Probably one of the most dangerous old scripts that no longer applies is "don't worry about finding your partner too quickly. It'll happen like it does with everyone."
Definitely not true anymore. Everyone, men and women, need to be very intentional about this now.
Wow. I can't imagine 1000 failures in dating. Maybe statistics have changed, but is it still true that most lasting marriages are between couples who met when invited by married friends to a dinner or party? I confess I haven't looked this up recently. Note: Please invite widows and widowers and divorcees! It's awful when singles are excluded from the little socializing cliques that married couples often form. I speak from experience as a widow, with my own neighbors and church.
One thing I learned after I already was with my life partner is that I met plenty of men who were attracted to dating me once I no longer cared about attracting men, PLUS I went by myself to try different things that interested me. Back then I was the only woman in a paper making class, for example. As a crisis intervention worker I went with a psychologist on rides with the police, to learn more about de escalating fraught police encounters. The psychologist told me he'd met his wife when they were both in an auto repair class. I wonder if much of the online advice about dating and attracting the other gender (or same gender if that's your choice) is distracting from simply becoming more and more yourself and exploring what you might like to do -- enjoying life being single and being open to new things. (That said, prayer is a good idea too!)
My husband and I, when looking around at the younger friends gathered around our dinner table, feel like we got the last chopper out of 'Nam. The scripts *did* work for us and we were the last ones.
My dad told all his children to get an electrical engineering degree, and then they could do whatever they wanted, but they'd have the bachelor's degree with the highest average earnings. Four out of five of us are electrical engineers and that advice worked great for the four of us. (And for the two daughters it worked waaay better than he planned, we absolutely got way more job offers, more leadership-tracked, and more salary adjustments and promotions because we were women and graduated in peak "recruit and retain women in STEM" years. And my sister and I are solid engineers, we just wouldn't have gotten the same awards and visibility if we were men.
I'm also a writer and editor, which came in super handy among engineers who had seen military service but broke out in a cold sweat about writing a sentence. Instead of being a writer competing against other writers, I was an engineer who was routinely the best writer in the room and was asked to help on many writing projects for customers. I love public speaking and many engineers don't. I presented to many customers and within four years at a Fortune 500 company I was presenting and hosting a panel for 200 defense and government leaders in DC with our CEO present. Some of the speakers were: the deputy administrator of NASA; the first African-American Congress woman from Selma, Alabama; and me (who am I to be in this list?!!). My sister was a Director of a Fortune 500 company by 28. All this to say, my dad's career advice worked SUPER WELL for us.
My sister and I both met our husbands in college (majoring in engineering does help, "Finding a guy in engineering: the odds are good, but the goods are odd" as they say 😅). So, our romance trajectories looked more similar to our parents' in the 1970s than that of young people today, where meeting online or through an app is common and third places to meet people have mostly vanished. Despite both my sister and I having infertility struggles, I have two kids and my sister is expecting her first. (Praise God!) We both have houses, even though the market is crazy. We are the ones for whom our parents' life advice worked.
When people younger than me (or even my age, early thirties) despair of online dating but say, "what else is there to do...?" I think, I would probably despair too!
We've hosted weekly open invite dinners for eight years. This year we're just hosting twice a month, because of increased commitments elsewhere. We have had three couples get married after meeting at our house! Praise God!
I have young people in my house at my table week after week and I listen to them and think, wow, the scripts are broken, it's a new world and I don't know what I would do if I were in their shoes. I had it much easier than they did and my parents' advice all worked for me. I don't have any advice to give them and it makes me feel old, of a different generation. I think I can do my part to bring people together in friendship with shared food and love of Jesus. And I can pray. That's all I've got.
As a fellow engineer and mom, I find myself wondering how to advise my teen, who is clearly a languages / verbal / liberal arts sort of person, not a STEM person. I mean, she has excellent grades in her STEM subjects, she simply does not enjoy them. It seems to me the reason to continue with post-secondary studies in liberal arts is primarily about the type of person and citizen you will be, not to advance your career prospects.
It sure would be easier for her to meet a potential husband if she were STEM-inclined, simply because there are so many more men there. That said, I met my husband in high school.
I LOVE the open dinners idea and think we could do that too, as part of my stealth plan to be the nosy busybody "auntie" to the young single men at my church, who outnumber the young women 7 to 1.
Immediately post-college (and during) it's worth looking up book talks, lectures, etc that are of strong interest to you and chatting up as many male attendees with no ring in a plausible age range as you find there.
