What to do about the next generation?

I had lunch with a young business friend recently, and our conversation turned to our children. He has two young kids, and he was worried about what their American Dream would be since the model to which he aspired—a good job, home ownership, upward mobility—might not be attainable, especially here in Hawaii. He was concerned, of course, not only about our impossibly high cost of housing and comparatively few career options but what his kids would have to motivate them to succeed: his own parents were working class people, and he'd worked summers picking pineapple and quickly learned that he didn't want to do that for a living. That experience helped motivate him to study hard and become a professional. What would his children have to motivate them?

I told him that I had the exact same concern when my two children were the age of his, and now that they're older I had yet another level of concern: My kids have never had to have a job and pretty much have been relieved of any responsibility to do anything but develop themselves academically, athletically, and artistically with their parents chauffeuring them around and cheering them on every step of the way. I wonder how will they compete when they didn't have to struggle like we did, especially when their competition in the global marketplace have.

While I have no clue as to the answer, at least I know we're not alone in our concerns. The generation of kids born between 1982 and 1995, referred to variously as echo-boomers, millennials, and Gen Y-ers, are a much studied group on whom studies and books have already been written. They reflect the seismic societal and technological changes that have occurred over the last twenty years or so as we baby-boomers started having kids and endeavor to give them everything we didn't have, including home computers, satellite TV, cell phones, iPods, and a whole new universe on the Internet. Their whole lives have been programmed with every kind of sport and class imaginable, and we their parents are called "helicopter" parents because we hover over them so much.

Our generation was the rebellious one that challenged authority; our kids aim to please. They've been taught to play nicely together, to report bullies and not fight them, to suppress individualism for the good of the team. What happens when we're no longer there to hover over them, when they show up for work at their first real job? Are we teaching them the values they'll need to sustain them and help them successfully overcome adversity? I like to think so; our kids are so much smarter and better informed than we were. I have to believe they'll meet the new challenges—the like of which we've cannot even imagine at this point—at least as well as we met ours. I'm not sure this comforted my younger friend much, however.

I had to point out to him that he actually is not a Baby-boomer but a Gen X-er, and that his kids are not Gen Y-ers but the unnamed subsequent generation for which there does not appear yet to be any analysis. I could only wish him luck as he faces his own generational challenges.

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