An article in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine addresses a question much on the minds of the middle-aged these days: “What Is It About 20-Somethings?”
Drawing on the work of psychologists, sociologists and neuroscientists, writer Robin Marantz Henig explores possible reasons that twenty-somethings no longer use that decade of life to move through what sociologists have long considered the five milestones that signify adulthood: completing school, leaving home, becoming financially independent, marrying and having a child. In 1960, 77 percent of women and 65 percent of men had passed all five milestones by the age of 30. By 2000, fewer than half of the women and one-third of the men had done so.
Delaying marriage and parenthood until one’s thirties is generally seen as a good idea these days, but postponing financial independence is another matter. The phenomenon of twenty-somethings living with their parents (partially or even fully supported by them) is so widespread that everyone reading this has surely witnessed it, many within their own families. It’s a frequent topic of puzzled discussion among people my age, who wonder why things have changed so much in a generation. While the Baby Boomers were seen by their own parents as cases of arrested development (still arguable given their penchant for behaving as if they don’t want to grow up), they did actually leave home and start independent lives at the usual age, while their children seem to have embraced prolonged dependence with very few qualms.
Some people have theorized that what we are seeing is not a generational change or a response to current economic conditions, but a developmental stage (Jeffrey Jensen Arnett’s “emerging adulthood” being the preferred nomenclature) that people pass through in their 20’s before reaching full adulthood. Proponents of the delayed adulthood theory suggest that just as “adolescence” is now an unquestioned developmental stage despite only being identified a century ago, this trend should be accepted as a new fact of life in a time when people live far longer than ever before.
But others argue that developmental stages must meet the criteria of being both universal and essential, something that everyone must move through in order to progress in life. Given that many people (especially in less developed parts of the world) skip the “emerging” and leap straight into “adulthood” with all its attendant responsibilities, how can this decade of delay be considered a given of human existence?
For those of us who did jump directly into adulthood after finishing our education, it is indeed a stretch to see the behavior as something other than a choice, albeit one undertaken with the cooperation (or even encouragement) of the parents involved. Despite complaints about their children’s dependency, many parents relish the closeness they share with their (legally) adult children, and may even be thrilled that their kids like them enough to want to keep living together.
And if you’re a Baby Boomer, even a childless one like me, it’s easy to understand those emotions. After all, we were the generation who couldn’t wait to get away from home, and who judged and even shunned our parents for what we perceived as their endless list of faults – political, social, cultural and moral. Most of us fled our families as quickly as we could, and never looked back. “I would have done anything not to have to move back home,” is a comment I've often heard people my age utter about our move into independent life in our early 20’s.
And doing anything and everything was precisely what we did, including in the recession-riddled years of the 70’s and 80’s that rival our own difficult economic times, when jobs were also scarce (especially for recent college grads) and inflation was soaring in ways that are hard to comprehend today (banks offering car loans at 22%, anyone?). The eyes of twentysomethings glaze over when we recount how we lived – sharing living quarters with a pile of friends, having only battered old belongings (and few of them to boot), eating cheap food we cooked ourselves and spending little or nothing on entertainment.
At times, we can sound just like my parents did when they recounted what it was like to live during the Great Depression: “We made our own fun rather than going out.” “I once lived on beans for a week!” “We had to save up a long time for anything we bought, and so it really meant a lot to us.” I’ve told the story of figuring out that onion soup was the cheapest thing to eat (requiring only water, an onion and a bouillon cube to prepare) more often than my father ever talked about hopping freight trains with hobos in the 1930’s – and I don’t even have kids of my own to tell it to. Explaining that not only did much of what twentysomethings feel are necessities (personal computers, cell phones, DVR's, Frappuccinos) not even exist when we were their age, but that we were just as happy without them makes me feel like I should be gumming my toast and whittling out on the porch.
And yet it’s all true.
It’s also true that our independence, expensive as it was – costing us servitude to often lousy and menial jobs, near-poverty living conditions and deferred gratification of our material wants – seemed a bargain well worth making at the time. Anything to be free of the parental yoke, we felt.
But that makes it sound like it was a choice. And the cold hard truth is that like many of my generation (much less previous generations), I simply didn’t have a choice about when to become an adult.
My parents informed all four of us while growing up that after high school graduation, we had only two choices: Go to college (mostly but not entirely at their expense) or go to work and support ourselves. And after college, our choices were reduced to the latter. There were no do-overs, no grad school, no coming home and thinking about your life and how you’d like to spend it. Should you feel the need to live at home after your education ended, you had to get a job and pay the parents for rent and food. Only one of us took them up on that option for a while; the other three moved away immediately. All of us got low-level, low-paying jobs from which we worked our way up into professional careers. Two of us later put ourselves through grad school while working professional jobs and a third finished out the undergraduate degree she’d had to put on hold after marrying (which my parents used as a reason to sever support) in the same way.
At the time I went to grad school, many people expressed surprise that my parents weren’t paying for at least part of it so I didn’t have to work while attending school, but to me, this was simply a fact of life. Once we left home, we were required to be entirely financially independent – there was no subsidizing of our health insurance or our cars or any other life expense by our parents. If we couldn’t afford something on the money that we earned, we didn’t have it. Which meant that there was much that we didn’t have, until we slowly built careers that paid better salaries.
My parents, both of whom entered adulthood during the Depression and left home to make a living, thought that self-reliance and independence were virtues next to godliness. We were raised to be self-sufficient, and we are to a fault (just trying helping one of us and you’ll see). We also had the satisfaction of knowing that what we made of our lives as adults was truly of our own making. And having involved sacrifice, even small triumphs carried that much more weight.
But there was a predictable cost to pushing us out of the nest so thoroughly. We remained at a considerable emotional distance from our parents until they relaxed their own self-sufficiency and let us care for them at the very end of their lives. Even then, despite the comforting healing of many old hurts and divisions, we could never catch up on all the lost decades and become as close to them as I see my peers being with their own children, even at the ages (teens and twenties) when people most often resist parental involvement. Their intimacy seems almost alien in its contrast to what most of my generation experienced with our parents.
You can speculate about the reasons for this change: if the generation gap of political, social and cultural differences has truly narrowed to near invisibility, if parents today are more accepting of their children, as well as simply more openly loving and fun, or if my generation was actually aberrant in our estrangement and that the historically normal closeness of nuclear families has simply been restored. They’re all equally valid theories. But perhaps the answer is something simpler, and, well, closer to home.
My parents always made it clear that if we were ever in trouble, we should call on them and they would help. But that was the equation – we’re here if you really need us. “Home is the place where they have to take you in,” as the old saying goes. But having to take you in and wanting to do so are two very different things. A safety net is not a welcome mat. As early as adolescence, many in my generation felt ill at ease in our own homes, hopelessly severed from any real connection with our parents, who had grown up in the first half of a century that had seen seismic changes in every realm of life. We couldn’t go back to what we never had in the first place.
As another old adage warns, "You can’t go home again." But in fact you can, if there's a place where you truly feel at home. Most twenty-somethings these days have that, and I think their parents have wanted to make sure they do, knowing what the lack of such sanctuary felt like to them at that age. While some parents obviously go too far in taking care of their should-be adult children, it's hard to argue against the value of a generation that feels close to their parents rather than being emotionally estranged as we were.
