I tend to agree. It isn’t that young people are taking longer to grow up today, but that the post-WWII baby boom era was an anomaly. The idea that kids should “leave the nest” and be out on their own soon is by no means traditional in the long-term historical sense. Historically families have been centered around interdependence, and not achieving independence. IMO in this matter things may be improving and returning to the way things ought to be, rather than things are getting worse.
Yup, when you’re a kid you live off your parents, but you also collect close to $100,000 in k-12 schooling. Then you go to college and recieve another $60,000 or so in state and federal welfare. Then you get out into the real world with FICA backed banks, a variety of labor laws and first time homeowner mortgages. Then you retire with social security, corporate pensions & medicare.
Somewhere in that chain of events you become independent. Yehaw.
FDIC backed banks.
even sven said:
Sure it is. You just did it. Every generation thinks they have it tough when they’re young, because it IS tough when you’re young, no matter what era you are born into. You start out with zero experience and no money, and have to figure out a way to make it in the world.
But frankly, young people have it better today than they ever did. Unemployment is low, new educational opportunities are all over the place, there is more wealth, and life is better. More kids go to college today than ever before. More young people own their own vehicles than ever before. They have more disposable income than they ever had - why do you think the key demographic for advertisers is 18-30? Young people have tons of disposable income. And, as this thread has shown, many of them have the luxury of living at home well into their adult years if they so choose. Back in the 50’s, when the average family had 3-5 kids and the average house size was 900 square feet, that just wasn’t an option.
Frankly, I think that young people may be having a tough time of it simply because they are spoiled. They go to college and study things that aren’t practical, just to ‘broaden’ themselves. Their parents indulge them and let them live at home while they ‘find themselves’. They have the luxury of turning down jobs they don’t like and waiting for that ‘special’ job. Then one day they discover that they’re 28, with no job history and a degree that’s five years old and not applicable to anything they want to do, and they cry about how tough the world is, and how unfair life is.
This hardly seem normal to me on a farm. Makes sense in a family of a factory worker. Kick the kids out so you don’t have to support them. However, on a farm so long as the children can be useful workers on the farm they can stay there indefinitely. The reason that the US moved from extended family structures to the “nuclear family” (I’ve always found that term ironic, as nuclear particles are unstable and decay) is that the nuclear family makes sense in an industrial society.
I’m sorry, but I was referring to single people for my criteria. You see I do believe all people should have at least a few years to experience independence rather than be subjected to their parents then live under the rules and controls of another without any time of independance acting as an adult. However, if we want to talk about a marriage situation then I will expand my criteria.
Considering those stay at home parents are actually being responsible for the care and raising of their children and are acting in the role of an adult (not depending on their parents for all decisions or relinquishing all decisions to another including their spouse) then I would consider them adults as well. They are demonstrating responsibility they are exercising independent ideas and contribute as an equal in the family.
As far as the lower wager earner is concerned, well they must at least exercise some responsibility towards family finance and decison making. To simply hand your paycheck to another and let them make all the plans for the family is not being an adult. You must play an active part in family finances. Also where applicable they must take up slack where the other cannot.
In my family I make the lower wage. That does not mean I let my wife make all the rules as to how our money is spent. I have responsibilities and can not ignore them. On top of that because my wife’s job requires more of her time I take up the slack by spending the required time with our children. During the week I’m the one who picks the kids up from school, makes sure dinner is on the table and homework is done. I am sharing the responsibities of the family as an equal.
As for those who want to know what I think of the idea that because they pay a rent to their parents they are equally and adult I will say only this. If you are legitimately involved in household finances of the family unit and not just paying a token rent there may be an argument there. But you better not be telling me that mom still makes your lunches and does your laundry while Dad drives you to work or pays your insurance etc.
I understand the idea of staying at home to save costs and have enough to put a downpayment on a first home, but if you exercise no independence and do not actually contribute anything to the household aside from a token amount then forget it.
