Childhood

Eric Hansen It is sooooooooooo tough. It makes me absolutely crazy that someone who serves our country could ever write the words “Now I’m on my own and baaaaarely making bills.” I am SO sorry that is the reality of your life. I think it is shameful. That should never be your reality. And I don’t know how to solve this huge problem…..

Eric Hansen THAT is exactly the argument against raising the minimum wage. That employers cannot afford it and therefore fewer people will be working. But the actually problem is, IMO, a mountain of interlocked problems at this point and only one of them is increasing a person’s base salary. It is an actually lack of jobs, decreased manufacturing in the States, the longtime outsourcing of work to other countries where it can get done much less expensively (in countries that are less expensive to live in) than here in the States and the now accepted “new norm” of short contracts, no vacation days/pay, no sick days/pay and few promotional opportunities. I don’t have the answers either. The economic sandwich seems to be increasingly composed of people like the young 27 year old woman featured in this article and older, still very viable workers, who also cannot find meaningful, let alone, financially viable employment.

In my very current case, the company doesn’t have money to pay employees because sales have been down for five years in a row. We’ve had a tremendous sale on carbon fiber road bikes for going on a month now, and moved like three units. We do OK on super entry level bikes, but we have to sell four to six of those to equal one nice bike. Overtime is out of the question; if the manager lets someone get paid overtime hours, he’d be fired immediately.

For the most part, in my little developing country, it is not uncommon to see children as young as 6 or 7 helping their families make a living in small ways. In the cities. Move out to the rural areas and you might get 6-7 year old children working full time while getting a rudimentary education (it would be against the law not to send one’s kids to school).

The problems alluded to in this article are large and I don’t know the answers to any of them, however. There is also, in Malaysia, the sense that we are starting to see the emergence of four (or more) economies; the top echelon is largely composed of a rent-seeking elite (mostly presumed to be corrupt) who have tremendous amounts of wealth and who would not be out of place buying entire buildings in the Upper East Side, a thin urban middle class, an urban underclass, and the abject poor at the bottom.

Michael O’Reilly and, I’m sorry to say, I think there is a mindset among many, many people who do not actually want to see people rise up out of economic hard times. It’s a falsely Darwinian, survival-of-the-fittest too bad for you if you can’t figure it out value system. Bumpy indeed.

Also,

“After graduating from Loyola University Chicago, Kasinecz struggled to support herself in the midst of the recession, working a series of unsatisfying jobs“

WELCOME TO LIFE

The annoying thing is that life is demonstrably worse, even for the very wealthy, when wealth- and income-inequality are high. Sure, life’s really good for the rich even in an unequal society, but it’s even better for them in a more equal society. It’s in their own best-interest, but so many of them don’t get it.

I’m afraid my outlook must be somewhat skewed by the fact that I was working, trying to finish high school and supporting a grown man at the age of 16, way back in the day.  I don’t remember any sense of entitlement among my peers, either.  You got out and took care of your life and the world moved on.  The old joke was a visual of mom on the phone talking to one of her late-teens-kids saying, “Oh, no, honey, I don’t think so, we’ve rented your room.”

Michael O’Reilly I am sensing some faulty economic wisdom in what you are proposing but this is probably true for many proposals… By stuffing money into pockets, economic and social problems are not solved. If they were governments would print money and distribute it and everyone would be happy. Actually governments do this sometimes in times of despair and it has never been heard of that problems were solved, rather inflation comes in to whatever mess is there already.

I believe that entitlement is self-esteem bolstering gone seriously wrong.  There are obviously exceptions, but do kids have the same work your butt off, no job is beneath you, your future is in your own hands attitude that we had when we were young?  Work is never about what you want to do.  It is about what you have to do to succeed.  Maybe, hopefully, paying your dues today will someday lead to your vision of success, but don’t expect to be “happy” when you first start your career.  Maybe the quest for “happy” causes too many to not even start.

Matthew Graybosch too much expectation.  Not enough action.  

