Everything your mother didn't have time to tell you because she was too busy struggling!
Thirty is the new twenty.
Forty is the new thirty.
Oh girl, don’t worry! Women are having kids well into their forties nowadays; you’ve got plenty of time!
They intend to be helpful and supportive, upbeat and modern–but, although their intentions are good and their hearts are (probably) in the right place, those who are advising today’s twenty-somethings by offering the above italicized platitudes are actually doing more harm than good, according to Dr. Meg Jay.
Dr. Jay earned her doctorate in clinical psychology and gender studies from the University of California, Berkeley. It was her work counseling and teaching twenty-somethings–as a clinical professor at the University of Virginia, and in her private practice in Charlottesville, Virginia–that led her to write “The Defining Decade: Why your twenties matter–and how to make the most of them now.”
According to Dr. Jay, twentysomethings are more confused than ever, and their confusion is partly due to receiving well-intentioned, but ill-informed and inaccurate advice. Twentysomethings are also confused because they fail to realized just how important their twenties actually are.
In “The Defining Decade,” Dr. Jay lays out the facts.
Two-thirds of lifetime wage growth happens within the first decade of your career. Your salary will most likely reach its peak by the time you hit 40–wage increases after that point are mainly cost of living increases. Thus, you need to have a career established by 30 so that you can rise within the ranks and gain salary increases by 40. Yet, Dr. Jay sees many twentysomethings choosing the low-paying, low responsibility, dead-end, job that gives them ‘freedom,’ over the position that may be more demanding and challenging in the short-term, but in the long-term provides more room for career advancement.
Look at it this way: Say a woman wants to be able to save enough money to supplement her family income in her thirties for a few years while she stays home with small children. In order to accumulate this fund, the women will need to have been saving money in her twenties. If, instead of saving, she has been working to fund back-packing trips through Europe, how will she be able to comfortable stay home with kids when her thirties arrive? Yeah, a husband who earns enough money may make her dreams a reality, but what if he did the same thing with his twenties as she did with hers? You can see that by not taking the prime working years of their twenties seriously, both men and women are closing off their options for the future in a way that they may not yet realize.
Your twenties are the time to take the task of meeting new people seriously, says Dr. Jay.
Familiarity breeds similarity. The more time we spend with someone, the more likely we are to share a common set of experiences and to share confidences; in other words, we become like the people we are around all of the time. We develop what are called strong ties with people with whom we spend significant amounts of time. We develop strong ties with our friends, family, and romantic partners, among others. The opposite of a strong tie is a weak tie.
A weak tie develops with “the people we have met, or are connected to somehow, but do not currently know well” (The Defining Decade, pp. 20).
Rose Coser, a sociologist cited in “The Defining Decade” states: “Our strong ties feel comfortable and familiar but, other than support, they may have little to offer. They are usually too similar–even too similarly stuck–to provide more than sympathy. They often don’t know any more about jobs or relationships than we do.”
Surprisingly, it is the people with whom we develop weak ties who often end up being the most meaningful and propitious relationships in terms of how our lives end up. Weak ties introduce us to people who can help us in unforeseen ways; we even communicate differently with weak ties than with strong ties, and thus are speech becomes more elaborate and informative the more we communicate with our weak ties. Those who limit themselves by failing to develop weak ties with a wide web of people are limiting their chances at randomly meeting a future romantic partner or hearing about an as-yet-unadvertised dream job.
“The Defining Decade” is mostly upbeat and optimistic, but the good doctor does engage in a bit of ‘real talk’ about the reality of the aging process. The truth is, thirty really is not the new twenty, and forty really is not the new thirty. A woman’s eggs have a clock, and if a woman wants to have a family, she needs to start planning for that family sooner rather than later. One of Dr. Jay’s patients said that she wanted to get married, have a year or two to enjoy her husband, and then get pregnant. Sounds like a plan. The only problem was that the woman was already 33–and not yet married, but close to being engaged–when she announced this plan. Long story short, the woman worked her plan: she got married, enjoyed her husband, and then tried to get pregnant. Unfortunately, the woman’s body had a different plan and she was unable to conceive. After spending thousands on fertility treatments, the couple eventually gave up on their dream of having children.
Dr. Jay cites the data: “In 1970, one in ten fortysomething women were childless. Today, one in five are” (pp. 182). The doctor continues, “But according to a National Survey of Family Growth, about half of childless couples are not childless by choice.” A woman’s egg quality decreases as she ages. By waiting until they are older, more and more women are ending up involuntarily childless. Older mothers are also causing a spike in the number of children born with birth defects.
Dr. Jay’s advice is simple: If you want children, start thinking about that ASAP and then plan accordingly to get what you want.
“The Defining Decade” is filled with tons of good advice about how twentysomethings can and should make the most of the decade between OMG-I-Can-Get-Drunk-At-The-Bar and OMG-I-Want-To-Finally-Start-A-Family.
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Jamila Akil is a Senior Editor at Beyond Black and White. Follow her on Twitter @jamilaakil
“Author of Swirling. Advocate for black women finding love across color lines. Creator of The Pink Pill.”
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