When I travel the country speaking to audiences about the values and characteristics of my generation, the millennial generation, I often take questions from curious parents and bosses who just want to better understand their children or junior staffers. They don’t understand why their employees want to work strange hours or crave constant feedback and praise, or why their children don’t hold the conservative values they were raised with. I do my best to explain what the disconnect might be and from where it might originate.
But every once in a while, there’s an exasperated audience member who has “less of a question and more of a comment.” Typically that comment is total disdain for the next generation. They’ve got a gripe and they want to get it off their chest, I find myself having to shift briefly from an explainer to a defender of my kind.
“As the mother of an almost 30-year-old son who is still on his parents’ cellphone plan, I am just wondering, when are these millennials finally going to learn the values of self-reliance and personal responsibility?” asked one woman at a speech I recently gave. The obvious answer felt a bit flippant and too personal: You can start by telling your son to pay for his own phone.
I wanted to take her seriously, so I paused, smiled, and with the kindest voice I could muster, replied, “With all due respect, ma’am, and I don’t mean this as directed at you personally, but … well, someone raised us.”
“The kids these days” are always looked down upon by the ones who came before them. As Jonathan Haidt points out, there’s solid evidence for this. But there’s now fresh evidence from the Pew Research Center that people’s views on what age people ought to be financially independent are very different from what happens in practice.
Looking at economic and survey data, Pew finds that only 24% of those aged 22 or older are “financially independent,” meaning they have an income of 150% of the poverty level, just under $20,000 a year. Yet, in their survey work, they find 64% of adults say children “should have to be financially independent” by age 22 or younger — a massive disconnect with what is really happening in practice.
Indeed, almost half (45%) of those aged 18 to 29 say they got some financial help from their parents in the last 12 months, and they seem to think this is all just swell. About half of those aged 18 to 29 say parents these days are doing about the right amount for their children, while only 18% say they’re doing “too little.” But the older adults, in the aggregate, feel they’re doing too much, with almost two-thirds of those over the age of 50 saying parents these days are “doing too much.”
But when you ask parents themselves about what they’re doing for their own adult children? Well, 63% say they’re doing about the right amount. Only 28% feel they’re doing too much for their grown children.
It’s easy to understand where this disconnect might come from: Parents see the struggles their own children may have faced and want to do the best for them, while at the same time understanding that young adults ought to be able to stand on their own two feet. They’re caught between wanting to help their children and resenting that they have to.
When the financial crisis happened, millennials were entering the workforce and saw their lifetime earning prospects take a massive hit. Living with their mother and father for a year or two to figure it out was a path many young people chose, and it helped them get on their feet during a challenging economic time. A decade later, however, even though employment has recovered to pre-recession levels, the percentage of young men who live with their parents in their late 20s has actually risen to 27%.
Parents of millennials and Gen Zers often have complaints about young adults not being self-reliant, and that makes them completely normal in the grand cycle of intergenerational griping. But as the data show, those same parents are often the ones still paying their children’s rent or cellphone bills.
