Big news for moms this week. A new study says today's young people are "more materialistic" and less likely to work and study hard than any generation of kids before them. Moms! Could we be raising the lazy generation?
That's what a study published this week in the in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin says. The researchers claim "youth materialism" is at "historically high levels." And just wait till you hear what this could do to the job market.
The study out of San Diego State University claims that Gen Y or Generation Me, as today's teens are called, have a high desire for "material rewards," but they lack to a "willingness to do the work usually required to earn them."
It's a blow for moms who are working hard to raise kids who will be upstanding citizens and productive members of society. So is it true?
Here's what the web has to say about Generation Y:
In a piece titled the Go-Nowhere Generation, the New York Times contends young people today are just too sedentary:
According to the Pew Research Center, the proportion of young adults living at home nearly doubled between 1980 and 2008, before the Great Recession hit. Even bicycle sales are lower now than they were in 2000. Today’s generation is literally going nowhere.
And to make matters worse, the New York Times Magazine contends kids are pushing back the "five milestones" that mark the transition to adulthood:
We’re in the thick of what one sociologist calls “the changing timetable for adulthood.”
But according to Karen Foster, a sociologist and a Banting Post-Doctoral fellow at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia (where she is conducting a study on the concept of productivity in economic and political discourse) you have to look deeper to understand today's young people:
It turns out that 20- and 30-somethings are looking for more than just a job. They want work that is meaningful and consistent with their socially and environmentally responsible values. They’re disaffected, to be sure, but that disaffection conceals a drive toward more caring, compassionate relationships and away from materialism.
Michael Greenstone, chief economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers in 2009 and 2010, says you can't blame today's young people for everything because the economy plays a role too:
Children are not earning as much as their parents, and I think we’re laying the seeds for that to continue into the future
Do you feel like young people today are lazy? Do you blame their parents?
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