Do These People Talk to Each Other?

[walkitout]

Over at the NYT last week, there was this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/books/review/how-to-raise-an-adult-by-julie-lythcott-haims.html

Don't waste your time. It's a kids these days/parents these days article of the form, if you are anxious and your kids are anxious you should Just Get Over It article. You would think we'd all be intelligent enough by this time to recognize how unhelpful this kind of advice is, but no, when you are doing undergraduate advising as your second act (after corporate law), you're bound to have some clashes with parents who Think They Know Better. So when third act is supposed to be an MFA in poetry, I suppose we should have expected an anti helicopter parenting screed. Get off My Lawn! But just note for the purposes of this juxtaposition, that it is about being LESS involved in the lives of young people, where young people are defined as undergraduate years.

This week, there is this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/opinion/the-cost-of-letting-young-people-drift.html

In this, young people are defined as 16 to 24, and the group in question is conspicuous in their absence from our two primary institutions, school and work. Things don't go well for them, a study or three say.

Good news: the piece starts with a paragraph about My Brother's Keeper, so I suppose a reader might go, oh, hey, I should worry less about my kid at Stanford (altho how you do _that_ given the tuition cost and other high stakes I am unclear) and instead pour myself into helping the less privileged around me?

But really, I think the real take away is that parents whose kids are largely happy and do well in school and have good executive function should maybe be less quick to poke at parents who are trying to get their kids through college, even tho the kids have deficits in executive function and maybe elsewhere as well. You may think your kids have great executive function because of your parenting, but I'm betting that anxious parents have anxious kids and this whole executive functioning thing probably has a significant genetic component to it.

The balance of the piece argues for more investment in public education (yay!), mentoring, etc., as well as finishing the project of desegregation. All things we should be working towards. Perhaps it would better for all of us if we adopted Een Zes is Goed Genoeg, like the Dutch; it might make us more willing to divert resources currently devoted to making the already excellent even more excellent and send them off to bring as many people as possible up to contributing competency.

Comments

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

"I would there were no age between sixteen and
three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the
rest; for there is nothing in the between but
getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry,
stealing, fighting--Hark you now!"
Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale)

More seriously, I think the parameter 16 to 24 is awfully broad and ends up grouping people it doesn't always make sense to group together. That second article isn't actually talking about, say, kids with chronic depression who drop out of school, any more than it's talking about a 24-year-old woman who's in a financially stable relationship and quit her job to stay at home with her new baby.

As for the first article, well, I do agree that people shouldn't be writing their kids' papers and resumes and such. But the main problem is the system where you're walking the straight-A tightrope and any deviation is a failure. If you've already fallen waaaaaaay off that tightrope anyhow, it's a lot easier to be honest.

I just got back from a college reunion, and I have to say it does hurt sometimes that my kids will none of them have the same kind of small-liberal-arts experience as B. and I did. But that sort of school is two or three times harder to get into than in our day, and two or three times more expensive, so even if I did have kids on the straight-A tightrope (or thereabouts), it likely wouldn't have been possible. It is pretty liberating to say, you know what, fuck it, there are other options. Because, for my kids, there are.

The weird thing I see in the second article is that no one seems to be looking at whether there is actually the capacity to absorb this swath of folks who aren't in school or in jobs. There would have to be seats in schools and be jobs for them to all be off the streets. To what extent are we using young (+poor +brown) people's supposed laziness as a tool for cost-cutting?

very apropos shakespear quote!

[walkitout]

I guess what is really going on is quite simple. We have automated our way out of the need for so many people (and by automation, I am including the automation of shipping that was the container revolution, which lowered trade barriers and made available other pools of vastly cheaper labor). You're right -- we don't have jobs for these people, we don't have places in school for them, and if we did, when they were done with school, we'd _still_ have not enough jobs. It is the problem of our age and one which is obvious when looked at from the policy/group perspective and rendered invisible when in a family with kids approaching this age range and contemplating how to make sure _my_ kids are the ones who are lucky enough to get those few jobs.

I used to want to get rid of jobs, or at least dramatically shorten the hours/work week. Over time, however, as I have watched how _bad_ it is for many people to not have the structure of something like a 5 day a week/35+ hour a week job, I am forced to rethink my position. But that's okay. I have an alternative position: CCC for the 21st century, amirite?!? It could easily sop up and help a lot of the people in the troublesome age group AND it would build us some infrastructure, that we would then reap the benefits of for decades to come.

Re: CCC

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Yeah, something like a CCC would be nice, but the other thing is the whole erosion of safety nets for society and businesses sitting on their money instead of employing more folks. I disagree that we've automated our way out of jobs as yet. I see plenty of jobs that need doing that no one is paying any attention to -- e.g., rich landlords who won't fix up their rentals are not only screwing their renters, they're screwing people who do house repairs who'd be glad to have the work. I also see lots of people who'd love to leave jobs they don't actually like much or find challenging and start their own businesses, but they don't have secure enough health care and what not to do that (Obamacare is starting to help some of these folks, but we haven't seen the full effect of that yet). That not only increases the number of businesses (some of whom will employ others) but opens up the jobs the new business owners have left to people who need that kind of job worse.