The Vanishing American Adult by Ben Sasse

   I don’t need this book to know that the US adult has stagnated. Every day I see 20-something men and women who refuse to work, or simply don’t know how. Then I see grown men at the airport doing coloring books with adult themes. Next come the college students getting special refuge rooms and counseling, all because Donald Trump is now the president. Keep in mind that combat veterans with PTSD can’t get free psychotherapy, but a 19-year-old, with no financial obligation is given a shoulder to cry on. Speakers are barred from college campuses because they’ll traumatize the students with conservative rhetoric. Last of all, in my neighborhood, I see 40-year-old men and women with their kids, and I can’t distinguish the parents from their children.

    Senator Ben Sasse, graduate of Harvard, Oxford, and Yale, PhD in History, gives many examples of the softening of the adult American. It all starts in childhood, he says, with the “Baby Einstein” syndrome. More school, less outdoor activity, less manual training, and fewer part-time jobs. Look at The Economist July 6, 2017 article on the disappearing summer job; it uses Ronald Reagan as an example of how a teenager’s job used to mold the mind. It also discusses how rising minimum wage has made it harder to hire teens.

   Sasses give a funny (and at the same time disturbing) example in Talia Jane, whose meager salary at Yelp headquarters kept her hungry and poor. Kind of unfair, no? After all, Yelp’s corporate officers were raking in the cash, and they knew that rents in the Bay area are sky-high. But just when Ms. Jane was about to become the poster girl for the underpaid, another twenty-something named Stefanie Williams tore the poor serf’s platform to shreds. Out came the photos - lifted from Talia Jane’s own social media page – of Jane’s high-maintenance e partying. Yelp’s salaries are not enough? You bet they’re not, if you’re throwing away money on alcohol, expensive cakes, eating out a lot, and living without roommates!

    Most of Sasse’s book blames the problem on helicopter parenting, safety paranoia, pressure to get into a top college, and parents who won’t teach the kid to get himself up in the morning. He refers to his own childhood, where he was expected to work, and how it taught him life skills. He blames helicopter parenting for the lack of financial savvy in today’s young men and women, and I’m inclined to agree. He advises giving the kids more responsibility, giving them tasks that let them prove their worth, and advises against grouping them by age.

    This book should be read with other tomes on this topic. Glow Kids, by Nicholas Kardaras, tells you how too much screen time damaging the children. Rebooting the American Dream is another excellent book on this topic.