You’re the best!
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Good Grief! You have to go to college in America to learn such things?
What are they teaching students in grade school there? How to play video games?
Then maybe you could find some more accurate or descriptive term to label the group you’re bashing. Calling them “Boomers” just looks like lazy, unthinking ageism.
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Well, either that or the freelance writers and assignment editors who produce all the “Millenials vs. Boomers” clickbait are Gen-Xers playing the classic game of “Let’s you and him fight.” 
Until I read this article and these comments, I didn’t realize how fortunate I was to have gone to a Canadian public school in the 1980s. Every student was required to take three things: Home Economics, Industrial Arts (shop class), and Career And Life Management. We called them HomeEc, IA, and CALM, respectively. The first taught cooking, cleaning, and sewing. The third taught carpentry, some metal working, and basic automotive repair among other things (we also made pneumatic hammers, injection-molded plastic things, etc). The third was budgeting, shopping, time management, sleep habits, and general mood management.
I’m deeply disappointed that, rather than being a model for the future, we seemed to be the last group of kids to learn any of this in high school?
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No, they are teaching them how to score well on standardized tests.
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That is definitively a huge part of the problem. I would also add (as a parent of 3) that another portion of the issue is the amount of time we have to spend devoted to work to maintain even the shred of a modest life style.
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This is what happens when parents barely see their kids. Work hours are longer (9-to-5 is now more like 8-to-7), both parents have to work to survive and many poor parents work multiple jobs in order to keep their family afloat, and the kids are in daycare and then school. The only time parents see the kids are at bedtime, which is not really the time to teach life skills, and everyone is so exhausted all the time that the parents don’t have the patience to let the kids “help” with household chores in order to learn how to do them.
So when are the kids supposed to learn these “adulting” skills if they never see their parents do them, and if the daycare/school environments are not the places where such things are taught?
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Agree.
Most schools have turned towards being day care. Public school always was day care to occupy the kids so the parents could work, as America industrialized and moved to cities away from farms. But now, the schools have been defunded to the point where education is not able to be adequately administered. So the actual education of children has become fragmented, and yet the block of time from 7am until early afternoon remains and must be filled with some way of keeping the peace. Easy pickins when the teaching staff is underpaid and inexperienced is to teach towards a very tangible goal such as a standardized test, and to fill the rest of the time with frivolous activity that passes the time, generally keeps the peace and doesn’t cost much, like playing in the gym or watching videos or going outside.
If America were serious about education, it would abandon the current model and adopt something more akin to how Scandinavian countries fund and administer their systems.
Yup, and that’s what parents don’t have time for anymore, especially poor parents working multiple jobs. I’m lucky and privileged that I get to work part-time and spend the rest of the day with my kid (who is 4 years old). She comes along with me to do the grocery shopping, “helps” me cook (or at least watches the cooking being done), “helps” with the cleaning, comes along to do the laundry, watches me do our budget, and so on and so forth. All of this is only possible because I’m spending multiple hours a day with my kid while she’s awake, active, and not too tired to learn.
If I were less fortunate, I’d be picking up my kid from some sort of daycare/preschool at about 6pm. Her bedtime is at 8pm, and really, even at 6pm, she’s way too tired to come along to the grocery store or to “help” with the cooking. By 6pm, dinner has to be ready fast, so I wouldn’t be able to take the time to let her “help” anyway. Same for any sort of life lessons delivered through conversations - by 6pm, the only conversations I have with her are fairly minimal.
The real problem is that so many parents are put into situations (through no fault of their own) where they really can’t do a lot of parenting. So, teaching life skills falls by the wayside.
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My parents never taught me to budget either, but they taught me that debt is bad and that if you ever incur a debt, it’s an emergency that needs to be taken care of right away. Which is why I no longer have student loans and got rid of them within 3 years of graduation. It boggles my mind how many people never learn the “debt is bad” lesson.
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It took me well into my 20’s to learn this. I had a couple of maxed out credit cards and generally a spendthrift lifestyle and it hurt so bad to fix those problems after they’d turned into collections nightmares. Stupid stupid stupid! But I learned that debt is bad, because if you fuck up or have a real emergency like a car repair otherwise you can’t get to work, AND you have an outstanding debt that you can’t ALSO handle, then you are royally fuct. I keep saying you. I mean my old self.
Not only is debt bad. Debt is so bad that it is worth rearranging one’s whole life to get rid of it and be free of it. It is worth not going out and having fun or buying clothes and shit just to feel happy, but to spend that money instead on handling that debt right down to $0. There is no other feeling like being debt-free.
The tentacles of debt creep in like all the black vines in the Upside-Down in Stranger Things, putrefying everything they touch until one’s whole life turns into a shadow realm of suffering.
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For the first 2 years of my payback period, my monthly loan payments were 90% of my earnings. So no, I didn’t pay them off early. I worked for my room and board on top of working for money, to make it through those first few years. And that was in the early 80’s, when college costs and loan amounts were a fraction of what they are now.
Blaming the victim isn’t going to solve anything.
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