I cleaned video games at about 8, had a paper route at the same time for a few years, worked at McDonalds at 15, worked at a sub shop, and worked at Radio Shack before I graduated from college.  My first job after earning a mathematics degree from a top school was … customer service.  Trying to excel at every single thing I did and discovering my passion, led to my big opportunity about 3 years later.  Even then it was only an opportunity and it took a good attitude, hard work, learning everything possible, and continuous improvement to realize the potential of the opportunity.  If today’s kids can not worry about what they don’t have and set themselves on course to be great at everything they do, they will get somewhere … in time.

I worked at 15 because I got a permit through the school’s career center.  I think the normal work age would have been 16 without the permit.

There are teens and college-age kids working at fast food and sales jobs all over the place where I live.  Maybe the issue you’re describing with healthy adults taking fast food jobs from kids is geographically based.  But my point stands.  College graduates might think the degree by itself is a key that automatically unlocks the golden door.  It it their motivation and skills that will earn them everything they achieve.  The piece of paper hopefully helped them to learn to focus, learn, and communicate, but there are a lot of college graduates out there.  You have to compete to be amongst the best of them.  

Yikes. In between meetings. So grateful for all of your comments. Will read through everything before commenting back. Thank you all!

Matthew Graybosch who is teaching kids that doing what you’re told and working hard in school leads to a good life?  First of all, those are the bare minimums to avoid having a bad life.  Just playing the game will not earn you a participation trophy.  

Secondly, kids will learn lessons and skills from every job they have.  Maybe they will hate some of those jobs.  Great.  Pay the bills, don’t let those negative feelings show through, and feel inspired to not become stagnant.  There are so many things to learn from every opportunity.  Observe your manager and start to assess and compile what your own management style will be.  Observe the business and formulate opinions on how businesses succeed and fail.  Develop the ability to interact effectively with customers and coworkers.  Those skills will be essential in any future job.  Learn when to voice thoughts and when to keep them to yourself.  

Thirdly, most really successful people say that you have to fail over and over and over again in order to achieve a success.  No one starts off day one as the boss.  Start chalking up those failures, learn something from each one, and maybe these kids will feel thankful twenty years down the road that things didn’t come too easy when they stepped off the campus. 

Matthew Graybosch my comments weren’t directed towards your situation.  Hopefully today’s college graduates will be open-minded about their prospects and their future and not give up before they’ve even started.

Eve A I have not read that book. Thank you for telling me about it. Several years back I was walking to a coffee shop on Irving Place in New York. A well-to-do young mother was pushing her no longer so young daughter (she seemed to me to be about five) in a stroller and the little girl was fussing. The sidewalks were sort of bumpy and broken on that side of the street and it wasn’t a very cushy ride. As I passed them I heard the mother say that she would find a sidewalk that was smooth.

I really never forgot it because I thought it was so odd. Am I making a judgement? Possibly. Might it not have been wise of that mother? Possibly. Is there such a thing as a smooth ride or a sidewalk without cracks? Not that I have every seen.

Hi U-Ming Lee. I now that is considered normal there and most people in our country would call it child labor abuse. I know parents who give their children chores (I had lots and lots). I know parents whose children never do anything for themselves. I remember the hoopla over Michele Obama announcing that the White House staff does not make her daughters’ beds. They are expected to clean up after themselves just as they would back home in Chicago.

Might these issues be related? Meaning…what we do at home is reflected in what we create in our society?

No, Nila Jones it is not about courage. Sadly…except for possibly the courage to suffer the consequences of taking a chance? What would you do, let’s say if you had a notion about something? Would you take the chance this woman did? Actually I post this for everyone here…because I think it’s really a great story and interesting. Mom. No education. Worked very hard. Sold everything she owned. Took a risk. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/12/business/smallbusiness/my-previous-bosses-are-now-my-customers.html?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3As

I’m not good on an iPad so forgive my mistakes please. Nila Jones that is sort of what I mean. If one is the entrepreneurial sort life looks different, and perhaps less scary because there is a different set of expectations and, in my experience, a different kind of resiliency.

I do not mean that to sound critical of people who aren’t…because I think that entrepreneurial instincts are literally being bred and taught OUT of kids in school. There is a be afraid, be afraid, be very very afraid thing going on and that is not good for business the economy and evolution. IMHO.

For the average person selling one’s belongings and betting everything on a new venture is equivalent to slitting one’s wrists!

