The anxiety of aging

Noah Baumbach’s new film, While We’re Young, is his most mature (no pun intended) and funny film to date. Each of his films (The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding, Greenberg and Frances Ha) combine funny dialogue with the painful drama of relationships.

 

While We’re Young opens with a middle-age couple, Josh (Ben Stiller) and Cornelia (Naomi Watts), watching over their friends’ baby, trying to calm it by telling fairy tales they can’t remember. Soon we’re awash in dialogue that pokes satirical fun at people’s anxieties and obsessions with parenting, career and where their lives are heading. Serious subjects, but Baumbach handles them with such a light touch that we find ourselves laughing at these characters before we realize how much we may resemble them.

After two miscarriages, Josh and Cornelia have given up having children, and they feel alienated from many of their friends, who are first-time parents. Josh is a documentary filmmaker who has 100 hours of footage recording an old professor lecturing in his home on the meaning of power, though the old man interrupts the filming with calls to his wife or trips to the bathroom. Cornelia is a producer, and her father is a well-known filmmaker. He and Josh don’t get along.

After a lecture Josh gives at a college in New York City, where they live, he meets a young couple, Jamie (Adam Driver) and Darby (Amanda Seyfried). Jamie gushes about Josh’s film work and about Cornelia’s father. The two couples go out to eat, and Josh and Cornelia are struck by how carefree the young couple is. Josh especially is attracted to Jamie’s in-the-moment approach to life. Soon they’re spending more and more time with this young couple and ignoring their older friends.

Jamie, who is a budding filmmaker, pitches a film idea to Josh and soon lures him into helping him with it. The film appears to be based on a serendipitous meeting with one of Josh’s high school classmates. Josh, meanwhile, can’t procure funding for his film, while Jamie gets support for his.

Later, Josh discovers that the subject of Jamie’s film is actually Darby’s classmate, and the whole thing was staged. When Josh confronts Jamie about it, Jamie admits it was fabricated but says it’s still a good story. The satirical jabs at filmmaking is one more layer to the story.

While We’re Young performs a delicate balance between satire and drama. In today’s world, where irony reigns, it’s difficult to portray the emotions of a relationship or the anxieties of aging, as when Josh has a bike accident, then learns from the doctor that he has arthritis in his knee. Josh and Cornelia’s relationship is the emotional center of the film, and these two actors carry it off well, again combining laugh-out-loud humor with pathos.

Baumbach’s milieu is usually New York, and his characters are frustrated intellectuals whose skill at relationships is limited. Many of us who watch the film may not fit that profile, yet we will connect with the humanity of the characters and the anxieties they face.

While We’re Young is rated R for language.

Reasonable risks are good for children

When I was a boy, I and my friends wandered the neighborhood unsupervised. We walked to school and didn’t worry about strangers. We had a tree house and built forts; we used our imagination to play various games.

Now that seems like a different world from today. I rarely see children playing outside in our neighborhood. And if they do, it’s usually in their own yard.

No, I’m not just being nostalgic. This change in our culture has unhealthy consequences for our children. An article in The Atlantic (April) addresses this reality and calls for change.

In “Hey! Parents, Leave Those Kids Alone,” Hanna Rosin points out that when kids face what to them seem like “really dangerous risks” and conquer them alone, this builds self-confidence and courage.

She quotes Joe Frost, a safety crusader whose influence brought drastic changes to playgrounds in the ’80s but has now become concerned that we’ve gone too far. Adults have come to the mistaken view “that children must somehow be sheltered from all risks of injury,” Frost writes, but “in the real world, life is filled with risks—financial, physical, emotional, social—and reasonable risks are essential for children’s healthy development.”

There has been a drastic change in parents’ supervision of children. Rosin refers to a U.K. study that showed that “in 1971, 80 percent of third-graders walked to school alone. By 1990, that measure had dropped to 9 percent, and now it’s even lower.”

Parents routinely tell their children never to talk to strangers, “even though all available evidence suggests that children have about the same (very slim) chance of being abducted by a stranger as they did a generation ago,” Rosin writes.

In fact, overall, crimes against children have been declining. One exception is family abduction. “The explosion in divorce in the ’70s meant many more custody wars and many more children being smuggled away by one or the other of the parents,” Rosin writes.

Ellen Sandseter, a professor of early-childhood education in Norway, published a paper in 2011 on children’s risky play. She concluded that children “have a sensory need to taste danger and excitement,” at least in their minds.

