6 ms·

The point is, likely intentionally, understated. I cannot speak for the author, but the gist I got is that our society thrusts wholly unprepared people into adu

The point is, likely intentionally, understated. I cannot speak for the author, but the gist I got is that our society thrusts wholly unprepared people into adulthood and we could get a lot of improvements from just making it harder for people to fail at adulting. IYKYK and if you don’t you will get fucked - repeatedly. Basic life skills are not taught so it’s up to the individual if their family fails. Importantly, it is unreasonable to expect someone to teach another how to do something they don’t know how to do. I’m talking about stuff like navigating health insurance, paying taxes, budgeting, managing credit, home maintenance, vehicle care. Mistakes in any one of these domains can have devastating consequences that profoundly change one’s life. Simple things like single payer health care (only complex because of greedy people demanding a tax for the privilege the laws wrote grant them), personal budgeting education, and teaching basic home improvement skills will markedly improve many people’s lives. We could also discuss more difficult topics like the complete lack of a meaningful social safety net, and the rippling consequences of systemic injustice but that’s less on topic and more likely to get me flamed or trolled.

gentleman11 2y ago
If you say the problem is social class and poverty, and not having available role models to show how adult life actually works, you’ll get flamed and trolled. If you say the problem is racial issues, you’ll get upvotes. I’ll just sit here and await my downvotes now
- bccdee 2y ago
  Role models are kind of a non-answer to the question. It's like saying the problem is "bad luck." Role-model-based policy solutions are, if not impossible, at least deeply impractical. Childcare subsidies and other forms of welfare, including simple direct cash transfers, have been shown to be strongly beneficial and are much simpler to implement. What people dislike about those is that they involve starting fights with lobbyists. Hence non-actionable perspectives like "the problem is role models" or "the problem is personal responsibility," which are not solutions so much as excuses for collective inaction.
- 6510 2y ago
  The pattern I've noticed is that the poor and the poorly educated have no career expectations from their kids. If the kids with wealthy and/or highly educated parents showed up at home with just one poor grade all hell broke lose. Grounded for 6 months, allowance cuts, no more TV or video games etc One kept his kid at home during the holidays to tutor him himself, screaming 90% of the time. The other parents would look at the grades for < 1 minute and compliment the single thing they did well. Later on, when the other kids ended up in their first factory job the mantra was if only my parents gave me a good kick in the but I wouldn't be here right now I would send all 13 year olds to the factory for a good few months. Earnings to be paid when 21. I would also introduce Sunday school if your grades are crappy, 8 hours every week until you are no longer behind. And finally, call in the parents regularly just to annoy the fuck out of them. You don't seem very involved mr Jones. Could you be so kind to explain these grades?
  - emmo 2y ago
    I hope you're never in a position to make any of these decisions.
    - 6510 2y ago
      Which one(s) and why? A few months in the factory is nothing compared to your entire life. Stories are no substitutes for experience. Those who go on to get degrees and nice jobs would also benefit from the experience. Sunday school because if you are sufficiently behind on the material you will never catch up. Never is a long time. Getting the parents to show up and explain why the grades are bad will force them to consider why that is. I had lots of friends with parents who absolutely loved them but couldn't be any less interested in grades. I appreciate how anecdotal this all is. How do you see it?
  - OccamsMirror 2y ago
    > screaming 90% of the time. Well isn't that just awesome parenting.
    - 6510 2y ago
- Thorrez 2y ago
  > Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- harimau777 2y ago
  Is it possible that the issue is both and that the two are interrelated? It seems to me that there can be both a problem with lack of role models and problems with racial issues and that both should be improved. It seems to me that lack of role models could be exasperated by structural issues (mass incarceration, parents having to work too many hours) and in turn the lack of role models could exasperate the structural issues (unattended kids getting into crimes, kids struggling to get into college since their parents don't have time to tutor them).
sabarn01 2y ago
The outcome of this has been to make it harder to fail as a kid. We don't hold kids back anymore and we don't suspend kids anymore. At some point in time the rubber meets the road and you will be held accountable and have to be. We could improve the social safety net but we never want to match other countries that have more supervision of their at risk population. When I worked temp jobs there wasn't a place I worked where if you showed up on time two days in a row and worked hard I wasn't offered a job. All of these places paid well over minimum wage you just had to be willing to do hard physical work. Society plays some role but I have zero trust that our institutions know how to help people.
- ZhadruOmjar 2y ago
  There are so many teachers explaining how and why kids don't fail anymore and that leads to issues from grade 1 to graduation. At some point people just need to _do the thing_.
- batshit_beaver 2y ago
  > The outcome of this has been to make it harder to fail as a kid. I'd like to go a little further and suggest that more recently there's been a trend of not holding the adults accountable either. Instead of trying to improve outcomes for all, we seem to have decided to choose the path of collective failure.
  - Red_Leaves_Flyy 2y ago
    When do the greater communities need to pay their dues? Schools cost money to run but taxpayers balk and cry over every cent increase. There are crumbling schools with toxic air and water that lack adequate HVAC paying their teachers unlivable salaries. This is the result of neglect to preserve and invest which is a condemnation of those who allowed such neglect on their watch when they should have championed such plights before they reached these new heights. Teachers can literally be miracle workers but that makes no difference if the communities their students return to undervalue education or lack the resources to foster healthy environments to grow and learn in. Broken communities create broken school districts. This goes back to the point I make in another comment on this page. We must invest in underperforming communities to bring them up to the average if we want to see improvements. This necessarily requires such difficult conversations like the poor Hispanic or black majority cities getting some of the education tax from rich white suburbs or something to the same effect.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
mortify 2y ago
>making it harder for people to fail at adulting That has been the direction school has gone and, at least from my perspective, it seems worse. It has lead to a loss of agency among now so-called adults who expect to always be in a situation which guides them toward success. They struggle without a guidebook. Learning to fail, and crucially, how to handle failure and recover are better approaches.
- internet101010 2y ago
  This is how you end up with people that are "book smart" but do not how to create something from vague instructions or connect the dots. The easiest way to weed these people out of the applicant pool is if they link to their github and it is just projects from online courses.
- coopierez 2y ago
  The things the above poster suggested are largely man-made, artificially complex things seemingly designed to trap people. Things like paying taxes and handling healthcare are pretty much automatic in most European countries for example.
mbesto 2y ago
> navigating health insurance, paying taxes, budgeting, managing credit, home maintenance, vehicle care The self-perpetuating lie in American life is that all of these get solved by <insert market good/service here>. Silicon Valley has only made it worse because these solutions are just monkey-patching poor "source code". Why learn how to balance a checkbook when Chase online can do it for you? Our parents' generation had it different. They had fewer health provider options, a smaller tax code, fewer financial products, simpler home setups, engines that didn't have planned obsolescence built into them, etc, etc. We assume that things like 6 different options for MRIs or 2,304 different credit cards mean better products/services, but what is ignored is that these have only made for more complex and yet brittle systems that are harder to navigate and create much greater analysis paralysis.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  I learned out to fill out a basic Form 1040 tax return in middle school (late 1970s). Banking now is WAY easier. Balancing a checkbook? All your transactions and your balance are available 24/7 on your phone. Your paycheck appears in your bank account automatically. You used to have to get a paper check at work and then take it to the bank (open 9-5, maybe a little later on Fridays, and 9-12 or maybe 2pm on Saturday) to deposit it. Paying for stuff at the store today? Tap your phone. You used to have to carry cash, or a checkbook (if the merchant would accept checks) and hope you had figured your balance correctly. I don't remember a lot of lessons about managing credit but we did study simple and compound interest in math and talked about how that can work for and against you depending on whether you're borrowing or saving. Home maintenance and vehicle care --- covered the essentials in home economics and driver's education. Most people then and now paid others to do that, or went to the effort to teach themselves what they needed to know. Cars back then were much less reliable than today. Today's cars will go 100K miles easy with little more than oil changes and maybe a new set of brake pads and tires. Cars then needed regular tune-ups and generally started having more major problems after only a few years. Health care does seem worse now. You don't have as many family doctors with their own or small group practices, where getting an appointment was pretty easy and they actually knew you. But overall daily life is way more convenient now than it was 30 years ago.

