The other day a friend of mine, driven demented by her son, screamed: “Will he ever grow up?”
The son in question, a really nice young man – clever, sociable, kind and very funny – is still living at home, aged 26. So too are most of his friends.
His mother, knocking back the pinot grigio, asked rhetorically: “What were we doing at 26? We had flats, jobs, we’d lived in London or New York, and we were independent.”
While it’s true that each generation laments the failings of the next generation, when dropping my own children to the Dart on their way to school this week, this friend’s observation struck me as very important.
Growing up is difficult. There can be little doubt about it. Yet moving from the state of emotional, moral and financial dependency to emotional, moral and financial independence is a part of how the person becomes a fully involved member of the society. Ideally, this should start to happen in the late teens and should be finished by or before the late 20s.
The traditional route to independence goes through five broad phases, which can vary from person to person, but usually goes along this pretty well-accepted cycle:
1. Leave school
2. Leave home
3. Become financially independent of parents
4. Settle down with someone
5. Have a child
It is essential that the economy, which should be merely the facilitator of process, encourages the move from dependence to independence for our population in their 20s.
One of my fears, looking at the plight of twentysomethings in this country, is that despite all the energy, brains, enthusiasm, creativity, the fun, optimism and potential, the economic opportunity is stacked against them. This lack of economic opportunity is retarding the move from dependence to independence. This is the best-educated generation of Irish twentysomethings ever, yet they are not achieving their potential early. And not getting started early has costs.
Before examining the costs, consider the following:
The proportion of Irish “dependants” aged 18-30 who are living at home stands at 42 per cent. This is despite having the highest emigration in Europe in this particular demographic.
In total, 440,000 Irish people, aged 18 or over, still live with their parents. One reason has to be the very high levels of Irish youth unemployment. The Irish youth unemployment rate is 25 per cent, which, although down from 31 per cent in February 2012, is still incredibly high. Of those twentysomethings in work, many thousands are on unpaid internships.
For example, 86,000 people are working in publicly funded ‘labour activation schemes’ such as JobBridge. This number has nearly doubled in four years – up from 45,000 in 2009.
Now, 28.6 per cent of interns eventually progressed to employment with their host organisation, but this meant that 71 per cent didn’t.
Ireland is full of unemployed or underemployed young people, and this problem has costs which are much greater than simply annoying their mother with washing and borrowing the car.
In the US, where they have data for the long-term impact of unemployment and underemployment on twentysomethings, the evidence is truly shocking. The lasting negative impact of not getting started on the career path in your 20s is unambiguous.
Research carried out by journalist and writer Don Peck from the American magazine The Atlantic found that the psychological impact of being unemployed in your 20s is extraordinary. People who are unemployed at this crucial time are much more likely to suffer from depression in later life. They cling more tightly to jobs and become incredibly risk-averse. Their wages, over the entire span of their working life, never recover to the level of people who have jobs in their 20s.
They are much more likely to be alcoholics, and to beat their partners. Their physical health deteriorates. Amazingly, people who lose their job just when they are getting started, in the 27-30 age bracket, have shorter life-spans (one and a half years) than those who never lost their job. Some research in the US contends that long-term unemployment is the emotional equivalent of losing your spouse.
A person’s confidence can be permanently shattered by the loss of opportunity in their 20s. In short, they settle for much less over the course of their entire lives. Unemployment affects the quality of our relationships because it affects the quality of our relationships with ourselves – our self-worth.
The affirming process of moving from dependency to independence, is retarded by the lazy notion that the twentysomethings have time on their side. Sometimes we hear older people, when confronted by underperformance of our twentysomethings, retort that the young ones have lots of time and things will pan out.
But things don’t pan out. Things get worse. In a person’s life, nothing is more urgent than now. Tomorrow can wait but today can’t. Today determines tomorrow. If we leave young adults to drift, that’s exactly what they will do. They will drift from one dead-end job to another without ever amassing the knowledge, discipline and savvy to get the best out of themselves.
This is why all our economic resources should be focused on intervention in the labour market for young people to give them a chance. Maybe drastically reducing the tax bill on younger workers or giving tax credit to companies that employ the under-30s could help.
The worst thing we can do is have a recovery and not use it to help the people who will eventually help us.
We know that the economic fortunes of twentysomethings have a profound effect on their lives. We also know that confident twentysomethings can do wonderful things. What age were Page and Brin when they set up Google? What age was Zuckerberg when he set up Facebook?