A bigger city (NYC, DC, etc) will have more deep pocketed institutions that can foot the bill of attracting people with your interested to a public, visible location.
I also did not enjoy math classes at all and I *really* enjoyed being a systems engineer after college. Just my two cents there. Math classes are like grammar classes. If you only took grammar and never read a novel, you'd say you hate English too! The "novel" in math I didn't get to until the real world! Plus in college they teach a foot of math and I only ever needed an inch of math at my job.
Left to my own devices I would have been an English major. I'm so glad I'm an engineer today instead! Her mileage may vary, but I was happy with the outcome in my life!
This is funny, because I too was more of a languages/literature person, but I'm glad now to be an engineer because I've been able to provide a solid financial foundation for my family, and without this training we would really have struggled financially. This may not be very feminist of me, but think young women would be wise to choose something they can do part time on a self employed basis while raising kids. I sometimes wish I was an attorney, because I could charge much, much more per hour and therefore work less.
I definitely agree that college career offices should speak frankly about what professions are more amenable to part time work or pauses. And to have parents of young children in more often for panels (with babysitters)
My engineering job might not be representative, but I was able to drop to 32 hours (8-hour days, Monday-Friday), with full time benefits, after I had a baby. It was extremely helpful for me re: childcare. I worked that schedule for two and a half years until my husband graduated from grad school and got a job and I was able to retire into stay-at-home mom life.
I also did this (30 hrs/wk) for about 9 mo's, but I was in sr leadership at a Fortune 100 co, and the available roles where I could be part time were pretty much nonexistent. They had to create a custom temporary role for me. So once my husband had a stable job with health insurance, I ended up quitting and starting my own consulting firm so I could work more like 10-20 hours for a while.
There was an article I read a decade ago tracking marriage economics for the last fifty years, saying that in the past the male doctor might marry the female nurse and the male engineer might marry the female teacher, but now doctors are more likely to marry doctors and engineers to marry engineers.
I do think AI will continue the trend of decreasing entry level job opportunities. My husband has a PhD in engineering, focused in AI/machine learning. When he wants basic but tedious code written, he doesn't need a junior programmer anymore, ChatGPT can write it, and he knows what he wants well enough to make corrections from there.
It feels weird that my husband and I experienced peak, or just past peak, usefulness of a college degree. The advice "major in anything you want, college graduates make more money on average" failed a lot of our peers and some of them have student debt they can never pay off. (The "I've paid $30k on my $30k loan and I still owe $30k because of interest" stories of people I know make me sick.)
I have a master's and my husband has a PhD and it's hard for us to imagine sending our (currently still young) children to college, when, in our experience, earning a degree has become unmoored from competence. Even outside all the ideology stuff that has taken down big colleges, some of the Gen Z graduates I've met, even from "good" Catholic colleges, lack the basic reading, writing, speaking, and critical thinking skills I expect of an eighth grader. There exist competent new college graduates, but I begin to suspect they aren't competent *because* of college.
I don't blame the professors for lowering standards (my brother was a professor at a Big Ten college and got told by the Dean that he was getting too many student complaints about low (read fair) grades in my brother's course and to make the problem go away). So all the pressures, especially on untenured professors, are to not fail students, even if they don't show understanding of the material presented. Covid lockdowns only made college student performance and expectations worse. Even engineering has lowered standards since I graduated in 2012. And there are very few Americans in engineering grad school, in our experience it's mostly international students.
Our response is that my husband is starting a business, so there's a job option we can train our children for and pass on to them. Whenever we need to hire for the business, we're not looking for a degree, we're looking for competence. I saw Palantir is now hiring high performers directly out of high school, so they can train them and skip over college entirely. It will be interesting to see if this starts a trend, or just a spate of civil rights lawsuits over "inequality." Will America be allowed to have companies that design and build real things with competent people? Or will regulation and lawfare continue to make that nearly impossible? It's an open question!
LOL, this is so fun. My dad told my sister and I to get really good at math. We both majored in math. And that also went well! (There was other advice of his that I don't love so much.)
"The odds are good, but goods are odd" was the unofficial dating motto of my college. XD
> We have had three couples get married after meeting at our house! Praise God!
