“New York Times” journalist Patricia Cohen says she wrote “In Our Prime: The Invention of Middle Age” partly because she has always been interested in history and partly because, no surprise, she is middle-aged. She explains, “There have been books about childhood and books about adolescence, but there has been no book about this stage of development. No one had looked at middle age historically before.”
Cohen, who is 51, concedes that her middle-age experience, though no longer unusual, is not typical. She married at 39 and had a child at 40. “But that is part of the point,” she says. “We no longer walk in lockstep from education to marriage to having kids early, the way other generations did. In my middle age, I was changing diapers and worrying about preschools. Nowadays there is not one middle age but lots of middle ages.”
Cohen’s book traces the development of the concept of middle age--the term was not even used till the end of the nineteenth century--and knocks down some myths often associated with this time of life. No, women in middle age have never really suffered from an “empty nest syndrome.” They’ve almost always been glad when the kids were grown up and gone. And, no, the much discussed “midlife crisis” is more fancy than fact. “Research for over ten years has repeatedly found that a very small number of people have midlife crisis in midlife. Usually these episodes, when they happen, occur at different times.They are more likely to happen in the end of one’s twenties or early thirties. In fact, another life stage may be evolving , since teenagers are taking so long to grow up. That new stage may be an extended young adulthood. “
