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Around 34 percent of millennials still live at home with their parents, and as these young adults make a late foray into being independent, they are doing so without the necessary skills to handle life on their own.
This has resulted in a variety of classes for “adulting” now being offered at secondary schools, as well as at the high school level.
In case you didn’t know, millennials use the term “adulting” when referring to doing something age-appropriate rather than an immature act.
But, what’s most ironic of all, or perhaps sad, is the number of millennials who don’t actually possess “adulting” skills.
A report in 2015, found that 34 percent of adults aged 18-34 (millennials) still lived with their parents. This is up 26 percent from a decade earlier, a rise of 8 percent.
It appears that because such a high percentage of millennials haven’t left their childhood homes, they aren’t gaining the experience of being an adult in the real world.
This delayed departure from the nest is also resulting in young adults are marrying and having kids later in life. But unfortunately, when this happens, they have yet to develop the necessary skills they need to be both adults and parents.
Going all the way back to 1940, there was a relatively similar percentage, around 30 percent, of 25-29-year-olds living at home with parents or grandparents. But here’s the key difference…
In the 1940s, young people living at home had more responsibilities. They were expected to do chores and held other responsibilities that prepared them for life. In more recent decades, parents are still doing the brunt of the work, and not forcing their offspring to start doing and learning these responsibilities.
With necessity being the mother of invention, the need for millennials to learn how to be adults prompted the creation of a school for such a purpose.
Rachel Flehinger saw a need and co-founded an aptly named school – Adulting School in Portland, Maine, which teaches courses both in the classroom and online.
The courses offered by the school are aimed directly at millennials, teaching them a variety of skills needed in the adult world.
Courses are offered in cooking, sewing, budgeting, time management and more.
One curriculum on love includes courses dealing with conflict resolution, how to have a relationship, how to talk to someone, and how to tell someone you love them.
The understanding of this problem facing younger people is gaining wide attention. As a result, one Kentucky high school is now including “Adulting” classes hoping to pass these skills to people while they are still in their teens.
They have a designated day called “Adulting Day,” where seniors spend the day learning these practical skills instead of usual topics such as math, science or history.