Including my brother! I prayed for a volunteer for my Catechesis of the Good Shepherd program at church, and a sweet young woman in my city whom I had never met and who had no friends in common with me *found my email address on the Internet from an old event I had hosted at my church* and emailed me asking to volunteer for CGS. I called her "Mary Sent-by-the-Holy-Spirit" every time I talked about her. Then she met my brother at my house for dinner and they dated and now they're married and have a baby and live three blocks from me! She really was sent by the Holy Spirit! She's possibly the sweetest person I've ever met in my life and now I get to be related to her. My cup overflows!
And my one friend who didn't have her driver's license (life stuff and there wasn't always a car to practice with/take the test) once told me, "I'm praying for a husband." I said, "Sure, that's great, but you have to get out more. You just craft at home and sometimes come to dinner at my house, you need to get involved somewhere. God isn't going to just drop a husband out of the sky." Literally, within weeks of this conversation, a new guy came to dinner at my house, met her and was immediately smitten. They started dating and then got engaged and married and now have two kids. Oh me of little faith!!!!
My life would make a great tv show, and also no one would believe it. It's too wild. 😂
So many kids enter college not knowing what they want to do -- which is fine despite the sophomore last quarter angst of having to choose a major for junior year. That's ok, but when kids pretty much waste their first year because of immaturity, it would be great to go to technical school first in a field that's pretty sure to last a few decades of high demand and reasonable pay. Then it's possible to go to college and major in a field that may or may not pay well, but is deeply fulfilling -- because there's always a part time or intermittent job as a backup option when funds are low.
I started at community college and really recommend it for everyone out of high school.
It gave me an appreciation for how privileged I was to be young and to only have school to worry about. I took English classes with single mom bus drivers and CAD classes with dads who did shift work. Getting this associates degree could mean more money to feed their kids, and yet, it was iffy if they'd be able to finish a two year degree, given the other stresses in their lives. My class sizes were small and my professors actually knew my name and I went to office hours every week for additional support, which they were happy to give.
Transferring to a four year school after community college set me up for success in that 1. I had taken almost all my math courses in an environment I was more likely to succeed (and I got a lot of Cs in math classes in college), which helped my gpa and self esteem and 2. I had a different and more focused attitude than my peers, which helped my gpa and self esteem.
I started college at the $10/quarter Chicago City Junior College when classes were on TV and we mailed in our papers, went downtown twice to take tests. For Chemistry 101, though, I had to go to class at 8 AM -- left at 5:45 with the kids to walk to the train station to take them to day care, with oatmeal cookies stuff in each mitten for their breakfast, then took my train to downtown class. What was great was that most of my classmates were nurses coming off the night shifts to take the class. We could talk (and eat sort of a breakfast) during a break. Their determination to get their degrees reinforced mine, and I saw how challenging their lives were. Wouldn't miss that for the world. (Later, I was able to transfer to the University of Chicago, another story for another time.)
Love this idea. I wonder what fields are in high demand and pay well for the next decade? This is me visualizing my now-13 year old daughter as an HVAC technician.
Lots of information about this online; sometimes it varies greatly according to location. Keep in mind that interests and natural abilities are just as important. When I was your daughter's age, my school had a beloved guidance counselor who allowed us to take a vocational development quiz as many times as we wanted. It was interesting to see how fast our answers changed over the year as we discovered more things about ourselves and different areas of study and work. Now a lot of such quizzes are available online. Of course, if your daughter hates the idea of such quizzes, that's another clue!
I don’t think my parents consciously handed down any scripts-they were too busy trying to pay the bills; most of what I understood as such came from my elder siblings. At 10-15 years older than me, much about college, starting careers, etc. was dramatically different and the prevailing scripts were quickly becoming obsolete by the time I graduated HS. Tuition had almost doubled at the university they attended; even the best resume wasn’t very successful in the aftermath of the 2008 recession. I felt pretty deceived at the “good grades will result in success” message that most adults in my life constantly presented to me as a teen.
Even though my parents didn’t overtly offer any scripts about parenting, my mom clearly struggles to comprehend the new paradigm. I recently started reading David Graeber’s “Utopia of Rules,” and his explanation of how bureaucratic our society has become articulates why raising children is different now vs. 35 years ago better than I ever could. There are definitely more rules and more paperwork, as we’re reminded at every pediatrician appointment and summer camp registration rush. Signing up my kids for preschool and developmental therapies has blown away the amount of work required for my college applications, for instance. Negotiating medical bills is far more complicated and time consuming than it used to be before insurance became what it is now (not to mention getting consistent access to our own very young kids’ medical records, which is confoundingly not so simple because insurance companies build their information systems around who *pays* for the insurance rather than relationship to the patient, despite healthcare privacy rules requiring it.). I often get the sense that my mother and older siblings think I’m being high maintenance about the administrative side of parenting for no reason, but Graeber’s book made me feel more sane. Having a kid with special needs who requires much more interaction with the red tape of education services and medical bills only exaggerates this reality.