Good point,  Giselle Minoli .  I think part of the millennial ‘thing’ is the idea that it is not ok to be anything but superlative.  Otherwise, better not to try.

Us genXers know we are doing well just to get by: Even 20 years later, the people who graduated into the recession of the early ’80s were making substantially less money than people lucky enough to have graduated a few years afterward, when the economy was booming.

Good morning Brian Titus. I didn’t read any of the commentary on the article. I try to avoid it, in a way, because it can be so incendiary. The odds. Yes, they do seem to be stacked. But my sense is that they are stacked against people at the other end as well. I don’t know anyone who wants to retire or be forced out of their job because the company wants employees who are earning more off the payroll, to be replaced by younger and less experienced people. But that, too, is happening everywhere.

The “economics” of being a productive person seems grim. That’s why, I suppose out of curiosity but also out of instinct, the entrepreneurial, self-invention part of this conversation – in terms of the evolution of a culture – is what interests me the most. What is the evolution of this in terms of how we function? Gone, and I do almost mean long gone, are the days of being “company men.”

So, perhaps it’s just me but I don’t know that it’s a youth issue.

I do think, however, that people who come to the US from other countries – this is true in the medical world – are willing to work for less money, because compared to where they came from, less is more. And I think this is hurting us. So is it perspective? Training? Belief system? All of the above? None of the above?

The article seems to me to be full of self-contradictions, and I am much more intrigued by the discussion here. Many of you seem to assume that people just OUGHT to work at whatever jobs even if they don’t really HAVE to — in the cases described in the article, they don’t have to, because their parents can support them, and are willing to do so. For what it’s worth, it’s just the middle-class version of “inherited wealth”, which for this generation gives just a bit more options for the start of their life (e.g. they can use a multitude of absolutely FREE possibilities to get more knowledge or skills, including lectures from some top universities; or write novels; or whatever). The idea that there is something bad about this, that these young people should instead go and work at unsatisfying and barely paying jobs just BECAUSE strikes me as very socialist (“who doesn’t work, doesn’t eat”, as Marx put it).

That said, my son achieved financial (and “residential” independence) from us at a younger age than both me and my parents (21 for him, 25 for us), but that was because his fellowship for graduate studies was enough to live and focus on those studies and related work (while ours weren’t nearly enough, so we were supported by our parents to some extent all through graduate studies). If my son’s graduate fellowship hadn’t been sufficient, we would have willingly supported him, “paying forward” as it were what we received from our parents.   

Giselle Minoli I think that the hope of getting a company job is a romanticization these days. Very good point!

Lena Levin it’s just the middle-class version of “inherited wealth” Another excellent point!

Lena Levin I can’t find the part in the article that discusses using living at home to write novels (or whatever). I think the article is an analysis of how seriously our economy has changed such that there even is a boomerang kid…as well as the changing attitudes about working itself. “We’re kind of in this limbo phase where we’re expected to be these great professionals who come out of college with bomb-ass jobs,” she said of her generation. “And then we’re like, Wait. I’ve got 80 grand in debt. How am I supposed to do that?” I thought that was interesting because I don’t recall a time when the expectations of graduates is that they immediately enter the work force with bomb-ass jobs. And perhaps that is the issue. That is/was a reality for so few people.

Honestly I think it’s reverse dumping (if there is such a phrase). People who are willing to do less than glamorous work to support themselves seem to be maligned, as if there is something fundamentally stupid about them or flawed in their thinking. Some kids want to be out on their own, no matter the hardship.

Not sure where the “bomb-ass” idea comes from today, but certainly in my day, we had the notion of “entry level” jobs. And that did not mean McDonalds…

I could see some of the (delusional) thinking being along the lines of — “hey, I took on 80K in debt for my education, so there MUST be a bomb-ass job on the other side of that, right?” I do feel sorry for these kids. 

Brian Titus add to that the concern that because it is so difficult to get a job, my students are electing to. continue higher education, thus increasing their debt load, because they want to be productive and they want to feel engaged in their lives. I don’t blame them. I don’t know what the solution is Brian Titus. But I do see it on the other end as well, with so many people being forced to leave their jobs long before they have used up their viability as employees. They are not old enough to claim social security and make use of their pensions…but they still have bills to pay and they, too, want to be useful and productive.

