Yesterday’s NYT piece about grandparents caught my eye, especially this paragraph:

     Vern Bengtson, a sociologist and gerontologist at the University of Southern California, says the growing involvement of grandparents has been just as dramatic a change in American family life as the unraveling of the nuclear family. While sociologists in recent decades have bemoaned the high divorce rate and the percentage of children born to single mothers, Professor Bengtson said, they have for the most part overlooked the emergence of grandparents as an important resource for family support and stability.

    So, maybe we are not as socially independent and autonomous as we thought we were.  Indeed, as a culture, the height of our feelings of independence and autonomy seems now to have been conditioned by historical circumstances: the consolidation of the nuclear family and the concurrent attenuation of the extended family during the economic boom that followed WWII.  As historical conditions have changed – economic conditions in particular – we can better see the reality of our social dependence that has always been there but which we have always tried to ignore.

     I am not going to cite chapter and verse of the Chinese classics to make this point but, if pressed, it would be fairly easy to come up with passages that remind us that we are not independent social actors.  We are, and have always been, embedded in webs of social relationships and ecological interdependencies.  It is our "rugged individualist" ideology that makes us turn away from the reality of our dependence and feel embarrassed or angry when we have to acknowledge our need for others, whether that be parents or grandparents or neighbors or colleagues or whomever.

     Some part of our ideological resistance to the reality of our social dependence comes from our belief in the virtues of youth and our fixation on trying to present ourselves as not old.  Youth, in our culture, represents fun and strength and vitality and possibility.  By implication, age is everything opposite.  But age can also be understanding and experience and discernment.  And if older family members and acquaintances bring that to the collective work that is an individual life: great.

     I think back to when I was twenty and I certainly remember all the fun I had, but I also remember how daunting it was: uncertainty about what sort of career/life I would fall into, where I would live, how I could find a meaningful place in the world.  I did not have a close relationship with my parents (I never lived up to the Confucian ideal), and I avoided asking for their direct help (beyond my college tuition!).  But at critical moments they did help.  And, just as important, other older adults were crucial to whatever success I stumbled upon: the director of my college’s housing office, who gave me a job and responsibility and treated me like a colleague; the elderly neighbor on my parent’s street, who provided me with "wordless teaching" (Chuang Tzu) about patience and practical reason; and one of my senior colleagues here at Williams, who, without ever directly saying so, showed me how to accept the ideas of my co-workers (which I have sometimes rather explosively failed to do!).

     Age is good, and we rely – no, we are dependent – upon not just the material resources but also the wisdom and insight of the older people around us.