But I'm also grateful that my parents encouraged self-sufficiency. Being required to take care of myself completely starting at age 22 has given me strength because I've learned what I'm capable of even in extremely difficult circumstances, and satisfaction because I have known that whatever I achieved in my life was due to my own efforts. I continue to believe that independence and direction in life are choices, not behaviors held hostage to some developmental loitering that lasts long past the arrival of both physiological and legal adulthood.
So what is it about 20-somethings? My own answer is simple. They have what previous generations did not: A choice about when to become adults.
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Comments
In the world of the helicopter parent, the last thing these parents want is for their children to be "independent" as they follow them to college interviews and yes, even job interviews after college.
Great piece.
Rated with hugs
I didn't ever get a dime toward college (she said, gumming her toast).
And yet I don't begrudge today's twentysomethings the nurturing they're getting. They've landed in a country at the beginning of its inexorable economic downslide at a time of its most precipitous fall.
(And on an unrelated aside...anybody who'd like to tell me I'm not an adult because I never completed Step 5--had a child--can bite my wrinkled, aged butt.)
I so love reading you.
I don't really see much positive in the extended adolescence of the twenty-somethings living at home in the lives to which they've become accustomed. It breeds entitlement and pathos. They somehow think they are entitled to all the things their parents worked so hard for for 30 years.
There must be an in-between where your parents encourage your flight from the nest with love and guidance but don't try to keep you tied to the homestead.
I absolutely agree that this generation of parents - probably older than I am, but at this point my contemporaries - DO encourage their children to use home as an ever present diving board.
As the youngest of four, born in 1969, my mother (a single mother by that point) was probably drinking wine and dancing with abandon the day I left for college. She worried when my phone numbers changed too often, but I also moved 3000 miles away from my home. (This is also anecdotal, as my mother didn't own a home and lived at the boarding school I had attended - probably more reason not to return to the nest!)
I guess, most of the time, I completely "get" why parents want to have that open door, thatdiving board. And maybe I feel a little bit envious. But, like you, I would not give up those years of struggling independence for anything.
I left home just months after graduating high school only to return for brief visits. I never made permanent residence in my parent's home after I struck out on my own. My brothers were the opposite. They returned often and lived with my parents on and off for years until my parent's death. Then they wanted to move in with me. I said no way!
I've dated a few men who live with their parents. It can put an unfair strain on me, the single woman who lives alone, to host them for our private times. I sometimes just want to scream, "Grow up and move out!" (R)
My next door neighbor's son finished college and returned to live with her last summer. Everyone is glad to see him again. We've watched him grow up, and she raised him to be a wonderful human being. It's more than the parents and adult children who benefit, the community does as well. All the kids I grew up with moved away. Maybe that will start to change now.
I floundered around after college, and I did live at home for two years. I guess I must have needed that time to get my act together. When I did leave, it was for good, and I've never had to ask for help. I'm pretty sure I would have been mortified if I had to, which maybe is the difference with 20-somethings now.
I think it's just the whole concept of family living arrangements that morphs over time. After all, lots of people from my parents' generation lived with one set of their parents after they got married for a time, and there was no stigma attached. Many of them simply returned the favor and had those parents (or parent) live with them when they got on their feet financially (my grandmother lived with us until I was a teenager, for example).
Then, it seemed like there was a real movement towards moving out as soon as possible, and now it seems to have swung back around again, but probably for different reasons.
But, no matter what, it's always a fascinating subject, and it will probably always raise some hackles!
I loved living with my friends, and think we all might end up communally bitching about things in our rockers on a shared porch.
Wonderful piece.
I was mostly on my own once I got out of high school, scholarships made it possible for me to go to college with almost no help from home, I was completely on my own before 20, but had to join the army which is just another form of dependence, America was so insanely rich in the early 70s that I found it possible to work for less than a half a year in the US to support months of low budget travel and exploration elsewhere
things are different for my own kids, I'm helping the older one a little as she struggles to make an opera career in NYC, the younger is lingering through community college a class or two at a time, still living at home at 23, but has a job, bought his own car, pays all his own bills and contributes to the household budget for food and energy
in other cultures and times, it's not unusual for multi-generational families to live together, I think in some ways the American idea of a nuclear family can be thought as a side effect of an economy that fractures social structures to provide a mobile and easily disposable work force, interchangeable parts in the smallest possible units
One could argue that the baby boomer mentality of peace, love and acceptance has contributed to this phenomenon. After all, my generation's parents were responsible for the creation of the phrase "helicopter parent" and gave everyone on the soccer team a trophy just for showing up. Coming from that sort of upbringing, entering the "real world" can be a very harsh pill to swallow.
OE, I think that even if the parents are as enabling as drug dealers, the kids have a choice. I certainly have known many people who refused support for various reasons - -not wanting someone else to control their life, wanting to be independent, etc. I agree that it can be very hard to resist the enticements of a parent offering a lot of material and emotional support, especially if you are a young adult who's never had the experience of being independent. But you can, and people do. Not to take the parents off the hook, but at some point, everyone owns their life.
Desert Rat, I wonder what would happen to some of these folks if their parents suddenly withdrew all support?
Linda, I've known other people like you who either had to or chose to become "adults" before age 18. It can be done, although it's not optimal. Pulling in the historical angle, people used to be considered adults in their early teens, and worked full time and even had families of their own. I think of this every time someone tells me their 15 year old is not old enough to even stay home alone for an evening!
Denise, thanks! And I know I was lucky that my parents paid for most of my college (we kids did contribute but they paid the lion's share). I've known many people who had to do it all on their own, or go without that education. I wish college were not a matter of finances, at least not as much as it is now. And I'm another one of those who hasn't met 2 of the conditions of adulthood -- I have a partner I live with, but I've never married, and I'm childless. So I guess I'm not fully grown up either!
Deborah, I think you articulate very well something I thought of putting in this piece towards the end but left out -- which is that I think ideally there is a middle way, in which parents are nurturing and supportive and the relationship is close, but that they also help their kids learn to be independent. I think that's far more difficult than either of the extremes, though! A real balancing act as a parent. And I highly respect the job of parenting, which I consider the most difficult in the world. So far be it from childless me to suggest how it be done.
Aim, I was the youngest and the day I left home for good (after college graduation), my mother tore my bedroom apart and repainted. I think that was her equivalent of dancing with relief that her parenting days were effectively over. And like you, I highly value struggle. One parent I know says she can't stand to see her kids suffer. I get that, but I also think it's an essential part of human development from which we learn much.
Sixtycandles, I think it was imperative for us Boomers to leave home to lead anything close to authentic lives. We couldn't do what we wanted or be who we were in the homes we were raised in. It's different today -- most parents are far more accepting (and similar to their kids in values, habits, etc than our parents were to us). That makes it comfortable to hang out at home. Add in some free food, big screen TV and other perks and you can see why it's hard to leave!
Will, I agree the job market is terrible (for everyone, including us middle aged folks!). But it was when I got out of college in 1980, too (historically, very bad). My fancy degree with honors yielded me only offers of secretarial work. I took that (it was a step up from the restaurant and cleaning jobs I'd had as a student, after all) and worked my way up from there. I also left home and went to an urban area that had more job opportunities -- still tough to get a job and it paid little, but staying in my hometown would have meant going back to waiting tables in terms of jobs available. I think that when you absolutely have to find a job -- or you're going to be evicted from your apartment or not eat -- it can make a difference in finding one. You turn over every rock and you think constantly of what you need to do to get one, including moving some place you may or may not want to live, as well as doing any kind of work you can get, and you work hard on how you present yourself to employers and pursue all opportunities. I think it all makes a difference, even in a terrible job market.