Somehow Brian Titus I do think a new way of working, a new way of employing and being employed, is going to evolve from this. We cannot have huge numbers of unemployed and homeless people living in America.

Giselle Minoli — the article has an example of a young woman who uses living at home to organize her business (care and education of children with autism); the “writing a novel” thing comes from G+. 

I believe the article itself shows that the “society” doesn’t expect them to be “great professionals” right out of college; nobody in their right mind can expect that (this happens only as an exception). Nearly all “great professions” in these 20% of economy he talks about do require further education (continuing throughout life), some of which can be done “on the job”, but certainly not if that job has nothing to do with the intended profession.

One question here is: if the budding writer’s (or artist’s) parents are willing to give them some time just to write and support them (so they can write without working three jobs) — as is the case for a young man I know here on G+, should the young people refuse this help (because one must pay their own bills), or should they take it? Obviously, if this budding writer has really wealthy parents, they can just use their trust fund (and nobody would malign them for that), but what about not-quite-so-wealthy parents who are able and willing to do just that: room and board, to give their daughter or son time to develop their writing, or other artistry, or other kind of self-study, or business, for that matter? I don’t see what’s wrong with that, and some “boomerang kids” certainly belong in this category (I know some on G+, and I know a couple “in real life” (friends’ kids), and there is one example in the article, too). It can be seen as an expansion of childhood, I guess, but I still don’t see why such a person shouldn’t take the opportunity for full-time writing (or painting, or music, or business start-up without debts), and why their parents shouldn’t use part of their earned wealth to help them with this.

As for “there are no jobs” — yes indeed, it seems that the number of low-qualification jobs is now considerably less than the number of people seeking them (I read recently that the competition for an opening at Walmart is now higher than for a place at top universities). This adds another dimension to the question above: the young person who could accept their parents’ help but refused it, would be taking the job from someone who really desperately needs it to pay the bills.

I don’t even think this problem is a matter of recession (which seems to be over anyway) — it’s a more global trend (as stated in the article, too). The efficiency of production these days is such that much fewer work-hours are needed to supply everyone with all the necessary material stuff, and more: not enough to give full-time jobs to 80% of people (I take 80% from the article), and this tendency will only increase. The economy has long been running on the idea of increasing the amount of material stuff one person “consumes”, but it becomes increasingly obvious that this is a dead end (if only for ecological reasons). But this situation, although it looks like a deep crisis, is also an opportunity — and I happen to see young people who take their time to think (and even “just be”) as rather a good sign in this respect (just like one researcher mentioned in the article). The future generations will certainly need the ability to “just be” and enjoy life (as opposed to “being productive” all the time) if they don’t want to destroy this planet completely.

Well, that’s what I meant from the start: in my opinion, the article looks at the problem too narrowly. 

I can make a list of what I mean by “too narrowly”… 🙂 in this particular case, “too narrowly” means using two women as in some sense representative of the whole population of “boomerang kids” (and there is no evidence they are). If one wants to understand what’s going on, we would need some idea of what majors have they graduated with, what exactly are they doing while they are at home (e.g. employed and saving for downpayment, developing new skills, starting a business, working part-time, etc. etc.), and some idea of the distribution of attitudes to this situation (their own, their parents’, the peers, the society as a whole).  

I think what we tend to forget is that not only is “childhood” as we view it now a fairly modern construct but so is the idealized white suburban nuclear family…which in America came into fashion after WWII mostly to sell more stuff. If every family lived in its own ticky-tacky house, then each of them would need a car, a washer/dryer, a lawnmower, and so forth.

Fast forward a couple of generations and now each child needs his own room, and television, and iPad, iPhone, and eventually a car. That’s what the marketers want us to believe.

Historically (and in other cultures across the world) the more natural family is the extended family. When I lived in Japan, it was not odd for most children to live with their parents: my female colleagues lived with their parents well into their 30s, despite having jobs. My male colleagues also lived with their parents, with their wives moving onto the family farm to raise the next generation.