My experience has challenged my conception of how I will hand down wisdom to my own children, who will certainly come of age in a world that yet again operates under a totally new set of rules.
This resonates so much with me. Recently I was talking to my retired dad (in his early 80s) whose entire career was spent working for the Texas Rehabilitation Commission. He's trying to urge me to seek help from the local rehabilitation commission for our special needs child who is currently looking for a job and... I quail at the amount of bureaucratic paperwork that I expect would be involved. Much more than is involved in job applications for entry level jobs. I tried to explain this to him and he just cannot grasp how much more bureaucratic everything is. There was a huge disconnect between his expectations and mine.
Yes, alas. A friend of mine entering a religious order had such a loooooooong and bureaucratic entry process. And some of the very old nuns were like "Why is taking you so long? When I entered I just showed up and they picked me a room?"
The slower process solves some problems, but it creates a bunch of new ones!
I feel like a lunatic any time I try to explain the sheer number of hours I have spent waiting on hold to get on *waitlists* for appointments or to fix administrative issues with insurance. My mom has basically said if she ever had been faced with doing that much work to get extra services for kids, she would have just…not. Which I imagine is the reality for a lot of people who need them. Not exactly an encouragement to hear “well, quit then” when sharing our difficulties with family.
I've actually been pretty fortunate in this regard. My parents were thoughtful enough not to hand down "scripts" too uncritically. However, I would say one way of being that dies the hardest is my mom's "using your gifts/talents," i.e. in an intellectual type job. (never quite clear what this was, since she's an academic and rails about the evils of academia nonstop.) I can tell she's not exactly disappointed, but perhaps underwhelmed by my banking on the Reserves, homemaking, and homeschooling indefinitely for my intellectual stimulation.
Parenting uses SO much intelligence! It's still possible to bury oneself in studying parenting books (and now, online articles) -- but any endeavor that uses heart and hands as well as mind and spirit -- leads, I think, to a more wholistic becoming. It's wonderful to learn from one's children as well as with them. Congratulations on your current choices.
When I read in the University of Chicago Magazine about a book by two alumni, Rachel Wiseman and Anastasia Berg, "What are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice," I wondered at once if you had read it, Leah. It's exploring the moral and philosophical reasons for choose to have a child, or choosing not to have a child -- based on the fact that Millennials are having fewer children, and very late in life. "Is life, however imperfect and however challenging -- however fraught with political disagreement and disaster, worth living?"
I would say that this issue, like the AI challenges and fears, comes down to a spiritual issue. It can help to realize that spiritual challenges that loom so new and different now, are basically similar to the spiritual challenges of not only previous generations, but previous centuries. What's Absolute Truth? What is of absolute value, above all else? How do we know what God wants us to do here and now, this moment? This day?
On an enforced retreat due to knee injuries (yes, pride leadeth to a fall and stubborn pride to another fall) -- I reread all 9 of the Susan Howatch novels about the Church of England -- a kind of spiritual direction in fiction. These are the only novels I read that lead me to not just highlight, but hand write notes for reflection. This time her novels led me into older writings by R Somerset Ward -- "The Way," for example (available free at Google). (My new scripture verse: "God is within her; she shall not fall.")
I've also found inspiration in Ben Rhodes' NYT essay "100 Days: That's All It Took to Sever America from the World" -- because it ends with the inspiration for us stop looking back -- to look forward, envision a better future, and work to create it, one step at a time. If we do this with humility and trust in our spiritual guidance, one step at a time, we can take the necessary risks with joy.
Does Ross's recommendation to live in reality (and Leah's too, for that matter) remind anyone else of Puddleglum's speech in the Narnia volume "The Silver Chair", where he rejects the witch's claim that her world is the real world? It certainly comes to my mind. Here is the speech - a great C.S. Lewis bit of writing.