Kat, when I was single, that was a deal killer for me -- guys who lived with their parents (actually it always seemed to just be their moms, which worried me even more).
Steven, your kids sound pretty darn productive to me! And as I noted above, I myself never married or had kids, so technically I'm not a full adult anyway. I think there's a big difference between doing/exploring various things but not settling on a career yet (like your son) and sitting at home with Mom and Dad wondering what you should do with your life but not moving ahead with anything. There are all kinds of ways to learn and grow, including by doing things that may seem a bit aimless (many people have found their passions in precisely that way) --- but waiting passively for inspiration to strike or opportunity to knock isn't one of them.
Lea, I'm so into delayed marriage, that I'm over 50 and still putting it off! I definitely think that waiting to marry and have kids till over 30 is a good thing. And I've always resisted the idea that you aren't an adult if you haven't done both of those.
Suzanne, you bring in an interesting angle I hadn't thought about. It does change things to have adult kids in the neighborhood, and that can be a good thing (or a bad one, depending on how they behave, I guess). We've gotten so far away from the extended family model of living in our culture, it's hard to even remember what it's like. And yet segregating the generations isn't good -- I thought that every time I visited my parents in their retirement community.
Joan, I think parents instill in their kids what they themselves value, whether they do it consciously or not. They're an eerie mirror.
Jeanette, as noted above, I don't think there's a one size fits all way of doing this, and I don't judge people who need to take things a little slower. I know that I could easily have done the same, and frankly, I'm glad that my parents pushed me out. I wasn't assertive, strong or confident at 22 -- more like a flaming scaredy-cat -- and so their push was needed to get me out. Then I developed strength from the experiences I had on my own. But some kids who are pushed out fall into terrible things, or don't find their way in life as happily as they might with a little extended time. And as I mention in the post and comments, I think in many ways we were an aberration and we're swinging back to a more traditional model of family life, in which the generations live together longer. So it's a real question how it will all play out, much less how things "should" be!
Buffy, your mention of a loan made me think of something my sibs and I still joke about -- even when we were teenagers, our parents would only loan us money for things we wanted to buy (like a used car) and they'd also charge us an exorbitant interest rate - which we'd accept since not only did we have no other choice but because we had no idea how high it was compared to normal interest rates!
The conclusion leads one down many paths. How does it extend into our political, religious and cultural beliefs? (We just had a boy who was president for eight years and it largely went unnoticed.) The divorce stats are unquestionably a factor. 5 per cent in the WWI generation, 1o in the WWII, and over 50ty in the boomers with a 50ty per cent greater possibility the children of divorce will divorce. What does that say about the quality of the family?
"Immigrants" are more likely to be "adults" by the definition you use. Did you consider that? I see it in my own child, who looks poorly upon marriage--and especially the traditional roles of male and female. How do they play into the mix? If men are getting softer and women harder does that make for more stress for children or greater harmony?
What of the notion of individual responsibilty--the foundation of Western culture? It is clearly time to take a deeper cut, but don't expect those in the soup to see the crackers.
Most earlier milestones were reached out of order.
That is, women with babies are vulnerable and it is a bad deal under a lot of circumstances. That is, simply not fair.
I don't blame women for deferring or skipping childbearing.
Caroline, I'm not sure how much the boomers' cultural values are behind that phenomenon and how much it is (as I suggest) a desire not to be like their own parents, and not to have their kids feel towards them as they did towards those parents. (That's a really horrifying thought to most people in my generation who are parents!) I really lean hard on the latter theory.
Ann, I chuckled reading your comment because it's just what I and many people my age say all the time - we wanted to be on our own! We wanted that independence, even in very reduced living conditions. I'm not quite sure what the difference is about, although most of our parents' homes weren't nearly as luxurious as the average home is these days. And our parents certainly didn't try to make it inviting for us to stay.
Lawless Lawyer, no, the article doesn't mention that, and it's a good point. I think the focus of the article is more on debating the idea that this a developmental stage vs. an economic necessity.
My mantra has always been "Don't lose your day job" although I didn't work "full time" (or even want to) until I was 30. Now I'm retired so I guess it served me well. You shoulda seen my case file for food stamps in the 1970's - thicker than "War and Peace". (but now I ramble)...
Yes, many of today's 20somethings are having an extended adolescence. But it is possible to be an adult at 22 and still have a close relationship with your parents.
I think I was raised with the right balance of nurture and self-sufficiency. My mother believed that if we wanted something, we needed to earn it. For a scholarship kid at a fancy prep-school, this was a hard pill to swallow. I worked summers to buy my own books and clothes - shocking to my peers. However, this never impacted my closeness with her - she was always available for emotional support and was my champion when I selected a career in non-profit. More recently, after an ugly divorce, she has provided some financial support as well.
I never lived at home after college, but I'm sure if I wanted to it would have been available. It is sad to think it has to be all or nothing.
I think it's the duty of parents to prepare their children for a life of self-sufficiency and personal responsibility, and that this training should begin as early as possible so that it can serve the emerging adult as early as possible.
It's great that today's boomer parents want to be friends w/ their kids. Parents and kids should be friends, but, it should be noted, friendship is as essential to the child's success as guidance, boundaries and knowledge transfer.
Not being nit picky here - that line is "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." I submit the correction only b/c I think it makes your point even better. It's how I see my own parental home, and the implication in the line is true for me - I'd only go there if I were in such desperate straits that I had no other choice. I know my parents would help - and maybe they'd even help if I were something less than desperate, but the die has been cast via my upbringing that I would not come to them unless I was.
Most of the fault lies with parents, period.
Incidentally, both my parents and my in-laws were basically given a "starter home" when they married, broke, at 22. They were working, they were pregnant, they had mouths to feed, but they were not upside down in mortgages. They paid property taxes. I cannot offer a 56K education to my kids or afford the opportunity cost of giving away a paid off home.
Yeah, maybe kids today are spoiled and working it. I've certainly said that. But the fundamentals in life have become more expensive for them. There have always been hook ups.
But I do have to disagree with those who have said that they have taken their grown children back in because there are no jobs except 30 hours a week at K-Mart, or perhaps McDonalds or other fast food/restaurant work. I'm in my early 50's and am married to a man with 2 children. When the kids graduated college (all paid for by us, 100%) they too said they could not find work in their chosen fields, so they spent their time trading beds at our house and their moms. The truth was, K-Mart and McDonalds WERE available as employment, and they COULD have had an apartment, however it would have been older, "yuckier" apartment without the fancy pools, workout rooms, etc..and they would have had to have room-mates!! God Forbid!!! They, of course, found this all unacceptable, and and since I am only a step-mom, my opinion didn't come into play and they played "trading houses" until they eventually found jobs (after about 1 1/2 years) because real Mom and Dad finally couldn't take watching 20 somethings sleeping till noon and then playing video games all day!!! It nearly broke us up, but thankfully things are much better after these last 5 years. I stll don't think that they "get it" though. They truly wanted to - as someone earlier stated- continue living in the lifestyle that their parents lived after 30 plus years of earning it, instead of starting out on the bottom and working themselves up to earn their own.
Excellant post Nelle!!!
...and then there's living at home, making mommy's life substantially easier (hey, an extra pair of hands and a few hundred bucks' rent really helps sometimes, even when you're An Adult), and managing not to default on your loans/live in a crack den/eat ramen for six years.