Brilliant things happen when optimistic people in their 20s reach for the sky. We should never forget that.
David, step 2 should read: 2. Leave Ireland. You had to leave Ireland to get your career started. So did I. So did my father. So will my son. You and I grew up expecting to leave Ireland for work, so we were not surprised up upset by it. It was just normal. We did indeed live in London or New York, because there was nothing to keep us in Ireland. The kids these days grew up in the Celtic Tiger era, and expected to find jobs in Ireland. Someone needs to explain to them that the Tiger was a… Read more »
You had me until the last but one paragraph. If you need examples of hugely successful and confident youngsters, no need to go to the extreme when we have the likes of James Whelton (CoderDojo) or Patrick Collison (Stripe).
Vingtitis As a parent of a pair in this passage of time I recognise this strange dilemma that seems on a concourse where directions are absent and leaders are missing and emptiness prevails. My son for good reasons had no 18th or 21st celebrations .However I managed to secretly organise a meeting of family and friends to celebrate his 25th in a hotel on Saturday night .It was a dinner for everyone. What I found interesting was the need for everyone to meet and 50 attended of which half were his friends . Many of those have already obtained degrees… Read more »
I’ve finally figured out why I get so irritated by your articles. Its essentially the same forumla every week. Step 1, find a noteworthy macro statistic about a poplulation group. Make sure this statistic is sufficiently sweeping and broad so as to give sufficient fodder to the glum, lemon sherbert visaged masochists who worship at the half empty alter. Secondly, apply said macro economic statistic to the specifc circumstance that attracted your attention on the dart that morning, and duly extrapolate a full disney movie worth of cliched deterministic froth from said circumstances. Step 3, is usually to preachily announce… Read more »
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I agree with the basics of the sentiment being expressed regarding young people having no opportunity.
Would it be possible for the government to give the deposit to young couples who want to purchase a property under cwrtain conditions and to claw this deposit back through the tax system during the young couples working lives?
Regards,
John
However, houses would need to be supplied before we look at ways to sell them. On that note I think the banks are sitting on lots of buy to lets that should be repossessed and sold on to the young couples.
Independence is a word often misused, Seems to me most people go from parent dependence to a kinda of institutional dependence (employers , banks, government etc) …in a some cases straddling both well into middle age (relying on granny for loans, child care , inheritance etc). Also …when it comes to developing a career the internet is misused , sending out a few CV’s via email is not job hunting , failure to do basic research for a job interview is inexcusable , …I’ve been approached by several 20 something’s with Degree’s who complain there is no work commensurate with… Read more »
one of the major problems for youth around the world is that they are over educated. Education has become a right rather than an option or even a privilege. Education in this context is in the form of higher education, i.e. college or university. One very successful form of education is or was the apprenticeship program that operated for centuries. Here people could learn a trade and the skills that prove useful for a lifetime. Having such skills today is proving to be valuable to the individual and to society. The plumber, the painter, silversmith, electrician, butcher, baker and candlestick… Read more »
“Global Unemployment Crisis” Two months ago the United Nations published a clarion call. They estimated world unemployment to be presently at 40% and rising, it’s been steadily rising since the early 70’s, so too has productivity. This trajectory won’t reverse because the answer to the question of what is driving productivity while requiring less and less human labour, the answer is obvious. The West is so fixated on ‘jobs’ that it is in denial of the future. I see the West as a society of futile jobseekers in an automated digitised mechanised world. The two realities will continue to diverge.… Read more »
The big problem now for kids is that expectations are soo high and reality is reality.
‘Back in the day’ our expectations were coloured by the reality that was around us.
Nowadays, expectations are what kids see on social media. This, coupled with the fact that the 50 something generation has pulled up the ladder and saddled future generations with paying for their penthouse means that disappointment (and kids who stay at home or leave the country) is inevitable.
>no work commensurate with their qualifications That is funny :-) . I have an idea for helping this generation of graduates: We write a book detailing the career path that real people have taken after leaving college in previous. And make it required reading. I suspect that it would show us that: 1. Less than 50% of people end up in work “commensurate with their qualifications”. Or in fact anything to do with their qualifications. 2. Almost everyone works on a building site at some point. Or in a warehouse. Or a call centre. Or as a waitress. 3. Employers… Read more »
In my experience …here’s the mind set (I’ve 2 -3 examples)
Mammy encouraging me to job hunt
Step #1 Email out a few CV’s
No reply
Step #2 Email a few contacts Mammy provided.