gentleman11 2y ago

If you say the problem is social class and poverty, and not having available role models to show how adult life actually works, you’ll get flamed and trolled. If you say the problem is racial issues, you’ll get upvotes. I’ll just sit here and await my downvotes now

bccdee 2y ago
Role models are kind of a non-answer to the question. It's like saying the problem is "bad luck." Role-model-based policy solutions are, if not impossible, at least deeply impractical. Childcare subsidies and other forms of welfare, including simple direct cash transfers, have been shown to be strongly beneficial and are much simpler to implement. What people dislike about those is that they involve starting fights with lobbyists. Hence non-actionable perspectives like "the problem is role models" or "the problem is personal responsibility," which are not solutions so much as excuses for collective inaction.
6510 2y ago
The pattern I've noticed is that the poor and the poorly educated have no career expectations from their kids. If the kids with wealthy and/or highly educated parents showed up at home with just one poor grade all hell broke lose. Grounded for 6 months, allowance cuts, no more TV or video games etc One kept his kid at home during the holidays to tutor him himself, screaming 90% of the time. The other parents would look at the grades for < 1 minute and compliment the single thing they did well. Later on, when the other kids ended up in their first factory job the mantra was if only my parents gave me a good kick in the but I wouldn't be here right now I would send all 13 year olds to the factory for a good few months. Earnings to be paid when 21. I would also introduce Sunday school if your grades are crappy, 8 hours every week until you are no longer behind. And finally, call in the parents regularly just to annoy the fuck out of them. You don't seem very involved mr Jones. Could you be so kind to explain these grades?
- emmo 2y ago
  I hope you're never in a position to make any of these decisions.
  - 6510 2y ago
    Which one(s) and why? A few months in the factory is nothing compared to your entire life. Stories are no substitutes for experience. Those who go on to get degrees and nice jobs would also benefit from the experience. Sunday school because if you are sufficiently behind on the material you will never catch up. Never is a long time. Getting the parents to show up and explain why the grades are bad will force them to consider why that is. I had lots of friends with parents who absolutely loved them but couldn't be any less interested in grades. I appreciate how anecdotal this all is. How do you see it?
- OccamsMirror 2y ago
  > screaming 90% of the time. Well isn't that just awesome parenting.
  - 6510 2y ago
Thorrez 2y ago
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
harimau777 2y ago
Is it possible that the issue is both and that the two are interrelated? It seems to me that there can be both a problem with lack of role models and problems with racial issues and that both should be improved. It seems to me that lack of role models could be exasperated by structural issues (mass incarceration, parents having to work too many hours) and in turn the lack of role models could exasperate the structural issues (unattended kids getting into crimes, kids struggling to get into college since their parents don't have time to tutor them).