The whole 18 months that I lived at home in my 20s meant that:
-I would pay off my student debt before age 30
-I would manage to stay largely free of credit card debt
-I could take an internship that led to a real career, instead of just a bunch of McJobs
-I could afford to pay for my own wedding when I did get married
I really feel like most parents would consider that a fair trade, especially as I paid rent, did extensive housework, and cooked constantly during my stint with Mom.
Let's see... 18 months of extended "adolescence" for 7 subsequent years of prosperous child? No, MUCH better to make some sort of high-minded point about the value of needless suffering.
I also believe parents should warn high schoolers that this isn't the same world that accepted their college app.: getting accepted is harder too.
There are so many issues connected with this, I could go on and on.
Thanks for Sharing your ideas,
Heather
I have a 22 year-old brother who however is just coasting (as is my 35 yo brother) and this is completely because my parents indulge them.
So I agree with some commentors here who say it isn't a choice, as the parents are partly to blame.
However, my parents never told me to go get a job, I did it all my self. I therefore think the bulk of the onus falls on the people trying to have an extended adolescence.
Neither of my brothers have ever lived with roommates, and they have no concept of things like: how to cook, how to do dishes, how to do laundry, respecting others hours etc.
It shouldn't be my responsibility to tell them what to do, but it is saddening to see such cool guys with so much potential languishing and living like teenagers. It is sad.
They DO NEED to grow up. They simply choose to NOT grow up, and it sucks.
You just gave one of the greatest examples of a nuclear family in action . The home shouldn't be the place where, when you have to go, they have to take you in. The home should be the place where you get the skills and courage and support to go out and make your place in the world.
My brother came home after college. He didn't pay rent, he was broke. He was looking for a job every feasible minute, and when he wasn't doing that, he took care of the cars, lawn and running errands for my mom. He It was really nice to have him home; it warranted my dad springing for going out to Red Lobster *twice* a year instead of just once that year. I could see how proud of him my parents were, and I actually thought at the time, I want to be like him, he's how you want to be. Adults loved being around him, because he was responsible, intelligent, industrious and polite. They always joked about 'borrowing' him, so it's funny to hear people nowdays talk about their returned nestlings sleeping in til noon and playing video games all day while the parents longed for them to just *do* something constructive toward their living situation, if only to clean the damn bathroom.
Nick, I certainly don't blame women for delaying childbearing either! And stats show that's a huge factor (perhaps the most defining one) for how a woman will fare economically in her life -- not having children too young. I think there's an enormous difference in choosing to marry and have kids later vs. delaying financial responsibility just for yourself. The former is actually a mature decision.
Geraint, thanks! How old are you, I wonder?
Noah, I think people who've done various things to survive have an enormous advantage because they know they can always do that again. Knowing you can find a way to manage on very little money is incredibly reassuring. Having high needs for what you consider making a living is a trap.
Will, I rarely see people my age eager to have their kids marry and have kids before the kids are well into their 30's. Of course, it's different in different cultures. But that's one "mistake" that most parents don't want to see their kids commit -- leaping into that responsibility (esp having kids) too soon vs taking their time.
Curator, I absolutely believe it's possible to balance the two! I think (as I said in an earlier reply to comment) that it's far harder to do that than come down more on one side or the other. It's a fine line, and it shifts often as the kids grow up, and you also don't really know how your actions are going to pay off until later. All parents have to do the best they can but then hope for the best!
Libmomrn, it definitely used to be a lot easier to pay for college on your own when we were young. I think that's something that's going to have to change, or no one's going to be able to afford it before too long. But I also think the imperative to get a college degree isn't good -- there are many other great ways to make a living and make a life.
Sandra, thanks! You've shared much about your early life so I know how hard you had to work from a young age, so it doesn't surprise me how this resonates with you. I confess to having some eye-rolling myself before I really let myself take in how close 20somethings are to their parents -- it's enviable, frankly (from both sides). And thanks for the quote correction -- once I saw it from you, I hit my head remembering that's what the full quote is.
LadyMiko, well, per a comment I made above, I still think everyone is responsible for their own life choices. Many of us had parents who were less than ideal in a whole variety of ways -- doesn't let us off the hook from making our own life choices as adults. I think the same of anyone in their 20's (or beyond), no matter what their parents did or didn't do.
Onstar, your parents had a different start than mine! They had to leave home at 18 and make their own way, or stay home and work (or in my mother's case, get married to the old widowed farmer down the road - ick). But you're right that in past eras, there was a certain amount of providing for adult children, usually upon marrying -- a part of the farm, etc.
Iluv, thanks! And yes, when you need to work for everything you have, it does make things feel quite different. I recall an epiphany my partner's son had after working his first summer job (retail) and going to fill up the gas tank of the car and counting how many hours he had to work at a job he hated just to fill the tank. Before this, he'd not thought a thing about his parents paying for the gas in the cars he borrowed. It's amazing how work can recalibrate everything in your life.
Rita, go right ahead!
Wellwhat, it sounds like you did exactly what my parents required were we to stay at home -- work and make contributions. As I thought I made clear, I think that's a whole different thing. I also have seen people do what you did to save money and get a jump start on a career or save up for a goal, including grad school. But just to be clear about my own story -- my sibs and I all advanced from low level, low paid jobs into the ranks of professionals and even managers BEFORE we went to grad school (on our own dime and while continuing to work and live independently). In fact, only one of us benefitted financially from our grad degree in terms of career advancement (hint, it wasn't me, the one who got another degree in literature). The point being -- it's not an either/or: either go out on your own and be doomed to a lifetime or even many years of what you call "McJobs" or stay with the 'rents and get ahead in life. Many people (in my generation and many others) went out on our own and worked our way up from those early jobs into better ones and even good careers, often within a few years. Honestly, staying with my parents would not have helped my career - -in fact, since I moved to a big city and they lived in a fairly small town, it seems very likely it would have hurt it. It's impossible to say where your life would have gone if you'd just struck out on your own, isn't it? You might have worked your way into a fabulous career even without that period of time with the parents -- many people do.
Heather, I agree with you about preparing kids for the cold hard world that's out there. We certainly got that message, and didn't expect for things to be easy.
Matthew, it's always interesting when different sibs have such different lives, since arguably they had the same upbringing. I've heard other stories like yours -- always from the responsible one, like you -- and it's a puzzlement and a heartbreak to them to see their sibs failing to get on with their lives.
Monsieur, as always you bring a nuanced view to the issue. I agree that there's that famous happy medium, or as the Buddhists say, the middle way. I'm all for a balance of nurturing and assistance along with encouraging independence. I think that would be ideal.
Lawless, I think it was left out of this article because it focuses on this theory that such circumstantial issues aren't what's driving this behavior and that instead it's just a developmental stage that has to be gone through. But again, it fails the test of necessity when you see so many exceptions (or in fact, the majority) not falling into this model.
Hells, where the economic issue falls down for me is again that my sibs and I also entered the workforce in a terrible economy when jobs were scarce. Let's not even talk about my parents who had to go out and make their first living in the depths of the Depression! The current state of economies plays a role but I think it's overemphasized. When you really need to work, you will take any job you can get and you will go to great lengths to get work. Some still may not find it, but it's amazing how necessity is the mother of invention -- and hard core job hunting, and grateful job-taking. There are also many things that can be done while waiting for a job, such as volunteering to gain work experience, yet few people try that.
Regarding those milestones: How many people in your generation faced divorce as a result of those early marriages? For the most part I put the failures of my generation on the failed university experiment. We acquired a gigantic debt and no qualifications. Why? Because our parents remembered the days a degree guaranteed a living. Now it just guarantees a long period of debt.
