Many struggles in the lives of the men and women we have interviewed for all our projects have centered on Generativity One issues. This includes many disagreements among couples we interviewed for the Enduring, Intimate Relationship Project and community leaders we interviewed for the Sage Leadership project. Tensions concerned the raising of children, creating and maintaining a specific business or shared project, or engaging in a major community service project. These struggles and disagreements often concerned the identification of values and the differentiation between these values and those that were inherited from parents, community, church, or friends. At a deeper level, tensions are fostered in a circuitous journey to Personal Worth on which both partners are embarking. The journey for both members of the couple may be dictated by voices and pronouncements from the past, or by new opportunities and challenges. At times, their two journeys can be joined; at other times, they need to part ways.
The new opportunities and challenges often come to the fore in surprising ways. They can abruptly change our search for Personal Worth. Even after we have come to terms with the separation of our values from those of our parents, something dramatic and often disturbing occurs when we have our first children or start our first mutual project. The voices of our mother or father suddenly come back to haunt us again. We tell our son not to play with that stick or “you’ll poke your eye out” and realize that we are using the same intonations of voice that our parents used and are basing our predictions and in junctures on the same faulty logic as they. We find ourselves using the same outmoded assumptions about how to motivate workers or how to sell products as our father or mother used thirty or forty years ago. These assumptions were out-of-date even back then!
Children and mutual projects tend to draw in all Eriksonian stages. As a result, Generativity One is often the eye of the hurricane during stormy phases in the life of a person or couple. Images of alternative pathways to Personal Worth swirl around our head. Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, we end up crashing down in a foreign world where it is not clear how we get back home (Personal Worth). Consequently, child-rearing or project management was often identified as the central problem for a person or couple whom we interviewed. To use an expression of one man we interviewed, it is easy to feel “muddle-headed” about life priorities and sources of Personal Worth when bringing the first baby home or finishing the first year of a project.
Fortunately, for many people we have interviewed, the muddle-headedness eventually goes away. Bessy and Bart discovered that their life values began to settle securely in place in the early years of child rearing or building a shared project. Generativity One has a way of powerfully anchoring what is truly important in their lives. Typically, responsibilities are firmly and clearly assigned, whereas before the birth of a child or the initiation of a shared project, these responsibilities were more likely to be loosely framed, readily shifted, or even ignored. Like many couples, Bart and Bessy made the choice to identify an “equal and logical way” of distributing their time with their young daughter and of distributing household chores associated with child-rearing.
