Is this a joke? Generations can be cyclical. Our parents wanted to pursue their dreams, to volunteer, to help the world, to take the time to live the life they wanted before having to join the work force. They raised us to live THEIR dreams (as most parents do) and they worked hard to provide money for us to accomplish those dreams they were never capable of doing. Now they are mad at us? Well, we have a whole lot of mess on our plate from a generation that was only interested in making money and material things... we have a lot that we have to change and from an ealry age our teachers were letting us know that it was going to be nearly impossible, and no matter how much we worked... we were never going to retire in the cushy environments that our parents would like in their futures. We will be sacrificing my childrens lives and our own retirement so I can take care of our folks who's retirement incomes are gone and can no longer live within their means. So their taking care of us now... I think that fair since we are living their dreams.... :)
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Narcissists in Neverland
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At the same time, employment experts are concerned about Gen Y's ability to make the transition into the standard workforce, because of their adolescent attitudes. Mitchell Marks, an organizational psychologist at San Francisco State University, says he thinks that young people's reliance on their parents has resulted in a generation that isn't capable of making adult decisions. Last year, for example, Marks was consulting on the takeover of a major American corporation; the new owners gave the employees a choice of six different health care plans. While Marks watched the older members of the workforce worry about whether they'd keep their jobs, the twentysomethings were obsessing about which health-care plan to choose. "These kids have always had everything laid out for them by their parents," he says. "The anxiety of having to make a decision made them go crazy."
But not everyone is worried. Prominent American sociologist William Galston, of the Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institution, who this month released a major nationwide study examining "the changing 20s," predicts that when the Gen-Yers do eventually settle down, they might actually "turn out to be more capable" adults than their predecessors were. "In generations past, some young adults resented parenthood and marriage because they felt it cut off a period of self-exploration that hadn't run its course," argues Galston. "But today's young people are going to be able to look back and say, 'I've screwed around for 10 years. I've gotten that out of my system.' So there's not going to be an undertone of resentment or regret."
Still, when everything's said and done, today's twentysomethings aren't all that different from their parents. They're just doing things a little bit later. Instead of getting married at 23 (the 1970 average), American men are getting married at 27; and instead of 80 percent of American women leaving home by 24, now they're getting out by 29. "Thirty is the new 20," says Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, editor of last year's "Emerging Adults in America." "The transition to adulthood is longer than it used to be, but it's still a temporary stage." So will Gen Y be able to deal with the realities of kids-and-a-mortgage adulthood? The answer is that they probably won't do any better--or worse--than their parents did.
With Akiko Kashiwagi in Tokyo and Lorna Shaddick in London
© 2007
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