That 18-yr-olds travel great distances to attend colleges for disciplines that are offered at local universities is a testament to how wealthy our society is; on the face of it, it makes no sense for a family member to pay for room and board when they have ample space at home. Unlike most people, I do not subscribe to the notion that going away to college brings about independence and maturity: au contraire. My oldest son, now 20, was responsible and mature at 17, fixing our appliances and the family cars, driving his brothers places and running family errands, helping clean the house, and participating in family decisions and discussions of both the petty and important variety. Now that he's away at college, he has only to study and keep up his grades (which he also had to do at his difficult private high school) and not much else. The party atmosphere is wildly out of control at most American colleges and has completely supplanted the serious mission of education, at least in the first couple of years. Frankly, I think kids become more self-centered and less responsible when they go away to college.
I actually think that if this bad economy hangs on, more and more people will have their kids attend the local public universities, live at home, work their old part-time jobs, and party a lot less than if they were to live on their own in dorms or university housing. I know it sounds counterintuitive, but it's keeping the kids home during college that will ultimately send kids out on their own in their early twenties. College has become Party Central and does nothing to promote maturity.
The first being that "previous generations who walked into jobs with health care and benefits in an economy on the rise". This wasn't true for my generation or most that preceded it, although in the post WWII era, there was a lot of prosperity, I grant you. That is not my generation (boomers). We walked into recession, insane inflation and a terrible job market. (As I tried to explain in my post, if you read all of it.) Our hard-earned degrees often meant nothing in the job market. I graduated with not only a double major and high GPA but had the equivalent of 3 years full time work experience, having worked since age 14, including my last 2 years of undergrad (while carrying 2 majors and earning a 4.0). Yet all I got offered, after a painful job search, was secretarial jobs that paid so little I subsisted on peanut butter and beans. And I was grateful to get one! I too wanted to a be a journalist, but didn't expect, as you seem to have, that my degree would magically make it happen. I knew success and even opportunity to have it required hard work, and wasn't a door prize for showing my diploma.
I don't know what your parents went thru to get where they are today, but it's likely similar to what I and my 3 sibs as well as all my peers did -- worked their way up with great effort from entry level jobs. If they walked into well-paid professional jobs right out of their undergraduate degrees, they are in the distinct minority for our generation.
I think this statement of yours is revealing: "We were convinced that the world would give us everything because that's exactly what happened for our parents." First, you assume the world gave your parents what they have - no suggestion that they worked hard for 20-30 years to gain it, or any awareness of what steps they went thru. (As someone else commented, many 20somethings look at what their parents have now, not knowing or having witnessed how their parents lived and worked at their age.) Second, that they got "everything" -- really? Wow. Third, that it's their fault that your generation has assumed that you would get the same goodies (which might not even be accurately perceived) in some automatic way.
Can you see the contradictions and indictments lurking in your own statements here? You're actually being harder on your generation than I have been, by painting a portrait of them as wanting a red carpet rolled out for them rather than going through the steps that previous generations went through.
It appears one thing is true, what Pete Townshend said in music a decade or so ago, Life is Hard. Some disagree and say that is all our mind and ego and conditioning. I haven't realized that truth yet, but I have wanted to ever since I was a 20 something. Do these 20 somethings have that kind of problem?
Yes most of your generation probably worked very hard to get where they are today, and I don't know of your experiences. I do know for a fact that my parents in particular did not work hard for what they have. I also know that our education system sugar coats the benefits of education. I'm not ashamed to say that after looking at my parents and being told that getting good grades was all I needed to do, I did think that excelling in college would be my golden ticket in the real world.
I think to a certain degree, the ideas in this article create a catch-22 perpetuating it. If you see 20-somethings as teenagers part 2, you're going to be reluctant to hire them or take them seriously. When I worked in food service, older employees were given more hours and prioritized, probably because it was assumed us 20-somethings had our parents to rely on and no children to care for. In many cases it was flat wrong, but that is still the mentality. Even though I am nearly 26, at all the jobs I've had, and in other public settings, older adults remark that I "look so young", "could be in high school", or ask "what are you going to school for?" It is not lack of professionalism, but I think just a very large gap between the mean age of worker's and my own. My point is, these comments make me think that even just my appearance is preventing me from being taken seriously.
It is easy to assume that our specific obstacles are comparable to yours, but unless you have spent time talking to people my age about how they got where they are, you probably don't understand. Both our circumstances are too unique to make assumptions about the other.
You made excellent points, I just think we would have liked perhaps a few concessions.
Please. When I was 26 I had two babies, had left their father and was raising them by waiting tables at night and freelance writing during the day. We ate dollar-store mac and cheese and apples.
Now my husband and I (remarried when I was 30) are raising the kids to be responsible and ready to leave when they're 18. Our very independent daughter can't WAIT to get the hell outta here. :)
DING DING DING. We have a winner. While I have no doubt that there's a fair amount of parental molly-coddling and young-adult entitling going on, the economy is much worse than it was in the 70s and 80s. Outsourcing and the internet have changed it drastically, from a manufacturing-based one to a service-based one. And if you don't take that into account, you are being disingenuous at best and intellectually dishonest at worst.
Yet another scree by the baby boomers at the young they wish they were. How tiresome.
I am a professional who had a scholorship for college, and paid for grad school on my own and worked 30 hours a week. So my credentials match yours miss, "high and mighty"
That being said, I would like to point some things out.
The job market is very different now than it was even in the "horrible seventies".
Education is *much* more expensive. Most students come out with hefty loan debt that they cannot afford to repay. These payments take at least 20 percent of their income, if they can find employment.
Health insurance is hard to find with jobs these days. One bad illness or health problem can be financially ruinous for most entry level people.
Finally, to even *look* for a job these days you need a computer and internet access. 90 percent of jobs are listed online these days. The newspaper is a joke. If you don't have access then you don't have the option to apply.
And before you say libraries are the answer, they arn't really. Many won't allow you to bring your own data drive, for fear of viruses. You can't upload your resume. Retyping it every time isn't really an option.
Everything is much more compartmentalized than it used to be. To be a secretary, you need experience or an associates degree. In the 60s and 70s you did not. I know this as I watched my mother who had neither when she started get multiple jobs.
Unemployment is higher now than it has been since the Depression and jobs that pay a reasonable wage are even harder to find. So yes, often people need help and parents want to help.
I don't view that as coddling. I view it as being part of a family. After all, am I *coddling* my parents when they become too old and ill to take care of themselves?
Should I make their lives *uncomfortable* to be in that situation? Make it clear that I took them in unwillingly and that I resent it, as you suggest parents should do if their parents need help?
Of course not.
Frankly, you are really a pathetic but typical example of your own self involved self important generation.
1.) All the McJobs... (almost all the jobs I took when I needed to where what we now call mom and pop operations - often nothing more than temporary financial gigs dreamed up by my peers - and there was far less regulation of businesses)
2.) drug testing ... and the computer-ready availability of arrest records etc. (back then, what you did when you punched out was none of their bizness - they were only concerned that you showed up and did the job well). Now they check Facebook pages. sigh
As a 23-year-old, I'm sorry, but I had to literally scoff at the notion that the recession of the 70s and 80s "rivaled" our current economic disaster... To anyone of my generation (or hell, even older) who has looked for a job for 7 straight months right after college with PLENTY of previous work experience (me), or anyone who has looked longer and still is looking, that statement is a complete joke and also pretty insulting. This is clearly and indisputably the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression... When baby boomers make statements like you made, it only comes off as, "I know I am not personally living through the hell you've had to go through right, now but...Hey, our economy was bad too! I still got a damn job!" Whether or not that's how you actually feel, that's how it reads. And it's infuriating.
