The ground-level view parenting teens right now is daunting. Mine don’t care much about school, and have a very cynical outlook about society.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the values I was raised with, and how I’ve tried to pass them on. Perhaps I haven’t tried hard enough? Yet other parents tell similar stories: kids home from college, either dropping out and reevaluating, or graduated but back at home. Figuring out the next step.
I’ve sometimes worried that our whole generation might be doing something wrong, but rarely occurs to me to think about the larger forces at work. Didn’t we have recessions? Tough job prospects? Demoralization about the nuclear-threatened future?
But recently my attention is on the bigger culture and economics that feel to me like oxygen, like “reality,” but in fact are powerful forces that shape our choices and lives.
A great production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons had lots to recommend it, but I was struck with the patriarch Joe Keller’s feeling, in the late 1940s, of becoming irrelevant in the postwar era. He’s a hard-working blue collar guy trying to pass his business to his son, Chris. “It’s a tragedy: you stand on the street today and spit, you’re gonna hit a college man,” he tells his son, who replies, “Well, don’t spit.” I love how this exchange encapsulates the evolution of manners as the culture starts to consider how a middle class might distinguish itself (no low-class old world spitting), and also sums up the feeling of a parent that things are moving beyond his understanding and control. I feel you on this, Joe!
A piece by Noam Scheiber in the New York Times got me thinking more about the difficult economy college graduates are facing, with high housing costs, huge debt, and poorer job prospects all ganging up to make a life like their parents more difficult. Could there be a new shift going on that will change how we go forward? Here’s the bit that stopped me in my tracks:
“Between 1990 and 2018, it was almost unheard-of for the unemployment rate of recent college graduates to exceed the country’s overall rate. But that has been the case for five straight years now.” (“Why College Graduates Feel Betrayed,” NYT March 27, 2026)
Shit. Maybe something is really changing.
The world that I came up in, where my parents were beneficiaries of the GI Bill, their parents’ absolute expectation that they’d do better educationally and economically, and of course white privilege, set me on a certain path. They saved so I could graduate without debt. I was a rebel around the edges, but one of my first priorities when I had a job was saving up to one day own a house. It seemed impossible, but by today’s standards I was so lucky.
When my kids laughed at me for being such a rule follower, at first I didn’t even understand what they were talking about. I was a queer liberal arts wild man! Wasn’t I? But I believe in following traffic laws, having insurance, being prepared for trips to the beach. And I’m an old dad, a grandpa aged dad! Maybe their rebellious non-belief in the system comes from the deepening problems with that system itself. Maybe they’re the ones reading the prevailing winds correctly: Doordash not savings. Tattoos because, who cares?
Scheiber’s article traces the rise of Starbucks union organizing to overeducated baristas unable to get jobs in their profession. Rather than identifying with the businesses and structures they aspired to join, as we did, it seems many in this generation now identify more with the proletariat.
As an idealistic middle class beneficiary of the system, socialism always seemed to me both ideal and unachievable within our politics. At the No Kings march this weekend I felt both excited to see so many Socialists (it is the Bay Area), but also scared that “the reality” of politics can’t let them win. But I’m getting the feeling that the younger generation, long with the mayor of New York City, are going to have something different to say about the world we’re leaving them.
Like Arthur Miller’s doomed patriarch Joe Keller, maybe it’s time for me to step aside and let the kids lead. Maybe I can find a way to be cheering the loudest for them.