She identifies six kinds of risky play: (1) exploring heights, (2) handling dangerous tools, (3) being near dangerous elements, (4) rough-and-tumble play, (5) speed and (6) exploring on one’s own.

The last one, she says, is the most important: “When they are left alone and can take full responsibility for their actions, and the consequences of their decisions, it’s a thrilling experience.” And they gain self-confidence.

She writes that “our fear of children being harmed,” mostly in minor ways, “may result in more fearful children and increased levels of psychopathology.”

Today, writes Rosin, “failure to supervise has become, in fact, synonymous with failure to parent.” And this has resulted in a “continuous and ultimately dramatic decline in children’s opportunities to play and explore in their own chosen ways,” according to psychologist Peter Gray.

In an essay called “The Play Deficit,” Gray chronicles the fallout from the loss of the old childhood culture: depression, narcissism and a decline in empathy, “a familiar list of the usual ills attributed to Millennials.”

Rosin concludes: “We can no more create the perfect environment for our children than we can create perfect children. To believe otherwise is a delusion, and a harmful one.”

Fear breeds fear. Raising children without phobias may require letting them play without parental supervision, letting them experience the thrill of reasonable risks.

Are family issues only women's issues?

One of the conversations going on in our society is a debate about work-life balance: how to balance one’s work life with the responsibilities of parenting. However, the conversation is happening almost exclusively among women. Men remain largely excluded from the debate.

In the July/August issue of The Atlantic, Stephen Marche’s essay “The Masculine Mystique” comments on this exclusion of fathers from debates about balancing work and parenting. He notes that “decisions in heterosexual relationships are made by women and men together,” and “when men aren’t part of the discussion about balancing work and life, outdated assumptions about fatherhood are allowed to go unchallenged.”

Marche challenges a myth perpetuated by Sheryl Sandberg’s popular book Lean In: that talent and hard work can take you to the top. He calls this “pure balderdash, for women and men.” Denmark now has more social mobility than the United States. 

The central conflict right now, Marche writes, is “family versus money.” The Pew Research Center released a study in March called “Modern Parenthood” that found about half of all working parents say it is difficult to balance career and family responsibilities, with “no significant gap in attitudes between mothers and fathers.”

Marche discusses women’s rise to economic dominance within the middle class. While “it is an outrage that the male-female wage gap persists,” he writes, “over the past 10 years, in almost every country in the developed world, it has shrunk.” And “of the 15 fastest-growing job categories in the United States, 13 are dominated by women.”

However, the “top leadership positions remain overwhelmingly filled by men.” According to the World Economic Forum’s “Global Gender Gap” report, he writes, “women around the world hold a mere 20 percent of powerful political positions. In the United States, the female board-membership rate is 12 percent—a disgrace.”

But Marche calls this a “hollow patriarchy: the edifice is patriarchal, while the majority of its occupants approach egalitarianism.” Nevertheless, men wield power. He notes a paradox: “Masculinity grows less and less powerful while remaining iconic of power. And therefore men are silent. After all, there is nothing less manly than talking about waning manliness.”

A 2008 Pew study asked cohabiting male-female couples, “Who makes the decisions at home?” In 26 percent of households, the man did; in 43 percent, the woman did.

This hollow patriarchy “keeps women from power and confounds male identity,” Marche writes. He notes parenthetically that “the average working-class guy has the strange experience of belonging to a gender that is railed against for having a lock on power, even as he has none of it.”

While enlisting men in the domestic sphere may be a good idea, Marche writes, “the solution is establishing social supports that allow families to function.” Sharing the load of parenting equally doesn’t matter if the load is unbearable. And it will only become bearable when things like paid parental leave and affordable, quality child care become commonplace. In every state, the average annual cost of day care for two children exceeds the average annual rent, he says.

Marche blames men for failing to make themselves heard in this debate. “Where is the chorus of men asking for paternity leave?”

Meanwhile, the society sees parenting as a women’s issue. The U.S. Census Bureau, when it refers to child care, "considers mothers the 'designated parent,' even when both parents are in the home," Sandberg writes. “When mothers care for their children, it’s ‘parenting,’ but when fathers care for their children, the government deems it a ‘child-care arrangement.’ ”

Marche concludes, “As long as family issues are miscast as women’s issues, they will be dismissed as the pleadings of one interest group among many.”