On the other hand, I can appreciate the thoughtful analysis on parenting differences from generation to generation. I think, as I read your piece, that my father feels the same way you described. He's always said, "You know, when I went to/got out of college, my parents didn't do shit for me." I know it's true for him and apparently lots of other baby boomers, and I think it's really fascinating (and relieving) that many of them did not want to do that to their children. In my favor, my dad really understood this economic disaster I faced after graduating, and he took the time to help me look for jobs and help me out financially while I did so. He knew I was working my ass off and doing all I could to get a job, and I never, ever had to deal with him giving me shit for not having one yet, or wondering if I was "really trying hard enough." I am so lucky and thankful for that, and this piece reminded me.
As a final note, I just always have to bring this up when talking about this with baby boomers, because they never seem to quite get it: Our baby boomer parents raised us to think the world was ours to take. Work your ass off in high school, take college prep classes, go to the best college you can possibly get into, get an internship, and you'll come out successful right after. Well, guess what? That didn't happen. I know you baby boomers don't understand this because you didn't personally live it, and this just sounds like "complaining" or "being spoiled brats" to you, but that's how it is. High expectations for life after college, and all you need is "hard work." Well, we all put in the hard work and dedicated the past 10 or so years of our lives to a better life right after college, a life where we could finally become "real adults," and it wasn't there waiting for us. In fact, close to nothing was there waiting for us.
Please consider this generational difference when facing the enraged comments here, and more so on Salon. (P.S. Congrats on getting the front page!)I'm very conflicted on this piece.
As a 23-year-old, I'm sorry, but I had to literally scoff at the notion that the recession of the 70s and 80s "rivaled" our current economic disaster... To anyone of my generation (or hell, even older) who has looked for a job for 7 straight months right after college with PLENTY of previous work experience (me), or anyone who has looked longer and still is looking, that statement is a complete joke and also pretty insulting. This is clearly and indisputably the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression... When baby boomers make statements like you made, it only comes off as, "I know I am not personally living through the hell you've had to go through right, now but...Hey, our economy was bad too! I still got a damn job!" Whether or not that's how you actually feel, that's how it reads. And it's infuriating.
On the other hand, I can appreciate the thoughtful analysis on parenting differences from generation to generation. I think, as I read your piece, that my father feels the same way you described. He's always said, "You know, when I went to/got out of college, my parents didn't do shit for me." I know it's true for him and apparently lots of other baby boomers, and I think it's really fascinating (and relieving) that many of them did not want to do that to their children. In my favor, my dad really understood this economic disaster I faced after graduating, and he took the time to help me look for jobs and help me out financially while I did so. He knew I was working my ass off and doing all I could to get a job, and I never, ever had to deal with him giving me shit for not having one yet, or wondering if I was "really trying hard enough." I am so lucky and thankful for that, and this piece reminded me.
As a final note, I just always have to bring this up when talking about this with baby boomers, because they never seem to quite get it: Our baby boomer parents raised us to think the world was ours to take. Work your ass off in high school, take college prep classes, go to the best college you can possibly get into, get an internship, and you'll come out successful right after. Well, guess what? That didn't happen. I know you baby boomers don't understand this because you didn't personally live it, and this just sounds like "complaining" or "being spoiled brats" to you, but that's how it is. High expectations for life after college, and all you need is "hard work." Well, we all put in the hard work and dedicated the past 10 or so years of our lives to a better life right after college, a life where we could finally become "real adults," and it wasn't there waiting for us. In fact, close to nothing was there waiting for us.
Please consider this generational difference when facing the enraged comments here, and more so on Salon. (P.S. Congrats on getting the front page!)
Your second paragraph contains the phrase, “sociologists have long considered the five milestones that signify adulthood.” This is an immediate invitation for readers to uneasily evaluate if these theories are obsolete. Surely, they are not concrete, as few things in the study of human behavior are, yet you treat them as the unwavering scientific foundation on which your opinion is based. This would be unquestionably criticized if you submitted this piece to any college Professor: the science of “adulthood” is, after all, still a relatively new field, and yet you manage to make it sound both outdated and unfairly qualified. I present to you a personal example: my friend Sarah has an impressive resume, has straight A’s, is capable of paying for her transportation and student loans with her own money from her two part-time jobs, baby-sits for over fifteen families as a casual third job and yet she lives at home. Is her emotional maturity annulled simply by the fact that she does not earn enough to purchase either a house or apartment? This suggests the issue is not so black and white as you may like to see it, no matter how many sociologists are involved.
This brings us to the fifth paragraph. You write, “Given that many people, especially in less developed parts of the world)… leap straight into adulthood,” without citing any source or statistic for this statement. My statistics Professor would fail you immediately. Also, you have an entire global history to contradict your statement. Consider the “less developed” areas of South America, where it’s actually far more traditional for children to stay close to nuclear family through all stages of life. Or how about the tribal tendencies of the African nations? My father spent years with the Peace Corp there and found that often families encouraged their sons to stay in the family house. One tribal family even adopted my father as a son, enthusiastically re-assuring him that they could never have enough children to keep home. This was done in the 1970s by the Chief of the tribe, and he gave a very clear reason: keeping his family close gave him and his children an opportunity for a thorough and lengthy education, in a familiar and nurturing environment, on how to lead the tribe and promote a prosperous and successful community themselves. They did not concern themselves with sociological milestones: they gauged a child’s maturity in a much more individual sense. It is almost ironic: a tribe in Africa, the near poster child for “less developed” areas of the world, can still produce people who contribute to society, learn life skills, and appreciate the traditions of the family all while unhindered by the imposed milestones of behaviorists that decree living at home is somehow bad. And yet why then is the American attitude, an attitude of a “more developed” nation, reflecting such a clinically un-individual insistence on a mass exodus from adolescence? Additionally, it proves that this is not a new phenomenon, but an issue with which the rest of the world has been dealing with for years (with a great deal less drama, I might add). To sum up this rather lengthy paragraph, I found this sentence of yours to be the first of many disturbing instances where you blithely ignore statistics, facts, and other cultural viewpoints.
Your sixth paragraph’s opening sentence perfectly represents your unfortunate habit of disregarding facts in favor of subjectively applied theories. So far you’ve only allotted a single sentence to the possibility of any influencing economic factors, which you have hastily (if not suspiciously) left unquantified. I found this to be the greatest flaw in this piece: during all the talk of this 20-somethings phenomenon, the economic climate of today’s market has been the very focus of the argument. Rather than address this by issuing insightful or factual counter arguments to the economic theories and then segueing into your personal sociological observations, you simply stew in memories of your past and vague generalizations of your peers. Worse, you attempt to proudly pass the whole thing off as an insightful addition to the pro-sociology side of the debate. A piece that could instead analytically deconstruct the pro-economic arguments would have better served the point you attempted to make.
The problem I mentioned above in regard to the “milestones” of adulthood cements itself in your seventh paragraph. You’re childless, you say? Then you have not marched alongside your steely working class peers to the ultimate destination of “Grown-Up.” You are, by the very sociological parameters you defined and evaluated us 20-somethings by, not an adult. Why, then, are you qualified to write this article? Certainly, you may have left the house at eighteen, but if you are just as bad at immediately meeting all the sociological requirements of adulthood yourself, why are you even writing this article? I am truly baffled by this: either it is somehow an oversight on account of poor writing, or you are a hypocrite.