My own parents gave most of us a stake to buy our houses: either a flat loan (which in my case, I paid back in full) or a rent-to-buy scheme for several of my siblings. We have then done the same with our children. Better for our children to rent from us (and keep the money in the family…why pay rent to a stranger?) and eventually inherit the property.

We have come to the end of sustainable growth. We can’t buy our way to prosperity. It’s hard to find a job and even harder to support a family on one income. These days it takes two. So, yes, it sucks to have paid a lot for an education that doesn’t deliver on its promise of prosperity. (I know…my own son just graduated from a well-thought-of business school to dismal prospects.)  But if it spells the destruction of the nuclear family and takes us back to a more traditional extended family, I see that as a silver lining.

—

PS. Brian Titus Thanks for pinging me in. However, I think it is this article, Race to the Bottonm on how privatization is gutting the middle class that is more pertinent to this discussion than Jill Lepore’s excellent piece on the myth of disruptive innovation.

http://www.inthepublicinterest.org/sites/default/files/Race_to_the_bottom.pdf

Giselle Minoli Yes. A lot of people don’t have friends or family or  church to rely on, which is why I believe in strong civil services. Because I live quite apart from the rest of my family, I struggled on my own in my 20s and 30s without the kind of support that my sibling and now my nieces and nephews enjoy. But none of us are trust fund babies or anything like it. As a family we balance precariously on the divide between blue-collar laborers and white-collar civil or military service.

My point wasn’t to say that all’s right with the world because youngsters can always move back in with their parents. I don’t believe that at all. What I was trying to say is that living with one’s parents shouldn’t stigmatize a generation as failures, or even as unnatural. People shouldn’t assume that just because a couple of generations has lived alone and apart from each other, that the world has always been this way.

I remember the same kind of discussions in the reverse about the new “highly mobile” society, quick to move and break ties with family and friends in order to take a better job elsewhere. In the 1960s, people acted as if that was shocking and as if cutting ties would rend the very fabric of society, destroying our sense of community as we all abandoned small town life for an anonymous existence in the big uncaring city. But what the alarmists seemed to have forgotten is that’s exactly what our immigrant ancestors did when they left the old country to come to America.

Economic downturn, like any disruptive factor, forces us to reexamine conventional wisdom. My main point was to remind people that living apart in suburbia has been the norm only for about three generations for a small part of the world population. I think we’re in another societal shift and I fear a lot of people (including people in my own family) will fall through the cracks. But I also think we need to explore new ways of organizing our society to meet these new challenges. And that always begins with rethinking what’s desirable and what’s possible.

Just read this article. I want to switch it around. When my daughter was 26, I grew tired of supporting her. I was 59 years old and I was done. I was broken. It seemed as if I had spent my entire life supporting others and I had nothing to show for it. Every penny I had ever earned had been spent on giving to others and I had no money, no income, and about to become homeless.

I thought about it, realized that there was no space for me in the world anymore, and wrote to my sister and told my daughter that I was seriously considering euthanasa.

Things changed with my daughter overnight. She committed to taking care of me, and instead of daughter moving back home, daughter and mother moved to daughter.

During the next three years, my daughter grew up. She finally became an adult. She understood that money wasn’t for going partying with friends and doing yet another ‘cosplay.’ It was for paying the rent and buying food. She also finally realized that a job was about working to pay the rent and buy the food – not about a l ife of fulfilment through one’s work.

Moving on, in another six weeks, I will be moving out, once again taking up my own life.

I leave behind a daughter who has finally grown up. No, she isn’t earning a fortune – she never was. She is steadily paying off her student loan, and she has a steady, of low paid job. But she can live off it once I am ‘out of the house.’ Not the way I was able to live when I was her age, but well enough.

I feel confident that she will manage, with a more realistic view of life. Her take on ‘looking after mother’ at the relatively young age of 26?

Here’s what she tells her friends.

“You know what? It’s the norm in Japan. It’s only our society where children don’t look after their parents when their parents grow old. It’s my responsibility.”

So, yes, times have changed. Children have moved back with their parents. But I see another day coming – when parents move back with their children, because life is about to become very, very hard. Job obsolescene is a matter of a decade away…

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