Parenting Grown Children: What Dr. Spock Forgot to Tell Us

Life with 20-Somethings: The fruitless job search may lead to a "lost generation."

An east coast friend with a 23-year-old son who graduated from college this past spring writes:

"Last spring after graduation, my son got a job offer with an accounting firm in Dallas. He had to study for his CPA, so he was home for the summer. One evening, a group of his friends came over. They were sitting out on the deck drinking cokes and beer, and I knew they were looking at my son with envy. He was moving to Dallas, he was going to live in his own apartment, he just bought a car--and he had a job in his profession. That used to the standard for kids coming out of college--especially good colleges like these kids had just graduated from. But most of them were living at home with no job prospects. A few had found something but not in their career."

This has been the new reality for college grads, and this is what the data recently released by the Census Bureau underlies. While the economy has been devastating for those living in or near poverty, it has also been wrenching for recent college graduates. Richard Freeman, an economist at Harvard University, has suggested that the generation coming out of college since the 2008-2009 recession "will be scarred, and they will be called the `lost generation'--in that their careers would not be the same way if we had avoided this economic disaster."

They have not only been unable to find jobs now, it's not likely to get better soon--even as the employment figures pick up. Recent college grads who are now getting by with waitering, bartending and odd jobs will have to compete with new graduates for entry-level career positions. As Andrew Sum, an economist and director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, put it, "We have a monster jobs problem, and young people are the biggest losers."

Here's hoping the latest downward trend on unemployment--8.3% in January--keeps going. It might make it possible for another friend's son to come home from his job in volatile South Sudan--a job he took not because he always wanted to go to Juba but because it was the only job he could get.

 

The Re-Filled Nest: Improvements for our college grads in search of a job

The economy has wreaked havoc on those of us with recent college grads. One friend, whose son was fortuante enough to get a job in his professional field (accounting), reports that he is the only one among his set of four best friends to do so. And that's not untypical of the job situation for the past year.

Many of those children--emerging adults, frustrated at not being able to convert their college degrees into good-paying jobs--are living home. That's creating a whole nother set of tensions. For those parents looking for a break in that bleak picture--we love our kids but we don't necessarily love having them live at home anymore--there's some hopeful news on the job front. Not necessarily the dip down to 8.5 per cent  unemployment (though that's welcome), but the signs that show where the job growth is.

In a December jobs report, workers with bachelor’s degrees or other post-secondary educations were the ones who hit the sweet spot: about 1.1 million bachelor’s degree recipients found work. Meanwhile, the number of workers with high school diplomas or less who were employed fell by half a million. More surprisingly, the least-skilled workers also added jobs over the last year. The number of high school dropouts who had jobs rose by 126,000.

According to Catherine Rampell, who runs the online Economix site for the New York Times, the numbers support MIT economist David Autor‘s argument that the work force is hollowing out, producing very low-skill service jobs that generally cannot be done by machines or workers abroad (like food services) and higher-skilled jobs that require greater schooling (like medical jobs).

Life with 20-Somethings: Is this the happy ending to a job search?

My friend Carol and I are starting out on a walk-and-talk when she blurts out this admission: "I'm a nervous wreck." Carol is normally a no-nonsense, assertive person; her remark is out of keeping with her hard-driving persona. The reason for the agita? Her 23-year-old son--he who graduated from a top college and has just finished up a low-paying internship with a nonprofit; he who she has been prodding and pushing to get off his duff and find a job--has finally been offered one and accepted it. He started working a week ago--when Carol and her husband took their son to the airport to catch a flight to the city where he'll be employed. A flight to Juba. Yes. Juba, the capital of southern Sudan--the country that broke away from northern Sudan, won its independence and is just beginning to set up a government and infrastructure. Juba does not have much of a Western presence--although that is growing. Carol's son is part of the opening wedge of that growth.

I think back to my own anxieties when my daughter went to live in Berlin for a year. But Berlin is an international capital and my daughter was attached to a major education institution. My worries were about missing her and her family--not about whether she would be safe or whether Americans would be welcome. Carol's son is attached to an NGO (Non Government Organization) that is in Juba on its first mission there.