Incidentally, your seventh paragraph contains the phrase “most of us fled our families.” I invite you to provide me with any reasonably reliable source to verify this information. Of course, while I do realize this is more of an opinion piece than anything likely to be published in a research journal, no article is a well written, well informed, or worthwhile article if it deals strictly in bland generalizations.
Paragraph eight made me laugh out loud. How many 20-somethings have you spoken to? I highly suggest your condescending manner and habit of expressing yourself in nothing but vaguely stubborn bouts of nostalgia have more to do with eyes glazing over than any inherent generational tendency to be awed by your time in the Ramen Noodle Trenches.
In all seriousness, though, this is the moment your piece lost any credibility. You seem to have spoken only to upper middle-class, white, American 20-somethings. Perhaps this is because you live in an area where that socio-economic class and race are most prevalent. But even so, what you’ve described as poverty of yesteryear is still very much so what I and my friends experience. Only, even after getting four people to go in on an apartment with her in the worst part of town, my friend LV still had to move back home with her Mother because her two jobs couldn’t pay her portion of the rent. Then, her Mother declared bankruptcy, and worst of all, her highest paying job ended as the business also declared bankruptcy. LV had to move in with a friend, M, who lived… you guessed it… in her parent’s basement. This has to be a serious economic indication: you don’t just have children moving back home, you have them so broke that they’re moving into other people’s homes. She doesn’t even have any battered belongings, she doesn’t even eat three meals a day, and her main source of entertainment is mocking the people at the local lobster counter where she desperately works overtime so she can try and pay M’s parents for her portion of the utility bill. My other friend, LT, couldn’t even get hired at a gas station. The town she lives in has less than 3,000 people and in the last six months has had a total of three job openings, two of them a pizza delivery gig and a gas station attendant position. She was underqualified for the pizza delivery job, and overqualified for the gas attendant job. She lives on a futon on her Father’s floor, venturing out on a secondhand bike to the only food she can afford, which is McDonald’s, and has nothing for entertainment but the free local library membership. So when you say the recession of the 70s and 80s rivaled the recession of now, stop and listen to yourself. There is, undeniably, a terrible economic situation in our country. It is different enough from the one that you grew up in to warrant its own evaluation; the job market nowadays, especially where I live, is almost unethically hostile towards both young and old workers. I have enough personal experiences to keep going on about, all of them exemplifying how your arguments based on theories are overshadowed by economic realities, but I’m afraid you’ll just roll your eyes and say my friends and I are exceptions to the rule that my generation is just too lazy and entitled to get that gas station job.
The next paragraph is where I come to what I believe is the emotional reason you wrote this article in the first place. Granted, I don’t know you personally, but I looked pretty closely at the text and tone of your article and your anecdote about recounting your onion soup story? It comes off as an obsessive attempt at recognition for some kind of poverty related street cred. It feels as though you can’t get past the fact you suffered a great deal of hardships, and your only release is to point fingers over the internet at children who may have had a better and easier time of going out into the world than you did. And 20-somethings are right to consider personal computers a necessity: most of the jobs we apply for, the jobs that we network for, the schools that we apply to and the schoolwork we complete, are all done online. In fact, a readily available computer is necessary for you to post your articles in the first place! Refurbished laptops can come cheap, and without them, us 20-somethings wouldn’t have as many chances to apply for the very financial independence that is the center of your argument.
A thought struck me as I finished reading your version of the cold, hard truth. You say that your generation didn’t have a choice about growing up, and that you just went ahead and became adults. What are the suicide rates for 20-somethings during the 1970s? Because I can’t imagine everyone was just as enthusiastic to flaunt their forced independence as you were. And I certainly doubt everyone was so wildly successful at building careers out of meager part time jobs. What about those who wanted to pursue jobs that they felt high school didn’t prepare them for? Wouldn’t they understandably need more time to prepare themselves? You have essentially taken no one else into account as you talk of “others of my generation.” What about the people who were clinically depressed adolescents? Did they fair as well as you? How about those who grew up without both parents or any financial aid toward their undergraduate degree? If they had a greater difficulty accepting that ultimate isolating familial independence, then it their fault? Are they to be humiliated and examined as “failures” simply because they were not in the mindset and environment you were in when you left the house? Any argument you can try to make against considering this in your article will sound impossibly narrow-minded. Just classifying them as the few who don’t fit into your category of “most us of” will not change the fact that their situations disprove your ideas and you are not willing to examine that in detail.
As for your argument about “no grad school,” the debt I am already in for my undergraduate school logically dictates I try to get my graduate degree as fast as possible, even if it means further debt. I could spend ten years in between my undergraduate and graduate degree working at McDonalds, trying to simultaneously pay off the loans that I took out for my undergrad degree and trying to save up for my graduate degree, but it wouldn’t be enough time. I’d need twenty years. Instead, I’m going to be another $60,000 in debt by the year 2014 so I can get my graduate degree faster; that way I can get the job I need the degree for in the first place and earn enough money to make a dent in my loans. If I, or other 20-somethings, waited until we could afford school, we would be waiting our whole lives. That certainly wouldn’t give us the skills we’d need to gain true financial independence. Your suggestion that we choose to borrow time and money toward negative ends is completely unfounded and impossible in the current economic climate.
I was actually stunned by your wish that 20-somethings would give up the time for “thinking about our life and how we’d like to spend it.” Isn’t your generation’s largest complaint about 20-something that we’re too hasty, too reckless, and we don’t slow down enough to give proper consideration to our decisions? Perhaps there would be fewer divorces, fewer unplanned pregnancies, fewer college dropouts and more satisfaction in the workplace if us 20-somethings took the time our parents gave us to actually think before we leap.
Then you write, “Once we left home, we were required to be completely financially independent – there was no subsidizing our health insurance.” This raises two issues. First of all, both my parents are baby boomers, and both of them moved back in with their parents at once time or another. They couldn’t think of many friends who simply left and never came back, either, so if you could at any point in your article drop the façade of speaking for others and simply and humbly point out your own experience, it would greatly improve the quality of the piece.
More importantly, it was your line about health insurance that caught my attention. I was at my very first job, two years into college almost 4,000 miles away from my family home, when I was injured in something of a freak accident. I became so ill – unable to eat more than once a day, unable to access my long-term memory, unable to resist sleeping seventeen hours a day as I literally starved to death – that my parents had to come and get me. The ensuing medical circus involved vitamin therapy, a vascular surgeon, a round of physical therapy for learning to walk again, and several hours and cheques sunken into the local hospital’s emergency room. Unable to work, unable to go to school, unable to function, I had to move into my childhood bedroom and rely on my parents once again for everything from food to transportation to medical bills. If they hadn’t decided to graciously take me in and had cancelled my health insurance plan, I most likely would have died. I would have had no way to pay for my procedures, as I was at an entry-level position that I had to vacate on account of my injuries. No one should gloat that they survived without health insurance, and no one should wish that situation on anyone. It’s incredibly cruel of you to proudly say that you never needed your parent’s health insurance, because I’m sure that even in your generation, there were those that did. I certainly know that I do. You could have gotten ill or injured in an accident at any time, and then you wouldn’t have had the privilege of writing on the internet years later about how you were so independent. The point I am trying to make is that there are circumstances that are beyond our control, especially as inexperienced 20-somethings, that can prevent us from soldiering out into the great unknown. Instead of accounting for this, or even empathizing about it, you treat the fact that you had relatively few economic and physical obstacles in your way as something to congratulate yourself for, when it is in fact something you should be grateful for.