“One word, Ma’am,” he said, coming back from the fire; limping, because of the pain. “One word. All you’ve been saying is quite right, I shouldn’t wonder. I’m a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won’t deny any of what you said. But there’s one more thing to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things-trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we’re leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that’s a small loss if the world’s as dull a place as you say.”
It was easier in the sixties when every city was loaded with subcultures that joyfully rebelled against every parental script. So it was easy for women to find men who expected to share household chores and make decisions consensually. (Consensus decision making was THE way to go, despite the ensuing long, long meetings that joining most groups required.) Luckily, thrift was also trendy at that time, plus organic gardening, alternative education in many flavors, and soon, the simple living movement and the back to the land movement. Unless we lived in high rises, cross-breeze windows substituted for air conditioning, and there were no rules about how many children or which genders could share a bedroom. All this can be reclaimed -- or the things we choose to reclaim -- and made into a new and better lifestyle. It requires a determination to ignore or resist the deluge of advertising (especially AI ads that are based on the vast knowledge that retailers know about us). This is possible -- by "getting by with a little help from my friends" plus prayer and the grace of God.
Probably one of the most dangerous old scripts that no longer applies is "don't worry about finding your partner too quickly. It'll happen like it does with everyone."
Definitely not true anymore. Everyone, men and women, need to be very intentional about this now.
Extremely correct.
My dad actually gave me an incredibly helpful mantra about this when I was dating: "Don't worry about 'guys.' You only need one."
It's a good mantra. 1000 failures mean nothing when number 1001 gets you to the finish line.
Wow. I can't imagine 1000 failures in dating. Maybe statistics have changed, but is it still true that most lasting marriages are between couples who met when invited by married friends to a dinner or party? I confess I haven't looked this up recently. Note: Please invite widows and widowers and divorcees! It's awful when singles are excluded from the little socializing cliques that married couples often form. I speak from experience as a widow, with my own neighbors and church.
One thing I learned after I already was with my life partner is that I met plenty of men who were attracted to dating me once I no longer cared about attracting men, PLUS I went by myself to try different things that interested me. Back then I was the only woman in a paper making class, for example. As a crisis intervention worker I went with a psychologist on rides with the police, to learn more about de escalating fraught police encounters. The psychologist told me he'd met his wife when they were both in an auto repair class. I wonder if much of the online advice about dating and attracting the other gender (or same gender if that's your choice) is distracting from simply becoming more and more yourself and exploring what you might like to do -- enjoying life being single and being open to new things. (That said, prayer is a good idea too!)
My husband and I, when looking around at the younger friends gathered around our dinner table, feel like we got the last chopper out of 'Nam. The scripts *did* work for us and we were the last ones.
My dad told all his children to get an electrical engineering degree, and then they could do whatever they wanted, but they'd have the bachelor's degree with the highest average earnings. Four out of five of us are electrical engineers and that advice worked great for the four of us. (And for the two daughters it worked waaay better than he planned, we absolutely got way more job offers, more leadership-tracked, and more salary adjustments and promotions because we were women and graduated in peak "recruit and retain women in STEM" years. And my sister and I are solid engineers, we just wouldn't have gotten the same awards and visibility if we were men.
I'm also a writer and editor, which came in super handy among engineers who had seen military service but broke out in a cold sweat about writing a sentence. Instead of being a writer competing against other writers, I was an engineer who was routinely the best writer in the room and was asked to help on many writing projects for customers. I love public speaking and many engineers don't. I presented to many customers and within four years at a Fortune 500 company I was presenting and hosting a panel for 200 defense and government leaders in DC with our CEO present. Some of the speakers were: the deputy administrator of NASA; the first African-American Congress woman from Selma, Alabama; and me (who am I to be in this list?!!). My sister was a Director of a Fortune 500 company by 28. All this to say, my dad's career advice worked SUPER WELL for us.
My sister and I both met our husbands in college (majoring in engineering does help, "Finding a guy in engineering: the odds are good, but the goods are odd" as they say 😅). So, our romance trajectories looked more similar to our parents' in the 1970s than that of young people today, where meeting online or through an app is common and third places to meet people have mostly vanished. Despite both my sister and I having infertility struggles, I have two kids and my sister is expecting her first. (Praise God!) We both have houses, even though the market is crazy. We are the ones for whom our parents' life advice worked.
When people younger than me (or even my age, early thirties) despair of online dating but say, "what else is there to do...?" I think, I would probably despair too!
We've hosted weekly open invite dinners for eight years. This year we're just hosting twice a month, because of increased commitments elsewhere. We have had three couples get married after meeting at our house! Praise God!
