but you’re sort of fed the line that you can’t have a normal life unless you get an education. And so you take on this tremendous debt. And so I’m just starting out now at the age of twenty-seven, with prescription glasses and all these payments coming due. And I’m living in an efficiency with a roommate. I had a nicer apartment in law school; I never would have thought that.” A house? A family? “There’s no
car
in the near future for me. Everything’s been pushed back so far, I can’t even see it. How did this happen?”
• • •
T HE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN many Millennials and their parents has become complicated since the recession began. In one recent poll, 39 percent of people aged eighteen to twenty-nine said they regularly received money from their parents to help them pay ordinary expenses, and many have moved back home. But these arrangements have worn on both parties. Recent research by the Purdue University psychologist Karen Fingerman indicates that while modern parents do provide more financial support to grown children who are struggling, by and large they prefer to offer their continued guidance and companionship to those who are already succeeding, perhaps because time spent with successful children flatters the parents more.
A May 2010 “Shouts & Murmurs” column in
The New Yorker
captures the ambivalence felt by many “helicopter parents” as their children have returned to the nest. Titled “Your New College Graduate: A Parents’ Guide,” it begins, “Congratulations! It took four years and hundreds of thousands of dollars, but you’re finally the parents of a bona-fide college graduate. After the commencement ceremony is over, your child will be ready to move back into your house for a period of several years. It’s a very exciting time.” Around the country,family and financial consultants have begun to offer their services to assist with this transition; one consultancy in Los Angeles has created a four-step program that seeks to settle in advance certain questions: What will the child do to earn money if he or she can’t find a full-time job? What domestic responsibilities will he or she undertake? What’s the target date for moving out?
Near the height of Japan’s economic boom in the late 1980s, a relatively small but growing number of teens and twentysomethings began to turn away from well-worn corporate career paths (or at least defer their entry onto them),instead living at home with their parents and taking a string of temporary or part-time jobs. By and large, they valued self-expression and a flexible lifestyle, and many had artistic ambitions. A new term was coined to describe them—
freeters
—and while many criticized them as coddled and lazy, a certain glamour seemed attached to the term.
With the bust of the 1990s, the number of freeters grew rapidly. Aging freeters could not find permanent work; new ones, typically with relatively little education and no designs on an artist’s life, found traditional career paths closed off from the start. In 2002, perhaps 2.5 million Japanese between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four were freeters, and year by year their ranks were both increasing and aging. Since the bust,
freeters
has been joined in the Japanese vernacular by a host of other new terms to describe single young people living with parents:
NEETs
(not in education, employment, or training),
hikikomori
(men, mostly, who do not work or socialize, seldom leave their room, and are in some cases physically abusive to aging parents), and several more.
Japan’s economy has been troubled for decades, and its culture is in many respects sui generis; one should treat comparisons to the United States with caution. But the evolution of freeters’ portrayal in Japan is perhaps telling. By the mid-1990s, most traces of glamour and indulgence were gone. And by the late 1990s,
freeters
had been subsumed into a newly popular term—
parasaito shinguru
, or
car
in the near future for me. Everything’s been pushed back so far, I can’t even see it. How did this happen?”
• • •
T HE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN many Millennials and their parents has become complicated since the recession began. In one recent poll, 39 percent of people aged eighteen to twenty-nine said they regularly received money from their parents to help them pay ordinary expenses, and many have moved back home. But these arrangements have worn on both parties. Recent research by the Purdue University psychologist Karen Fingerman indicates that while modern parents do provide more financial support to grown children who are struggling, by and large they prefer to offer their continued guidance and companionship to those who are already succeeding, perhaps because time spent with successful children flatters the parents more.
A May 2010 “Shouts & Murmurs” column in
The New Yorker
captures the ambivalence felt by many “helicopter parents” as their children have returned to the nest. Titled “Your New College Graduate: A Parents’ Guide,” it begins, “Congratulations! It took four years and hundreds of thousands of dollars, but you’re finally the parents of a bona-fide college graduate. After the commencement ceremony is over, your child will be ready to move back into your house for a period of several years. It’s a very exciting time.” Around the country,family and financial consultants have begun to offer their services to assist with this transition; one consultancy in Los Angeles has created a four-step program that seeks to settle in advance certain questions: What will the child do to earn money if he or she can’t find a full-time job? What domestic responsibilities will he or she undertake? What’s the target date for moving out?
Near the height of Japan’s economic boom in the late 1980s, a relatively small but growing number of teens and twentysomethings began to turn away from well-worn corporate career paths (or at least defer their entry onto them),instead living at home with their parents and taking a string of temporary or part-time jobs. By and large, they valued self-expression and a flexible lifestyle, and many had artistic ambitions. A new term was coined to describe them—
freeters
—and while many criticized them as coddled and lazy, a certain glamour seemed attached to the term.
With the bust of the 1990s, the number of freeters grew rapidly. Aging freeters could not find permanent work; new ones, typically with relatively little education and no designs on an artist’s life, found traditional career paths closed off from the start. In 2002, perhaps 2.5 million Japanese between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four were freeters, and year by year their ranks were both increasing and aging. Since the bust,
freeters
has been joined in the Japanese vernacular by a host of other new terms to describe single young people living with parents:
NEETs
(not in education, employment, or training),
hikikomori
(men, mostly, who do not work or socialize, seldom leave their room, and are in some cases physically abusive to aging parents), and several more.
Japan’s economy has been troubled for decades, and its culture is in many respects sui generis; one should treat comparisons to the United States with caution. But the evolution of freeters’ portrayal in Japan is perhaps telling. By the mid-1990s, most traces of glamour and indulgence were gone. And by the late 1990s,
freeters
had been subsumed into a newly popular term—
parasaito shinguru
, or
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