You’ve failed to take any other shifts in the nuclear family into account. The wave of children moving into their childhood homes is one thing, but what of the wave of elderly folks moving in with their children? My grandmother moved in with my mother again a few years ago. Our neighbor’s mother just finished moving into her son’s house. In fact, Newsweek - a reputable and valid publication, unlike Salon.com – has identified this phenomenon as much more significant and relevant than the one of 20-somethings staying home. Should we roll our eyes at these elderly people because they need financial and physical assistance? Should we say they are being held hostage by their developmental weaknesses? No. Then neither of these attitudes should be applied to the third generation suffering from the same financial insecurity and situational instability. And incidentally, it is the generation that taught you your so-called truths of financial independence that now needs help, and as more of them turn back to their children for assistance paying the rent, I think you are going to have less and less to gloat about regarding their rigid financial principles and the not so positive lessons they taught you.
Your third to last paragraph paints a picture of my generation that is, at best, role-tinted. “…There’s a place where you truly feel at home. Most 20-somethings these days have that.” Divorce rates are higher than ever, more parents are going bankrupt and foreclosing on their houses, the age of homeless people is steadily decreasing, etc. When you see a 20-something on their laptop at Starbucks, do you really and truly assume they are living at home, willfully existing as an apathetic parasite in the mange of society as they take their alleged good fortune for granted? How do you know they aren’t staying home to help their parents with the younger siblings? How do you know they aren’t paying their parents rent? How do you know they have not borrowed the laptop from a friend and spent all week saving up to splurge on their delicious Frappuccino? Do you ask them about it? Or do you simply make assumptions at them from afar, envying their imagined familiar closeness and imagined generational laziness? Yes, there are member of my generation who take things for granted, and yes, there are some children who need more of a push than others, and yes, some helicopter parents raise children who are more hesitant to rush out into the so-called real world. But to post an article that is nothing but a pat on the back for not having any traumatic set-backs, existential crises, or loving parents along the way to pull you out of the march toward arbitrarily defined notions of adulthood? That is nothing but a disservice to my entire generation.
Now, if you feel this response to your article has taken a defensive tone, then I can say only this: it is because yours took an equally offensive defensive tone. You are making light of the circumstances my friends and I are suffering through. Two years into her undergraduate degree, when LT found out that she didn’t have the money to keep paying for her fairly inexpensive state college tuition, she ended up in the psychiatric ward – TWICE – for attempted suicide. She was so guilty and ashamed of being what you call “developmentally loitering” because she was so broke she had no choice but to move back in with her father. She was afraid of being judged by people like you – people who only pretend to take individual circumstances into account, and do so with an insultingly patronizing tone. I’ve cried myself to sleep for a fair share of nights over the fact that my parents have to deal with my medical co-pays and my student loans and the little things like I’m still playing my music too loud at the age of 22, so you know what?
How fucking dare you try to label me and judge me.
I’m going to keep telling myself and my friends that if we need that extra time, that extra push, that extra loan, those extra beds that our parents give us, then there is nothing wrong with that. Maybe all that extra family time and all those financial savings will prevent us from turning out to be bitter and outdated like you, you who wear your so-called poverty like a badge and let it teach you nothing of compassion.
It’s taken me twenty-two months in my childhood bedroom to get my health and my confidence back, and I am not going to let you belittle my financial dependence from your cozy position in a rocking chair on a porch just north of Whoville, shaking your cane at those darn kids on your lawn. I am proud to be where I am, even if it is in my childhood home, and I’m going to encourage my friends to feel the same. I have not chosen to be financially dependent, many of us of all ages and races and classes have not chosen to be financially dependent, but we can choose to still be proud of who are. We will become financially independent when we are good and ready, and there is nothing wrong with that at all.
Good day, Madam.
And, yes I live at home. Why, because it was the only way I could afford to finish university. I worked my ass off in high school and was accepted into one of the top public universities in the country, but FAFSA decided my single parent could afford to pay $40,000 out-of-pocket, when her salary was around $45,000/year. When I looked into the price of room and board at more traditional campuses in my state, it was still out of my price range. I've made sacrifices, I did go to the state school, I worked 30 hours a week on top of a full time course load, and full time in the summer my entire college career, but still ended up almost $40,000 in debt. My mother gave me NO money for college, but provided a roof over my head, I suppose I am coddled? She provided what she could for my education. I am grateful. Not everyone's parents can afford to coddle their children. Get out of your white upper-middle-class bubble.
I made it through college without a laptop, (I used public computers), I rode a bicycle, used public transportation, and no, I do not have a iphone. My phone makes calls. That's it. So don't tell me I'm materialistic, selfish or wasteful. Frankly, I hate our cultures rampant consumerism.
When my mom lost her job last year, most of my income contributed to the household. I graduated this May. My income keeps our struggling middle class life above water. I am lucky, I worked an internship during the last 2 years of my schooling that has guaranteed me a position with career potential. And yes, in a few months I will be relocating to a new city for this job. But even when I move, I will be living with extended family. Because I don't feel like that makes me a failure. I'm happy to have the opportunity to form deeper relationships with family members who normally I only see once every few years. And frankly, no I cannot afford to come up with the money for first months rent and deposit.
But I guess, because I had to live at home during college for financial reasons, I am a failure. I suppose because I stayed at home to prevent my mother and I from slipping into poverty because this country is waging war on the middle class, I am a failure.
Finally, do you really think we WANT to live at home? The stress is ridiculous, my mother and I's relationship has been crumbling over the past few years. The stress on our finances is ruining our relationship, it's true. We need our space. I WANT TO BE INDEPENDENT MORE THAN ANYTHING!!
I'm sorry you hate working people.
http://open.salon.com/blog/jamesbondoogle/2010/08/23/from_a_20-something
life is just too freaking complex and all families are different. shit happens that can change one's path in an instant. it is possible for one's child to live at home yet still be independent. it happens all the time around here in the boonies of central new york.
The kind of life my (then boyfriend, now) husband and I lived -- competing to see who could cook the best-tasting and nutritious meal for the lowest cost/serving -- considering ourselves fortunate to have a car, even if it was a junker -- crappy, unsafe, hot apartments -- Saturday afternoons at the skeevy corner laundromat -- that's how everyone I knew lived. You worked at whatever shite late 70s jobs came along and made the best of it, and most of us eventually got experienced and/or credentialed enough to rise back into the middle class (or what's left of it).
I still remember the complete thrill when I finally made enough money (at age 30)to use the laundromat's wash & fold service; our first new-new car; real vacations to actual hotels now and then.
I'm not saying my teenage son doesn't appreciate what he has. But he hasn't earned it, and I won't be surprised if he regularly comes back home when things aren't going well. However, I am not a helicopter parent and I will not be editing his college papers (yes, professors at my house just last night said parents actually do that!), advising him by cell phone what courses to sign up for, or reviewing his work via the internet for him.
One reason, perhaps, that my own parents didn't do any of the above: they weren't college graduates, and they had absolutely nothing to contribute to my college experience at a public ivy except their best wishes, their cash and their confidence in me.
Today's well-educated, empowered parents know too much!