Trouble at Home
Did Generation X’s nesting mania spark the economic meltdown?
by Susan Gregory Thomas
December 22, 2008
HOME ALONE
Maybe I was born guilty. Or maybe it's because I still have that old, free-floating complex from childhood (i.e. it's-my-fault-my-parents-got divorced, etc.). "Generation Xers are by all accounts the most devoted to family in American history."But I think the main reason I've had the nag of culpability festering in the back of my brain ever since the housing market collapsed is because, when I was working on the book I wrote about very young children and the marketing industry (attention, holiday shoppers: Buy, Buy Baby: How Consumer Culture Manipulates Parents and Harms Young Minds, Houghton Mifflin: 2007), I learned more than I'd ever wanted to know about Generation X as parents — from the advertising professionals.
As I sat in on marketing seminars hosted in Orlando and Anaheim, I found out that the dirt on us is that the effects of our parents' collective mass divorces of the 1970s and 1980s are clearly traceable in our behavior as parents now. We may still see ourselves as outsiders, snickering cynics who see through baby boomers' pretenses. But that's a big cover-up to hide that we're big mush-balls underneath. We are completely, utterly attached to our children. Generation Xers, the parents of the majority of young children now, are by all accounts the most devoted to family in American history. And we'll do whatever we have to do to keep them from having the crappy childhood that we had.
According to marketing research, nearly thirty percent of Generation X parents volunteer at their children's schools or extracurricular activities. Again, according to marketers, we panic about child-care and preschool, spending more money on them than any other household necessities. We leave the workforce if no decent child-care is available. We sneered at Yuppies' conspicuous consumption, but credit card market research reveals that we spend twenty percent more on luxury goods than Yuppies ever did — especially if it has anything to do with home. We yearn for home. We'll spend whatever we have to get it.
But don't take my word for it: Look at the numbers. The housing statistics from that nesting frenzy of the late '90s to mid-'00s are a revelation, like a bad holiday trip with the Ghost of Christmas Past. Buckle up.