Get reply and some sound advise …Hmm this sounds like work ..I wont even reply.
Yeah Mammy I’m “job hunting” …nothing doing out der, is dinner ready yet?
A mate of mine set up a business offering students summer work in Germany, Netherlands, UK, Austria. The deal was – work 1,000 hrs, earn € 10 K. When he tried to get Irish employers involved he was met with blank stares. They wanted school kids to come in and work for nothing ! I know a chap who runs 3 thriving newsagents in Dublin, he only hires transition yrs from the local schools, even though he opens 16/7, he pays no wages! Why would any boss pay people when they can get interns @ no cost ? The min… Read more »
The reasons why some kids stay on living at home into late twenties is more complex than the article suggests and this practice is as part of irish tradition as is that of some kids moving out to cities and or emigrating. And now with teens having sex seen as being the norm, the pressure to have to move out to have somewhere to have sex is less of a factor. And of course now relations between young adults and their parents-tend to be more mature and easy going than in the past. And of course one of the great… Read more »
The current Taoiseach, Minister for Finance, Tananiste and leader of the Opposition are from the teaching professions as are 3 of the 5 TDs in my own constituency…though none have seemed to spent very long actually teaching and all have deprived young teachers of permanent teaching positions…shameful.
These are the people who have barred in the region of 10,000 unemployed people from registering as unemployed on the Live Register of Unemployment and have barred them from all the ststes re-triaing and re–educations programmers.
So the fingers of blame point at everything bar the prime cause of human labour surplus, and that is universal technological advancements renders human employment increasingly redundant. Period. Don’t waste your energy blaming the government or kids’ attitudes or waxing on about how industrious you were as a lad. Either society adapts to a future without work or we will tear each other apart chasing phantom jobs. Perhaps I’m in a tiny minority but I see a future without work as a glorious opportunity for mankind, first we have to get over our 20th century hang-ups about ‘jobs’ and then… Read more »
To be fair this isn’t just an Irish problem, this effect has been seen in America, Australia, the UK, Japan and probably more. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boomerang_Generation Usually the common element is that a recession happened when the respective groups were supposed to graduate college and start on the bottom rung of a decent career to find out the bottom rung was still occupied by the people already there who were unable to get promoted. What is the common element in all these countries, rampant capitalism, the bottom line, all the menial jobs or gone or have a lot more competition. Outsourcing of… Read more »
I’d agree with that, Mike but we still go out and vote for them. I also think they’ve fooled us in the past into believing that Ireland has a viable economy, sufficient to support its people. But it may be that Ireland’s economy is insufficient for this task. Or, putting it another way, Ireland’s population is too big to be supported by its tiny economy. Hence, emigration?!
David you got it wrong. Have a baby. Leave school. Go on welfare. Become dependent (on the state). It is a pragmatic alternative to being sucked dry by the state, and is gaining increasing popularity, because of the mechanism by which an increasingly ponzified state functions, with it’s “no banker left behind”. The system is dysfunctional. People have to adapt, to survive. Why go down the old path of old. The wages when you start are rubbish. There is massive social pressure to NOT save your wages. The Real Estate market (especially in Dublin) is bottlenecked due to lack of… Read more »
Hi, I am going to throw a right spanner in the works so before you all accuse me of being a racist you can all FUCK OFF. My uncle is now in his 89th year and has been in four different retirement homes in the past two years where by and large he has revived very good care. Two retirement home were publically funded by the HSE and two were privately owned. Almost everyone who works in the privately held nursing homes is female and either Indian or Philippine or the occasional eastern European. Almost everyone who works in the… Read more »
Anyone curious on the outcome of a society and its economy under the yoke of a weaponisation of the medium of exchange (institutionalised anarchic debt money usury system) you could do worse than read D’s article above IMO.
The article highlights the revolution society needs in respect to the concept of work. As a society we are too tied to the Victorian work ethic which is redundant when one looks out the window and sees an informational technological space ship sitting their and space and time shrunk to a pea.
“We also know that confident twentysomethings can do wonderful things. What age were Page and Brin when they set up Google? What age was Zuckerberg when he set up Facebook” -freaks- no wonder some kids can’t learn to fly when these freaks a set on pedestals…
what do you call a seagull who is bored with the daily squabbles over food but never learns to fly…
this might help find a cure – the hidden class divide gets bigger under the cover of morons in mansions – bono and more -:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/video/2014/oct/15/john-lydon-russell-brand-revolution-video