It has been a difficult year economically for employment opportunities. It was already bad before with over a third of 18-34 yr. olds living at home with parents but the trend has increased with adult children who were already well launched becoming more of the boomerang generation. Several issues come up with this group and with the group of adult children who never moved out to independence. Most commonly, I’m asked how to motivate them and how to help them find jobs.

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I meant to get this blog out before Father’s Day but a day late isn’t so bad. My own father passed away 18 years ago. We were closer when I was little and not the oldest of six but an only child or the only girl for four years. As I grew up, I was merely the maid and nanny and truth be told, he was always trying to work overtime and frequently did at his factory job in our auto town in Michigan. Both parents had a tendency to shower what little time and attention they had on favorites and I wasn’t one. But we had good adult to adult relationships once I was married and on my own. I escaped my family pressures by going away to college and thought I was going into chemistry until I nearly failed the class. Then I found psychology and was hooked. Since I was on my own, I was lucky to get a job as a nurse’s aide now called medical assistants. Within a year of my selecting psychology as a major, my father had a heart to heart with me. That alone was so rare, I remember it vividly. We were sitting in the dining room and he asked why I didn’t go into nursing. I had viewed my job as just a job. I liked it but separated a job from a major in college. Two different universes. I said I didn’t think I could ever have the stomach to start an IV on a patient which RNs did. He was very encouraging and I was a little angry that he bothered to care after neglecting me all those years. I certainly didn’t need his advice now that I was on my own.
Yet when my psychology degree didn’t net me a psychology job and I finally got the connection between college and work, I began to seriously think about his advice. I did what I counsel students and parents of young adults not to do and that is to think of college as something not related to work or vaguely so. Had I looked into the jobs I could get with my college degree, I would have seen that it wasn’t the way to go. Hoping to return to college to become an RN, I encountered college administration resistence to allowing those back in who already had a degree. It is easy today but it wasn’t back then. I had to go on for an advanced degree and went to law school. Ironically, my mother  had told me when I was in middle school getting all A’s, that my grandfather would probably put me through college if I became an attorney. Unfortunately, he didn’t see me go to college let alone law school.

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I’m a bit late in posting this blog because I spent the last half of May attending my oldest son, Adam’s, college graduation and moving my youngest son, Richard, home from college. Whew! As Richard and I went to take our chairs at Adam’s graduation, a mother and her elemenatry school daughter walked in front of us. The mother turned to her daughter and said, “Sis is graduating. Now what are we going to do with her?” Richard and I looked at each other and laughed. Richard said,
“With the help of Kidsoutnow, she might get a job!” Sadly, I see adult children living at home from last year without jobs or any idea of how to get one. Adult children boomerang home at even worse rates in these economic times than before when it was half of all graduating seniors. Lastly, have the job in place before graduation. Recently, the young man I mentored was job hunting when his work hours were cut back. I will often fill out his job applications as I have great handwriting and his is a bit challenging to read. On that first page it asks for four employers, past and present. Can your adult child list four employers? Mine had three by their first year of college because I required them to work in high school. They also had letters of recommendation from their former employers. Does yours? By the second year in college, they had to be working in the field they wanted to get a job in. Adam had worked two years for his uncle. They liked him and he liked them. He has avoided the failure to launch because we made sure he would launch.

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I recently appeared on our local abc T.V. station program, The View From the Bay with Spencer Christian and Janelle Wang. The following weekend I went to teach my seminar, “How to Get Your Teens and Young Adults to Independence”, at a local community college and a constant comment kept coming up so I figured this was the time to address it. Whenever I talk about how we Baby Boomers have created this new generation who has never worked, people tell me that these children have an overblown sense of “entitlement”. The word keeps popping up as if these children demanded at some point that they do nothing and receive all they wish in life. It isn’t that they arrived in the world with a sense of entitlement, they have been trained to be welfare receipients with the welfare givers being their parents. I think this is a much more correct view of what is going on because the blame starts with the parents who have created this.

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As we move into April, graduating high school seniors are finding out about which colleges they have been accepted to and college seniors are preparing to job hunt. In my book, Failure to Launch: How to Get Your Teens and Young Adults to Independence, this begins the great myth. Not Santa Claus, not the Easter Bunny, not the Tooth Fairy, but the College Fairy. Yes, we believe in the College Fairy like we believe in very little else. At the end of high school, there is the great push to go to college. Why? Because having got the best grades at the best schools, and the best SAT or ACT scores, and going to the best colleges, the best job awaits. It is a mantra repeated over and over and over and over. It is as if parents and students are waiting to the meet the College Fairy right after getting that degree and poof, she hands over the six figure job and all its glory. I watch this dance year after year. Students who never worked or managed bills or their own money struggle to comprehend the whole world of “getting a  job”. Successful in academe, they now are rejected for their lack of work experience. Their parents become ashamed and look on mutely. What happened to that great student? Why aren’t they succeeding? I have watched with sadness the trials of last year’s college grads even more shocked and daunted by this economy. Most are not working and are either at home with mom and dad or are being supported by mom and dad. Did you know that even before this downturn in economy, half of all graduating college seniors went  home to live with mom and dad and had no job prospects?

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Hello Parents and Interested Parties!

With the publishing of my book, Failure to Launch: How to Get Your Teens and Young Adults to Independence and in the talks I have given, one question always comes up. I got started in this coaching business almost three years ago when a young man, Justin, was left with me for a weekend by his aunt who then refused to take him back into her home. Only a  year out of high school, Justin had no driver’s license, was new to the area, had only a part time job, and no real plan on how to get on his feet. Within six months of that weekend, I saw to it that  he had the life skills he needed, a driver’s license, full time job, and a place to live on his own. Over time he has even gone to college a bit, moved up in his job to management, and was building a strong social network. He even lost a substantial amount of weight and learned to eat healthy. A true success story. But this isn’t a fairy tale and life never is. People who hear the story want to know where Justin is now. Until recently I was able to recount the facts I just wrote but then along came the economy and a few life lessons.

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Welcome to my first blog! There is so much to say in these difficult economic times when the problem that we had with adult children returning home is becoming a much larger issue than it has been in the last 10 years.

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