When Adults Fail the Young

And the young figure it out

A generation or two of young Americans are waking up to an uncomfortable reality: many of the adults in their lives failed them:

· They were and continue to be mal-educated. Fewer than one-third of the nation’s elementary schoolers can read at grade-level proficiency, and college students are no better in math. When the president told Fox’s Laura Ingraham in an interview last month that the country lacks the homegrown talent to be self-sufficient, he was not being provocative. He was telling an uncomfortable truth.

· Economic malpractice has priced many out of the American Dream. When the new millennium dawned, the median home price was about $150,000; today, it’s about three times that amount. In addition, years of quantitative easing and near-zero percent interest rates conspired to devalue the dollar and erode purchasing power.

· A misguided (or was it intentional?) program of social engineering that fixated on identity and established a grievance culture has predictably created a climate of mistrust between the sexes and hostility among the races.

Those are just the macro-level institutional failures. There is also a micro-level driven by individuals. This includes the overprotective parents who swaddled their progeny in bubble wrap and marinated them in Purell, ensuring that their children would be unprepared to deal with any adverse outcome. It includes the education professionals who eliminated valedictorians, instituted grade inflation, and provided safe spaces to protect young adults from ideas that might not mirror their own.

It became a punchline to laugh at participation trophy culture without acknowledging who established it. Hint: it was not the kids. In short, if you want to know why millennials and Gen-Z are what they are, they got that was honestly, through learned behavior that was reinforced time and again.

When young people never experience a skinned knee, defeat, a poor grade that stems from poor work, or any other negative result, they will freak out in the face of genuine difficulty. The sense of entitlement was baked in, along with the expectations of what life would hold – steady jobs with attractive salaries and the appropriate work/life balance, plus a house like their parents’ in the city of their choice, and whatever toys they want. Except that’s not how real life works. It’s not how real life has ever worked.

Many of the people who created this problem knew better. Several put themselves through college, a majority worked while in high school to earn spending money, drove the family beater, and understood that there is no such thing as free anything. Who did they think this approach would fool? Every child knows which kids are the smartest, the best athletes, the most talented musicians, and so forth. The most profound result of this misguided adventure was to erode merit, eliminate the incentive to perform well, and create a sense of entitlement. So, what is being done about it?

In a word, nothing. The elders engage in generational arrogance and the usual recriminations of how those who follow are softer and self-centered. Anyone in my age group remembers hearing about the older crowd’s tales of walking in waist-deep snow both ways, no matter the destination, so part of this is natural. But while the adults tell them “suck it up” or “quit whining,” the yoots are tuning into Nick Fuentes, electing New York City’s next mayor, or looking for anyone who can fill the vacuum of hopelessness that has been created.

The jobs that recent graduates prepared for are instead going to H1-B visa holders who will work for less, or those positions are being erased by AI. They’re told to “pay your loans like I did,” by people whose tuition costs were far lower than they are now. Tuition has more than doubled in the past 20 years. Go back 20 additional years and the figure for the September–May academic year at my major state university was all of $600.

Among those who do try to pay it off, this story is more common than people know. If you did not read the link, a couple left grad school with a combined 70K in debt. After 20+ years of making $500 monthly payments that added up to 120K, they still owe 60 grand. Yet, no one with the power to revise the loan program for the better is interested in doing so. Meanwhile, few in this age group were encouraged to look into the skilled trades, where there is a huge demand for labor but a woefully insufficient supply of ready applicants.

This is the world that they have entered. It looks nothing like the one they were told to expect, and because so few were taught to be resilient, most are ill-equipped to handle the challenge. There is a meme out there involving a teacher who tells students that previous generations were married with children, working, possibly owning homes, and so forth at their ages. The teacher wanted to give the class a sense of perspective and make clear that, by comparison, having to do homework is not very hard.

Perhaps the teacher was unaware that this crop of young folks comes from people who took early retirement but complained about losing their Obamacare subsidies during the govt shutdown. The young hear “possible loss of healthcare” and freak out; their lack of critical thinking skills – because they were told what to think, not how – is why they are unaware that many of these retirees make $85,000 per year. That’s more than 400% above the poverty line.

In case the point needs reinforcing, the last two generations (and there is a third in the pipeline) are the products of their upbringing. Laughing at them or berating them are not solutions. I’m sure many of you reading this did all the right things with your kids and they are problem-free, productive citizens, and that’s great. How about their friends? Because I’m just as sure that everyone who did it right knows of at least one aimless 20- or 30-something who doesn’t have a clue, and that group may well outnumber the one that is figuring life out.