My home ec course was purely about cooking and as every assignment was a team assignment, it was possible to get through the course without even really learning to do that.
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I do at least try to skim them, and if I run across terms like “You give us the rights to do whatever we want with your account whenever we want, forever and ever, RAmen”,
and reconsider checking the little “I accept” box.
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I was tempted, at first glance, to be snarky, but I honestly get this. We can debate about modern parenting, etc… but a very simple, overlooked fact is that a lot of basic ideas this covered used to be addressed by high school classes, but budget constraints and over-emphasis on academics/testing have devalued or eliminated a lot of “life-skills” classes that HS used to teach.
My HS, in a town of 3500, with 60 people in my graduating class taught family health, personal finance, home ec, driver’s ed, typing, statistics, etc… (This was in the early 80s)
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A pretty large fraction of my students are nontraditional students with families already. Others are returning veterans. Mainly they don’t need this kind of class, but they do need some help in finding the money to pay the rent and put food on the table, preferably without working 3 jobs on top of being full-time students.
Many of those (like welding) are now taught in high school robotics.
At competitive colleges (like Berkeley in this story), students had to rack up an impressive set of good grades, AP credits and extracurricular activities to get accepted, and in many cases that doesn’t leave much time in High School for learning everyday life skills.
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OMFG. How many more generations can boomers ruin?
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Us GenXers basically never bothered to learn how to adult because why bother, we’re all fucked anyway between the Boomers consuming all resources and cultural capital and waving their nuclear armaments at each other.
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OK, LostGen.
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Where’s the parenting class so I can learn these things to teach my kids? I’d especially like help with the pros and cons of “chores” and allowance, but everything else would be useful too: budgeting, home and landscape and vehicle maintenance, contracts, identity protection, self-care, socializing, sleep, etc.
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Who’s “bashing on Millenials”?
I’m a Boomer, and I knew a shitload of fellow Boomers who could’ve used such a course back in college. Some of them probably still could.
I’m actually very cheered and encouraged that so many of today’s young people have both the self-awareness to recognize that they lack esssential ‘adulting’ skills, and the !ack of self-consciousness and ego-tripping to take steps to rectify the situation.
This is a Ghood Thing, IMO
As for the increasingly predicatable ‘Boomer’ sniping, may I just say that people have had shitty parents who didn’t bother to teach their kids basic life skills since the dawn of history and likely before.
The Boomers often had shitty parents. Likewise, my “Greatest Gen” dad was kicked out of his family home at age 13 because his parents couldn’t afford to raise him, sending him out into the teeth of the Great Depression with the clothes on his back and a third-grade education.
He learned a lot of life skills rather quickly, riding the rails and living in hobo camps, looking for work. Later in life, while raising three kids, he went back to school to get his GED, and to take several ‘life skills’ at the local community college.
His example is what makes me say that it’s an act of courage and intelligence to recognize that you lack essential life skills, and to make an effort to fix that.
So I say good on 'em. Glad to see this trend taking hold. Hope it prospers.
Sorry to see, though, the intergenerational-hatred thing that the Russian troll -farms have been pushing has taken root here.
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Agreed. There’s a new generation born every day.
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You might want to check your local community college, vocational-training center, or adult continuing-education program. Last time I looked here in LA, all of those had some adult basic life-skills classes for things like budgeting, finance, nutrition, child care, and so on.
How many people withdraw from the course when they find out that it isn’t adultery?
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Hey, don’t blame my parents! Ignoring them when they tried to teach me about keeping a budget was my angsty teenage choice!
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You weren’t the first to have Armageddon hanging over you.
The first, and to date only, use of nuclear weapons was before the first boomers were born (going by the usual totally arbitrary definition). Growing up in the 50s and 60s we concluded our home town was definitely a target, based on a military installation and the presence of heavy industry, so we stood a good chance of being incinerated because of decisions our parents’ generation might make. So it goes.
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You aren’t painting with a broad brush so much as a push broom. Calm down, look around, you’ll see good and bad everywhere (everyone).
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I said it before and I’ll say it again: what with this “ugh boomers ruined everything for everyone” trend, I can’t wait for current Millennials get the exact same treatment from the generation succeeding them (whatever it is called).
One day these people will understand that history is basically a continuity of individuals making decisions that seem like a good idea at the time for their own subjective values. It’s not a case of stinky bad old generation vs amazing enlightened young generation.
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it’s been said before, but it’s true: Millennials are to Zoomers what Boomers have been to GenXers. get used to it, kids!
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Some of them, I assume, are very fine people. 
GenZ comes next, if I understand it correctly, and they’re already making themselves heard. The oldest are in their early 20s already.
But I’d prefer it if the whole generational thing went away permanently. It was invented by pop-culture hacks to sell books, and has morphed into a divide-and-conquer political weapon.
My own kids and their friends are millennials, and I’m greatly impressed by their maturity and life skills, although I don’t think I’ll call it adulting.
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Yeah, that’s how almost all teaching in the home goes. You don’t even notice you’re learning because you’re receiving guided experiences. I’m (trying) to teach my kids how to cook that way; telling them they have to cook dinner, then helping them through the process of selecting a recipe, gathering ingredients, then cooking it all so that - hopefully - when they go flatting they aren’t the useless one who either never cooks or only manages to burn boiled eggs.
Same with life skills. I don’t sit them down and run through a 40-slide powerpoint deck on how to behave at a dinner party. Instead when we go for dinner with the extended family the conversation is more along the lines of “ok, what are we going to contribute, food wise?” and if we don’t or can’t contribute food, how else can we contribute; setting the table, preparing a salad, doing the dishes, etc. It’s not a lesson, per se, but they are - I hope - learning.
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