I'm sick of hearing about kids these days, or, more specifically, people in their 20's who won't grow up, according to this story and tons of others. It's a non-story, and here's why:
- Every generation thinks the ones that follow are worse. It's true. You may be saying that these Millenials or whatever are the pits but people said that about you, and older people said that about your parents, and even older more crotchety people said that about your grandparents. Young people have been lazy and pert and immature for eons. Let's get over it already. We'll be saying it until the very last generation fails to save us from the exploding sun, and you know nobody's going to cut them any slack.
- Maybe the problem with these "boomerang kids" isn't the fact that they're coming home but that their parents are letting them come home and supporting them (if this is indeed a problem). If parents wanted to be hardcore about it they could change the locks and turn the kids' rooms into sex dungeons or whatever, which would be pretty good motivation for the kids to find some roommates on Craigslist and go get a job at Starbucks (which I hear has decent benefits). So in this case it's the oldsters, not the youngsters who are the issue.
- "Two-thirds [of people in their 20s] spend at least some time living with a romantic partner without being married. And marriage occurs later than ever. The median age at first marriage in the early 1970s, when the baby boomers were young, was 21 for women and 23 for men; by 2009 it had climbed to 26 for women and 28 for men, five years in a little more than a generation." Is this supposed to be a problem? If it's as presented as such, I think this is just jealousy, jealousy on behalf of people who got married too early and are mad they didn't spend more time in their twenties having unmarried fun. If you tried it you would know it's pretty awesome. (Plus, as the article points out, there is that whole thing about many people not actually legally being able to get married).
- A lot of things about hardcore adulthood are not very fun, and if a person can get away with putting it off for a while, do you really blame him/her? The argument that you should get to the boring/painful/responsible stuff just because you're supposed to isn't very compelling. But then the payoff is, of course, once you reach it, you get to gripe about how much worse the incoming generation is.