I try to ease her worries. I talk about what an adventure this is for her son, what a challenge. If he doesn't do something like this at 23, when will he? Certainly not when he's started a family and has a mortgage and children to support. I tell her about the recent NYTimes article "What if the Secret to Success is Failure," which posits that happy, successful people tend to be ones who face challenges--even if they fail at them. I also remind her that her son is smart, that he lived in an Arab-speaking country for a semester, has studied Arabic and is an athlete who's used to team play--all of which will help keep him safe.

It is cold comfort. There's only so much positive you can say to the parent of a grown child who has put himself in a potentially dangerous situation--not out of some sense of adventure but to get a job. The latter was made particularly clear the night before he left. A neighbor who has a son the same age as Carol's, stopped by to wish him well and tell him how much she admired what he was doing. "My son is hanging around here, doing the boring city thing," she told him. His response: "I wish I were doing the boring city thing, but this is the only job I was offered."

No wonder Carol is a nervous wreck. It's not like her son is going off to pursue a dream he's had all his life--to walk across India or climb the Chilean Andes. He's no happier about this "great adventure" than his parents are. That's the reality of the Great Recession, and its follow-up, the Great Contraction. Jobs are hard to find. Our grown children are shipping out to the far reaches of the Third World to make a living--even though they would really, really rather not go there.

 

Emerging Adults: Even if they do get a job, there's plenty to worry about

A major concern for most of us whose children graduated from college recently is whether they'll get a job. It's a nasty market out there. Sometimes we blame our kids for not trying hard enough --it may seem like they're doing nothing but they probably are checking those job-search Web sites regularly.

Here's a point to remember when they finally to do find employment: The pay may be puny--way below what a college grad has been led to expect. A recent study found that, after adjusting for inflation, entry-level wages for students who graduated from college in 2010 was lower than a decade earlier. Heidi Shierholz, a labor market economist at the Economic Policy Institute, found that after gains in the 1980s and 1990s, entry-level hourly wages for college-educated men (without advanced degrees) were down 4.5 percent from 2000. For college-educated women, they were down 5.2 percent from 10 years earlier.

If that isn't discouraging enough, her study concludes on an even more pessimistic note: “With unemployment expected to remain above 8 percent well into 2014, it will likely be many years before young college graduates — or any workers — see substantial wage growth.”

Makes it tough for a college grad to pay off those college loans--they are kind of underwater, just like some homeowners--or for the parents to feel the college bill they paid will pay for itself in no time. It may be quite some time.

Emerging Adults: The four stages of job-search anguish for our college grads.

A friend, whose 23-year-old son has been looking for a job for six months now, has been through several stages of search anguish. He's a graduate of a top college where he got good grades. Last year, a long search brought forth a one-year, low-paying internship with a nonprofit group. That ended in August. He is likely filled with anxieties about his future--none of which he is sharing with his parents. The dad has urged his son to go to graduate school--while the dad is still employed and can pay for it. It would get him out of a miserable job market and garner further qualifications for a good-paying job.  But the son doesn't know what kind of graduate school he's interested in. The mom wants to see him employed. And she is going through her own stages of acceptance of the difficulties her son's generation is facing in finding a job.

Stage One: mild annoyance with her son: "How long does he think we're going to support him? When I was his age, I couldn't lean on my parents. I had to get a job or starve."

Stage Two: anger at her son: "He's lazy. He isn't taken this seriously."

Stage Three: fear of her son being resigned to joblessness: "I think he's thrown in the towel. He doesn't seem to be trying. He won't discuss it with us. He won't even tell me if he followed a job lead I gave him--and I don't think he has."

Stage Four: the unthinkable: On a family vacation with her son, her husband's three brothers and their children, my friend sat and listened while an uncle asked her son what was happening on the job front. First surprise: he answered! Second surprise: he'd gotten a job offer. It was for a job with an NGO [non government organization] in an African country. The country, however, was a desperately poor one riven by political instability. He has not decided whether to take the job or not. My friend finds the thought of him going to such a dangerous place frightening. So the stage she is now in is this: "I wish I had $100,000 I could pay someone to hire my son."