sabarn01 2y ago

The outcome of this has been to make it harder to fail as a kid. We don't hold kids back anymore and we don't suspend kids anymore. At some point in time the rubber meets the road and you will be held accountable and have to be. We could improve the social safety net but we never want to match other countries that have more supervision of their at risk population. When I worked temp jobs there wasn't a place I worked where if you showed up on time two days in a row and worked hard I wasn't offered a job. All of these places paid well over minimum wage you just had to be willing to do hard physical work. Society plays some role but I have zero trust that our institutions know how to help people.

ZhadruOmjar 2y ago
There are so many teachers explaining how and why kids don't fail anymore and that leads to issues from grade 1 to graduation. At some point people just need to _do the thing_.
batshit_beaver 2y ago
> The outcome of this has been to make it harder to fail as a kid. I'd like to go a little further and suggest that more recently there's been a trend of not holding the adults accountable either. Instead of trying to improve outcomes for all, we seem to have decided to choose the path of collective failure.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 2y ago
  When do the greater communities need to pay their dues? Schools cost money to run but taxpayers balk and cry over every cent increase. There are crumbling schools with toxic air and water that lack adequate HVAC paying their teachers unlivable salaries. This is the result of neglect to preserve and invest which is a condemnation of those who allowed such neglect on their watch when they should have championed such plights before they reached these new heights. Teachers can literally be miracle workers but that makes no difference if the communities their students return to undervalue education or lack the resources to foster healthy environments to grow and learn in. Broken communities create broken school districts. This goes back to the point I make in another comment on this page. We must invest in underperforming communities to bring them up to the average if we want to see improvements. This necessarily requires such difficult conversations like the poor Hispanic or black majority cities getting some of the education tax from rich white suburbs or something to the same effect.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

mortify 2y ago

>making it harder for people to fail at adulting That has been the direction school has gone and, at least from my perspective, it seems worse. It has lead to a loss of agency among now so-called adults who expect to always be in a situation which guides them toward success. They struggle without a guidebook. Learning to fail, and crucially, how to handle failure and recover are better approaches.

internet101010 2y ago
This is how you end up with people that are "book smart" but do not how to create something from vague instructions or connect the dots. The easiest way to weed these people out of the applicant pool is if they link to their github and it is just projects from online courses.
coopierez 2y ago
The things the above poster suggested are largely man-made, artificially complex things seemingly designed to trap people. Things like paying taxes and handling healthcare are pretty much automatic in most European countries for example.

mbesto 2y ago

> navigating health insurance, paying taxes, budgeting, managing credit, home maintenance, vehicle care The self-perpetuating lie in American life is that all of these get solved by <insert market good/service here>. Silicon Valley has only made it worse because these solutions are just monkey-patching poor "source code". Why learn how to balance a checkbook when Chase online can do it for you? Our parents' generation had it different. They had fewer health provider options, a smaller tax code, fewer financial products, simpler home setups, engines that didn't have planned obsolescence built into them, etc, etc. We assume that things like 6 different options for MRIs or 2,304 different credit cards mean better products/services, but what is ignored is that these have only made for more complex and yet brittle systems that are harder to navigate and create much greater analysis paralysis.

SoftTalker 2y ago
I learned out to fill out a basic Form 1040 tax return in middle school (late 1970s). Banking now is WAY easier. Balancing a checkbook? All your transactions and your balance are available 24/7 on your phone. Your paycheck appears in your bank account automatically. You used to have to get a paper check at work and then take it to the bank (open 9-5, maybe a little later on Fridays, and 9-12 or maybe 2pm on Saturday) to deposit it. Paying for stuff at the store today? Tap your phone. You used to have to carry cash, or a checkbook (if the merchant would accept checks) and hope you had figured your balance correctly. I don't remember a lot of lessons about managing credit but we did study simple and compound interest in math and talked about how that can work for and against you depending on whether you're borrowing or saving. Home maintenance and vehicle care --- covered the essentials in home economics and driver's education. Most people then and now paid others to do that, or went to the effort to teach themselves what they needed to know. Cars back then were much less reliable than today. Today's cars will go 100K miles easy with little more than oil changes and maybe a new set of brake pads and tires. Cars then needed regular tune-ups and generally started having more major problems after only a few years. Health care does seem worse now. You don't have as many family doctors with their own or small group practices, where getting an appointment was pretty easy and they actually knew you. But overall daily life is way more convenient now than it was 30 years ago.