He is our collective responsibility. They all are.

April 10, 2024 2:19 PM

In this story, we'll follow hundreds of teenagers for the next 24 years, when they’ll be in their late-30s. They're among the thousands of kids who are part of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. This means researchers have followed them since their teenage years to the present day – and beyond. from this is a teenager [The Pudding]

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posted by chavenet (8 comments total)

Once again, we see the long-term adverse impact of parents not living up to their responsibility to protect and nurture their children. What are we going to do about it? Punish the children, that's what we're going to do.
posted by dg at 3:55 PM on April 10 [5 favorites]

I really struggle with blaming the parents so explicitly. Parents are basically grown up kids from the same or similar circumstances who turned 18 or 21 or whatever and no miracle happened. Nobody gave them magic tools or a lot of money. And now they have to just figure it out, in the same or worse economy and society as they grew up in.
posted by toodleydoodley at 5:16 PM on April 10 [9 favorites]

So like...we could blunt the ill effects by giving everyone at least a year in college? That's it? According to Biden's (now, I guess, forgotten) plan to give everyone two years of community college, that would have cost around $109 billion. So, roughly what OpenAI and Microsoft are spending on their Stargate supercomputer. It's strange to think that an amount of money that small, could so shrink the disparities caused by uninvolved parenting, bullying, and the other factors this piece outlines as raising teens' risks.
posted by mittens at 5:19 PM on April 10 [6 favorites]

Yeah it seems kind of ironic to go all "grr parents" in response to an article that explicitly makes the point that parents are grown up children, same as all human beings.

We live in a world that penalizes and punishes parents every single day for doing the hands-on work of raising children. We tell parents that they should be ashamed to bring children into the world, that the world already has too many people and the environment is dying thanks to parents who won't stop reproducing, how disgusting and shameful! We tell parents that the work they're doing is worthless anyway, not even real work, but also they'd better not fuck it up or we'll throw them in jail and blame them for literally everything wrong with the world.

We've dismantled every form of communal and religious support that ever existed for parents to exist in a human and humane way. What did we expect?
posted by MiraK at 6:27 PM on April 10 [6 favorites]

Crap, kids don't necessarily need a year in college, they need decent public schools from K to 12! My granddaughters IEP failed her so badly she oculd barely read at 3g level and couldn't even count money when she left high school. They told her mom she was unemployable. She believed it. Mom believed it. Guess what f**kers, she can count money now, she faithfully reads her favorite blogs, she designs and sews her costumes for Comicons, and she finally wrote a resume and has applied for several positions. She's 23 now, and she and I spent all that time doing what the damn school should have been doing. She's autistic and atypical, she's not stupid. Our society sucks.
posted by BlueHorse at 6:41 PM on April 10 [10 favorites]

Well, looking back...

My dad was a fisher and a hunter.

In my house, (in my bedroom closet), there were three shotguns. His dad's (don't ever try to shoot this one), and a single shot one, with a cool-looking compressor that kind of looked liked a silencer! and then a three shot semi-automatic.

I may or may not have used one of these guns in some random vandalism...
Didn't shoot people tho.
Wasn't gifted a gun in an obvious mental health crisis though.

They were bad.

I wish I still had my Grandfather's shotgun though. Was a beautiful piece...
posted by Windopaene at 9:01 PM on April 10 [1 favorite]

The unlived life of the parents might be a factor to be considered.
posted by DJZouke at 5:06 AM on April 11 [2 favorites]

Looking at it from a slightly different angle:

The median (half make more, half less) net worth for a 2 parent household with kids in the US is slightly over $100k, with over $8k in readily accessible savings. Alex's family has a net worth of $2k, or 1/4 of the median's savings and 1/50 of the median's net worth. Not the top. The middle! "When researchers assessed his home and family life, they determined he was in a fairly risky environment." So IMO, if you are at the 1/50 of the median, I'm not sure I'd describe your situation as 'fairly risky'. It's extremely risky.

To that extent and with no jail time by age 37, Alex probably slightly outperformed his upbringing. The data isn't really good or consistent enough (which is odd) to exactly make that determination, but it's a very possible outcome.

And that's the problem in the US: people at the bottom have no chance. Let's say he outperformed and is at the 1/37th instead of the 1/50 percent of median of his parents: does that even matter? No, not really.

So like...we could blunt the ill effects by giving everyone at least a year in college?
We should be giving them lots of things to equalize society. A single year of college probably doesn't even rate that high in the list of things we should be giving.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:37 AM on April 11 [2 favorites]