Now that is something that, when she was her son's age, she never could or would have thought about. But isn't that what some of us come down to--if only we could find someone willing to give our grown child a chance, we'd pay them a bonus to do it.

 

Emerging Adults: Their frustration at not having a good job vs. our understanding it.

I am having lunch with a friend when I ask about her son, one year out of college: Did he get the job he was applying for?

As far as she knew, the answer was no. Or possibly, not yet. Her son, she says, is incommunicado on the subject of job hunting. She's tried to get around a direct assault by asking round-about questions, such as, what search engines are you using for your job search? He saw that one for what it was and cut her off.

"When," my friend wants to know "is it going to be okay to ask these questions? How long are we going to have to support him?" 

It's not as though the lack of employment and the need to live at home is easy on her son--on any grown child. It's a trip back to adolescence. In a recent posting by Carl Pickhardt, Ph.D, he talked about a young man who, almost a year after graduating from college, was stuck in an entry level job with no future opportunity in sight. The young man--someone's grown child--was feeling anxious, disappointed, and angry. Pickhardt's suggestions to his patient may offer some insights for those of us with unemployed grown children struggling through the detritus of the Great Recession:

Pickhardt starts off with this observation: "When the reality we expect fits the reality we encounter, our emotional response is usually less upsetting than when the reality we expect does not fit the reality we encounter."

His patient has created three kinds of positive expectations about the reality he would face after college graduation. He has PREDICTIONS about what will happen after graduating. (He will find a job.) He has AMBITIONS about what he wants to have happen after graduating. (He wants an interesting job that will advance him into a satisfying career.) He has CONDITIONS about what should happen after graduating. (He should be paid a comfortable income at whatever job he finds.)

None of the three kinds of expectations came to pass. Pickhardt lays out the result:

"Because the prediction of easy employment is violated by reality, and after seven months of looking and he has yet to land a job, he feels surprised and anxious. Because the ambition for finding work he really wanted to do is violated by at last taking a routine assembly line job, he feels disappointed and let down. Because the condition of making a comfortable living right away is violated by making entry level wages, he feels betrayed and angry.

"Now this young man has two sets of problems, not one. He has the problem of choosing how to proceed with his life, and he has the emotional burden of bearing unrealistic expectations. For the sake of his emotional well being, he needed to give up his unrealistic expectations and create a realistic set instead. This is what he came up with.

"Just out of college I need to expect it will be hard to find a job, any job, right away. So I really need to look hard. Right away, I probably won't get a job like the one I really want. So I need to take what I can get and go from there. And financially, whatever job I get, I should have to struggle to get by on however little I am able to make."

Pickhardt's bottom line: "Accept what you have and you free up some energy that was spent protesting against it. ...Choice of expectations in life psychologically matters because these mental sets can have such powerful emotional consequences. Thus recent college graduates who choose to hold unrealistic positive expectations about their immediate prospects in life usually do so to their unhappy cost."

Supporting Grown Children: Jobs, the economy and the future for college grads

Her son is 24, graduate of a good college where he got good grades and behaved well--well, well enough so that nothing shows on his record. Even his Facebook account is 'clean." But finding a job since he's gotten out of school: tough going. He's in that cohort I wrote about in a previous post: From October 2010 through March 2011, 74.4 percent of college graduates under age 25 had jobs but only 45.9 percent of them had jobs that actually required a college degree.

His mom has been warned--by the hostility of his answers--not to ask him how the job hunting is going. But shes' worried. Not just about how long she's going to have to help  support him since a minimum wage job, on those occasions when he has landed one, would not pay the rent in even a group house. But the real concern is about the long-term implications: Will it put him in a lower salary bracket than he might have earned had he come out of college when jobs were available; will he lose his zest and enthusiasm for trying hard and let the lassitude of unsuccessful job hunting bring him down. 

