Life begins at thirty?

Press, 19 May 1984, Page 25

Life begins at thirty?

GEORGIA DULLEA

of the New York Times (through NZPA) New York 'My career as a child prodigy is over." a pop music critic intoned recently on his thirtieth birthday. ' A month before she turned 30. a travel agent told a plastic surgeon, “I’ve lived long enough with this nose." A magazine sales manager bought a co-operative apartment at the age of 29, and not long after that she married and became the stepmother of two teenagers. More than four million members of the baby boom generation are entering their fourth decade this

year. For many of them, 30 looms as a big number. As Dr Marilyn Machlowitz, a 31-year-ol'd psychologist, said, they are the last of the young people who can still laugh nervously at the old admonition, “Never trust anyone over 30." They are the last to enjoy “an almost endless adolescence,” she said, adding that the approach of the big birthday is widely seen as a time to take stock of one’s professional and personal life.

“There is an acceleration in expectations today about where you are supposed to be at 30, both professionally and materially,” Dr Ma-chlo-witz said. “Part of what gets called downward

mobility is 30-year-olds expecting what their parents had only at 50. in terms of houses, cars and holidays.” In another sense, turning 30 for this generation is what turning 40 was for their parents.

“We are seeing much more planning for the future at an earlier age,” said Ann Clurman of Yankelovich, Skelly and White.

Turning 30 may be more traumatic for women than for men. This is not necessarily a matter of grey hairs, though there is some of that. More significant in the minds of mental health professionals, are the differing social timetables of the

sexes. If a woman is planning on motherhood, and many are nowadays, she cannot avoid the tick of the so-called biological clock, warning that her childbearing years are waning.

Women who concentrated on careers in their 20s, to the neglect of personal relationships. feel the first stirrings of conflict around 30 over not being wives and mothers. At the same time, married women with families express concern about not being established in careers by that time. Rather than focus on their accomplishments, Dr Machlowitz said, women in both groups tend to devalue them and "anguish about what is absent in their lives.”

Still anguish is not necessarily bad, as Dr Michele Berdy, a clinical psychiiogist noted: “Anything that creates tension and causes you to ask, ‘Where am I going? What do I want?’ is all to the good. Anxiety precedes periods of growth, transformation, and development.” Dr Berdy, herself a member of the baby boom generation, detects a certain urgency in her 30-year-old patients. “There is an urgency about career issues, about relationships, about health and even about life extension,” she said. “The only thing I do not see reflected very much is political urgency. I used to see that in this age group. What

I see now is preoccupation with self.”

Others call it self-preser-vation. Richard Sorensen, for one, does not believcsocial security will be around by the time he is eligible to collect it. So last March, on the day after his thirtieth birthday, he bought a house on Long Island as part of a long-range financial plan. “I bought it as a present for myself and as an investment,” said Mr Sorensen, a sales representative at Geoffrey Beene. “If you do not do it in your 30s, you may never get the chance.”

“I was miserable almost from the beginning,” said a 31-year-old lawyer who walked away from a fiveyear marriage last year. “But I promised myself to give it my best shot in my 20s. When I turned 30 I had the feeling all bets were off.”“Everybody used to say I was a kid with a lot of potential,” said Jack Finch, a freelance writer who will be 30 in August. “Pretty soon I’m going to have to knuckle down and prove it. The other day I was looking at some old photographs and it brought me up short to realise that when my father was my age he had two kids and a service station.”

Still, not all 30-year-olds are counting birthdays. “It is just an arbitrary border,” insisted Edward Mitchneck, a computer systems analyst. “I do not intend to let it cramp my style.”