If you are covering your fair share of costs (50% of the mortgage cost is more than fair I’d say) of your parent’s home and living in an independent manor the yes, you are no different to one who rents out a room or basement from a stranger or shares a place with others. It is a matter of degrees.
However, in most cases, it is impossibble to be an equal member of a family where parents are concerned unlesss they are living with you and not you with them. In their eyes you are still their child and the idea that the child is an equal to the parents is foreign to most family groups. In most cases you are living under **their ** roof.
There is still the psychological barrier that is hard to break.
So allow me to expand my answer a little:
The ones I do not consider as self sufficient are the ones who pay a small percentage of their income or none of it toward living expenses, do not have any say in the finances of the family, do not exhibit any sense of responsibility to the others other the family unit and allow others to do the basic things for them
That they should be able to do for themselves. They must also be considered an equal in the family unit for it to work.
Since you’re married and make the lower wage don’t you think that’s a little hypocritical of you to set up a double standard?
You’re twisting yourself in a pretzel to come up with a consistent criteria for “adulthood.” What you really mean, I think, is that parasitism is bad and contributing is good. Nobody’s going to argue THAT point.
It sounds like you didn’t contribute anything to the household when you lived at home and did pretty much whatever you wanted, and now you feel the need to pass pretty harsh judgement on anyone that lives at home as if they were all the parasitic younger you.
Even the single criteria (which is a big factor, raising 3 kids is different than only supporting yourself) has some flaws in it. What if person A lives in a place with high real estate, or has a medical problem, or the job market is hellish in their area and person B doesn’t.
I myself have no medical problems (health insurance is $45/month for me), and I live in an area where I could get my own bedroom in an apartment or house for $100-150 a month if I was willing to relocate. If I got a roommate in my bedroom I could cut my rent down to $0-50/month. If I sold my car and rode the bus while doing that I could survive fine on $450/month (not including those large misc. expenses everyone runs into though, ie medical care, school supplies, new computer, etc). But a person in Boston couldn’t survive on $450 and neither could a person with a chronic medical condition.
I understand having universal criteria for being an adult and I have my own (mine mostly involve the mental maturity to handle setbacks), but some people have a harder time meeting those criteria, sometimes for reasons beyond their control or they have to jump over alot more hurdles to obtain those criteria.
Well that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? Only a non-adult doesn’t have to worry about school loans, mortgages, work related issues, etc (I don’t know where you get the $100k in K-12 schooling though).
I think that’s part of it. If I were really an “adult” at 23 when I graduated college, I would have found a cheap appartment in the town where my college was and taken a job bartending or whatever to pay the bills until I found a real job. Instead I moved back in with my folks and spent my time hanging out with high school and college buddies. That’s the big difference. For the most part, a true “adult” doesn’t have the luxury of running to his folks just because he can’t make ends meet.
Let me just also say that for many young people who want to be adults, often they can’t because of the high cost of living.
I hear you, I thought the same thing at first blush. However, a lot of the older individually run farms were of smaller size. I imagine there was only so much room for multiple adults, each of whom would have wanted to run things (and quite likely would have been capable, since living on a farm basically means you are training for how to run a farm for a good chunk of your formative years). What I have found is that the oldest child often stayed around (because he would inherit the farm), while the younger ones were pushed out on to their own at a certain point.
Of course, another point is that the same sharing of resources logic could apply to factory work; it would be cheaper to rent or own shared living space in a city, and your kids could go work at the factory and contribute the money earned there into the communal family fund. I think that there was simply a different logic at work - you “made your own way back” in the early part of the century.
I always thought it meant that the nucleus of the family was the parents and 2.5 kids, as opposed to a larger extended family. I guess it does also imply a modern (nuclear-age) family, but ironically they are often broken by divorce.
Sam Stone: *young people have it better today than they ever did. *
If sven’s assessment may be too pessimistic, I think yours is definitely too rosy. The average young person today has a huge amount of debt in college loans. Healthcare, education, and housing are way more expensive than they used to be, far outpacing the rise in cost of living. Fewer young people have any health insurance at all. Career ladders are much less stable than in earlier decades, and entry-level jobs are more likely to be temporary or part-time. Real wages for entry-level jobs have declined even for college graduates. And this has been happening even while college students have made a significant shift away from the “impractical” subjects you’re blaming, in order to major in more career-friendly fields like science, technology, or business.
