You want me to work eight hours?

A recent Times article written by Christine Haughney entitled, Parental Lifelines, Frayed to Breaking, explores the relative uselessness of an entire generation of over-indugled, spoiled, oblivious, and completely self-indulgent American youth.

These so-called adults are the products of Dr. Spock and parents who gave into their children's every whim to such an extent they managed to raise youth who have zero ability to comprehend the value of hard work and money ... The "we-don't-want-our-kids-to-suffer-the-way-we-did" mentality of making sure their children can't handle anything on their own.

It's easy to imagine these kids growing up watching an immigrant worker mow their expansive lawns, never having so much as smelled the exhaust of a lawn mower, let alone emptied a bag of cuttings into a garbage sack. How many of these kids spent the summer of their fourteenth birthday working their first paying job, corn detassling? Walking up and down corn rows that stretched two miles into the distance, battling stifling summer heat, zeppelin-sized mosquitos, biting flies, spiders, and mud, reaching over their heads to bend a seven foot tall corn stalk in order to pull out the plug at the top for cross-fertilization?  How many bussed tables in a cheese-coronary Mexican slop joint on their fifteenth birthday?  At sixteen, how many of these kids bagged groceries at the local family-owned super market? How many worked a part-time job through college to help subsidize their living expenses or worked eleven temporary jobs in the twelve months after they graduated to be punctuated by a stint whipping weeds at a country club?

Probably none.

What happens when the economy forces parents to pull back their support?
What we have today is a generation of kids who never had to lift a finger to do anything. Aimlessly plodding through college at the end of a bottle, then aimlessly joining the work force without a definitive career path or a clue how to get anywhere. 

Corporate offices have become extensions of sororities and fraternities where vapid small-talk of the previous night's binge is occasionally punctuated by work. The whole concept of work is anathema to the ease with which these kids have experienced life. Nowadays, kids drive Mercedes, BMWs and Range Rovers to high school. The unlucky ones have to wait for their "real" car when they graduate from college.

Two brothers in their late 20s who wanted to buy a $700,000 apartment with $250,000 from their parents. But their parents’ investment portfolio has lost so much value that they now can give only $50,000. Since the brothers make about $45,000 a year each, they are now shopping for a $500,000 apartment.

What kind of indulgent fool gives their child(ren) a quarter of a million dollars to purchase a $3,200-a-month apartment they cannot afford?  The total mortgage payment on a half-million dollar residence will cost one brother nearly his entire salary for one year — $38,400.00. That's assuming they can even pony up the cash to cover the $250k their parents are not covering.  Keep in mind that, if not for the economy, these fine folks would have helped their idiot, nearly thirty year old children purchase an apartment $200k more expensive.

Eric Gross, 26, a construction worker, was going to buy, with help from his father, a $600,000 one-bedroom condo with city views at Northside Piers in Williamsburg, a luxury building, he said. “He’s pulling back the lifeline,” Mr. Gross said. So Mr. Gross is scaling back, shopping for a $300,000 apartment.

This would be humerous if it were a joke. This clown had to "settle" for an apartment 100k more expensive than the town home it took this editor ten years of hard work to afford. How does a construction worker afford the mortgage on a $300,000 apartment?  

There is a “giant stigma,” stated a newly poor 26 year old writer and actor, for young people who are not financially independent. 

And, there should be. Never mind that the ONLY reason this young writer and actor is writing and acting at an age when the vast majority of people are grappling with the demands of self-sufficiency is because mommy and daddy subsidized her whimsical dreams.  The arts are a notoriously difficult field in which to earn a living wage. And, more often than not, success has very little to do with talent; rather, success is dependent on family connections, family money, and plain old luck.

We have all gotten help over the years, but there is a defined point when financial "help" becomes financial dependency and there is definitely a problem in our country with parents who don't have the capacity to raise children capable of functioning in society without a lifeline.  For those of us who never received a luxury car or a quarter million dollar down payment on a mortgage from our parents and have worked hard to achieve a semblance of the comfort in life that has been lavished on these spoiled brats ... Enjoy getting to know our good friend Mr. Ramen.