the Grown-up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization on National Review Online

By J. L. Bastiat ⋅ July 2, 2008 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

I take a backseat to no one in the gloom-and-doom department, but The Death of the Grown-up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization may be going too far:

Other such factoids include: the average video gamester was 18 in 1990; now he’s 33; the National Academy of Sciences has redefined adolescence as the period extending from the onset of puberty, around twelve, to age 30. And, leaving CNN aside, here’s another cartoon statistic: One third of the 56 million Americans who sat down in 2002 to watch SpongeBob SquarePants on Nickelodeon each month were between 18 and 49 years old. (Nickelodeon, incidentally, thought its core demographic group was the six- to eleven-year old set.) These older fans may be chronological grown-ups, but their taste reveals an affinity for kidstuff their forebears didn’t share and almost certainly wouldn’t understand. The point is, aspects of the maturation cycle have stalled, leading to significant changes not only in pop culture, but in ourselves as a people.

Now, since #1 fails to take into account that a 33-year-old today (my age, actually) remembers, and likely played, Space Invaders and Galaga; that is, today’s 33-year-old was a game-playing 15-year-old in 1990 (back then, I was playing Dungeon Master, OMEGA, Dragon Quest, Wolfenstein 3D, and others). An 18-year-old in 1990 was older than most video games; someone significantly over 18 in 1990 had likely reached his teens without playing video games. The idea that video games are children’s entertainment, and not hobbies, assumes too much.

A related factoid: in 1994, a comic shop owner assured me that the core market for comics was 21-to-35 year old male professionals. Nothing I know suggests he was wrong, or that this has changed.

Having said that, there’s an even better reason factoid #3 above does not support the alarmist premise: It may well, and let us hope it does, reflect increasing parental and family sharing of children’s entertainment if a third of the audience for SpongeBob SquarePants was in the (not especially narrow) 18-to-49 demographic. I note further that in my house growing up, any three children watching Bugs Bunny were likely to be joined by at least one parent, and if our whole family watched, the ratio 2:4 would perfectly reflect national averages. And let no one imagine all the jokes in the cartoons are for the kids! This is just snobbery and faux seriousness disguised as genuine concern.

The problem is real. These factoids, however, are not the problem.

The second factoid reflects something we should be concerned about, though….