No, I think it’s impossible to argue convincingly that young people today are really better off financially than ever, and those who are dissatisfied are simply “spoiled”.
Sam: *And on the flip side, young people living at home tend to have their own vehicles, cell phones, internet connections in their rooms, and a social culture that tolerates a lot more freedom for young adults. *
This is a very good point. Whatever we may say about other resources and benefits, personal technology is certainly much more abundant and cheap than it used to be, and it gives young people more “virtual autonomy” and opportunities for interaction with their peers even if they’re physically still in their parents’ houses.
Also, there has been a sort of generational “synchronization of mores” that recent generations of youth didn’t have. During and after the sixties, it began to be widely accepted that young people would have sex before marriage but that their parents would disapprove of it. Having an open sexual relationship while still living under your parents’ roof would have been practically impossible. Now that those young people are parents themselves, there is less of a generational clash between them and their children.
Why on earth should I think of it that way? By that criterion, everyone who benefited from an inheritance is not an adult.
[QUOTE=Sam Stone
But my daughter is 7 now, and I’m thinking that it’ll be fine if she lives at home until she’s 30. We have more disposable income than our parent’s generation had. We have bigger houses. Multiple cars. Several TV’s and computers. We’re rich in personal resources. And on the flip side, young people living at home tend to have their own vehicles, cell phones, internet connections in their rooms, and a social culture that tolerates a lot more freedom for young adults.
.[/QUOTE]
I agree, there are alot of benefits to living today as opposed to 50 years ago. Nowadays you can use autotrader to find a great deal on a car instead of having to buy whatever is on sale at the local dealer. And many consumer goods and necessities like food have gone down in real cost in regards to how much work you must do to buy them.
But there is also the flip side. Corporate pensions are largely gone so you have to save 10% of your income by yourself. Taxes are 40% higher, real estate is higher, healthcare is higher (thought largely because its better) & student loans are commonplace.
So in the end its hard to say really.
The important part there is “assuming he’s contributing to the household”, and the extent of that contribution. Most of my friends lived with their parents for some period of time after college, as did I. For the most part we paid for our personal items- clothing,shampoo, ate most meals out, perhaps paid for an extra cable box. The sorts of things that can be allocated to a particular person. But only one person kicked in more than a token $20 a week or so to the general household expenses- rent or mortgage, insurance, repairs, food, utilities laundry detergent. That’s not the same combining of income that you have with a roommate.
Maybe they aren’t? If growing up you never worked a day in your life or only worked jobs given to you by your dad, inheret a ton of money, do nothing all day but shop and drive your sports car at 28, are you really an adult? There’s a reason that trust-fund babies of adult age are often depicted in movies and TV as spoiled man-infants.
That’s always been a problem with young folks. They usually reach an age where they want and can handle adult responsibilities long before they have the means to. They usually forget that until they can support themselves, they have to follow the rules of the landlords (IOW parents).
I don’t…what, are we going to send out drill sergeants to everyone’s homes to demand point-by-point lifestyle accountability and fill out a report? At the end of which you will be awarded some sort of official certificate of rights and responsibilities, or shipped off to undergo merciless re-education?
Maybe all this is just phase one in a master plan to determine those who are fit to survive in the coming New Order… :dubious:
Love this post. This is what I’ve been thinking the whole thread.
That’s very amusing and all. Except that being an adult means that you can’t always get what you want when you want it. It means that you don’t get to live a high standard of living if you can’t afford it. A spoiled child says “I deserve it” and “it’s not fair”.
It becomes a real issue if people maintain an adolescent attitude into adulthood and it prevents them from holding a job or being self sufficient. In the end you are only accountable to yourself, provided you are only accountable to yourself.