Kevin Carey, an education writer and policy analyst, did some research that gives fresh perspective on that particular worry. Carey went back and looked at what happened to kids in 1982--young adults who struggled to find jobs in another difficult recession--and wrote about his findings in The New Republic.

Of the "sad cases" described in newspapers in 1982 [cases similar to my friend's son], he found the formerly under- or unemployed thriving. One of them, a Peace Corps alum with a master’s degree in international affairs,had been toiling away at a “mindless” file clerk job. He went on, Casey reports, "to a series of nonprofit management jobs and, by 2010, was a senior research project supervisor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Health." Another "sad case" is "a senior manager at an international development consulting company that works under contract with USAID. Her recent work includes building railroads in cyclone-devastated Madagascar."

They overcame. They suffered under the recession in which they came of age but they made up for it over time. There's nothing good about an economic downturn--and certainly nothing good about one as deep and prolonged as this one has been. So this is a note of hope to my friend who is struggling with the day to day pain of watching her talented and worthy son struggle and fail in a terrible job market. It will get better, and in his lifetime. 

 

Supporting Grown Children: The story in stats

While many of us came of age without financial help from our parents, that has not been the case for the past generation or two. Many of us have been helping our kids pay off their college debt, buy cars, put a downpayment on a first home. For the most part, it's been a way to share our good fortune with them--to cushion the first few years of career-building or to give them a boost until they come into their own. But with the Great Recession, that helping hand has taken on a new width and depth.

Here's the toll the Great Recession is taking, according to a study this spring by the National Endowment for Financial Education and Forbes.com:

--59 percent of parents are still providing financial support to their adult children who are not students, many of whom are living at the family home--either they were never able to leave or they have had to return.

--50 percent of the parental support is for housing; 48 percent for living expenses and 41 percent for transportation.

--75 percent of grown children living at home say they are helping to defray their parent's costs, with 52 percent chipping in toward food expenses, 34 percent helping with utilities, 31 percent putting gas in the family car and 29 percent helping with the rent or mortgage.

--43 percent of parents say they are supporting their kids because they are legitimately concerned with their child's financial well-being; 37 percent do not want to see their children struggle the way they had had to; and 32 percent say their children are worse off than they were when they left home.

 

"Parents are continuing their [financial] involvement longer than we expected," Ted Beck,the president  of NEFE, said. "The general sentiment is that financial pressures are higher for this generation."

 

Here's a nifty chart on where the parental support goes:

 

 

 

Supporting Grown Children: The job market they face

Consider this an addendum to my last post about the frustrations parents of grown children feel when their newly minted college grads can't land a job-- any job, no less one for which those college years prepared them. The generation has won such unattractive terms as The Lazy Generation and Generation of Slackers. And why not: there they sit, living at home with mom and dad and not seeming to lift a finger to get a job. Or so it seems.

But not to economists, who have a little more sympathy for the crowds of kids getting out of college but not into the kind of job they would ordinarily merit.

Here's the New York Times' Charlotte Rampell taking note of the job market for recent college grads, based on data from the labor economist Andrew Sum. From October 2010 through March 2011, 74.4 percent of college graduates under age 25 had jobs but only 45.9 percent of them had jobs that actually required a college degree. The rest of this group were bar tending or waiting on tables, looking for work, or out of the labor force altogether--perhaps because they were back in school.

Sound like anything that's happening around your once-empty nest? Rampell goes on to compare today's numbers to those from a decade ago. It's quite a shocker.

Andrew Sum; Bureau of Labor Statistics

Source: Andrew Sum; Bureau of Labor Statistics Numbers for 2010 refer to January through October of that year.

Rampell's bottom line: "The damage this recession will do to these young people may be permanent, too. Starting one’s career in a lower-quality job or one with low pay places workers on a worse pay trajectory for years to come, as research from Columbia’s Till von Wachter (among others) has shown."

We may need to shower our "slackers" with a little tough love--but a little tough understanding, too. And this little reminder from an observer of human nature: When the economy is bad, we (the older generations) tend to blame young people when they can't find a job.