I have young people in my house at my table week after week and I listen to them and think, wow, the scripts are broken, it's a new world and I don't know what I would do if I were in their shoes. I had it much easier than they did and my parents' advice all worked for me. I don't have any advice to give them and it makes me feel old, of a different generation. I think I can do my part to bring people together in friendship with shared food and love of Jesus. And I can pray. That's all I've got.
As a fellow engineer and mom, I find myself wondering how to advise my teen, who is clearly a languages / verbal / liberal arts sort of person, not a STEM person. I mean, she has excellent grades in her STEM subjects, she simply does not enjoy them. It seems to me the reason to continue with post-secondary studies in liberal arts is primarily about the type of person and citizen you will be, not to advance your career prospects.
It sure would be easier for her to meet a potential husband if she were STEM-inclined, simply because there are so many more men there. That said, I met my husband in high school.
I LOVE the open dinners idea and think we could do that too, as part of my stealth plan to be the nosy busybody "auntie" to the young single men at my church, who outnumber the young women 7 to 1.
Immediately post-college (and during) it's worth looking up book talks, lectures, etc that are of strong interest to you and chatting up as many male attendees with no ring in a plausible age range as you find there.
A bigger city (NYC, DC, etc) will have more deep pocketed institutions that can foot the bill of attracting people with your interested to a public, visible location.
I also did not enjoy math classes at all and I *really* enjoyed being a systems engineer after college. Just my two cents there. Math classes are like grammar classes. If you only took grammar and never read a novel, you'd say you hate English too! The "novel" in math I didn't get to until the real world! Plus in college they teach a foot of math and I only ever needed an inch of math at my job.
Left to my own devices I would have been an English major. I'm so glad I'm an engineer today instead! Her mileage may vary, but I was happy with the outcome in my life!
This is funny, because I too was more of a languages/literature person, but I'm glad now to be an engineer because I've been able to provide a solid financial foundation for my family, and without this training we would really have struggled financially. This may not be very feminist of me, but think young women would be wise to choose something they can do part time on a self employed basis while raising kids. I sometimes wish I was an attorney, because I could charge much, much more per hour and therefore work less.
I definitely agree that college career offices should speak frankly about what professions are more amenable to part time work or pauses. And to have parents of young children in more often for panels (with babysitters)
My engineering job might not be representative, but I was able to drop to 32 hours (8-hour days, Monday-Friday), with full time benefits, after I had a baby. It was extremely helpful for me re: childcare. I worked that schedule for two and a half years until my husband graduated from grad school and got a job and I was able to retire into stay-at-home mom life.
I also did this (30 hrs/wk) for about 9 mo's, but I was in sr leadership at a Fortune 100 co, and the available roles where I could be part time were pretty much nonexistent. They had to create a custom temporary role for me. So once my husband had a stable job with health insurance, I ended up quitting and starting my own consulting firm so I could work more like 10-20 hours for a while.
I am that busy body and I love it. 😂😂🤣
There was an article I read a decade ago tracking marriage economics for the last fifty years, saying that in the past the male doctor might marry the female nurse and the male engineer might marry the female teacher, but now doctors are more likely to marry doctors and engineers to marry engineers.
I can't find the exact article, though this one has a good graph of decreasing earnings: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/the-decline-of-marriage-and-the-rise-of-unwed-mothers-an-economic-mystery/274111/
I do think AI will continue the trend of decreasing entry level job opportunities. My husband has a PhD in engineering, focused in AI/machine learning. When he wants basic but tedious code written, he doesn't need a junior programmer anymore, ChatGPT can write it, and he knows what he wants well enough to make corrections from there.
It feels weird that my husband and I experienced peak, or just past peak, usefulness of a college degree. The advice "major in anything you want, college graduates make more money on average" failed a lot of our peers and some of them have student debt they can never pay off. (The "I've paid $30k on my $30k loan and I still owe $30k because of interest" stories of people I know make me sick.)
I have a master's and my husband has a PhD and it's hard for us to imagine sending our (currently still young) children to college, when, in our experience, earning a degree has become unmoored from competence. Even outside all the ideology stuff that has taken down big colleges, some of the Gen Z graduates I've met, even from "good" Catholic colleges, lack the basic reading, writing, speaking, and critical thinking skills I expect of an eighth grader. There exist competent new college graduates, but I begin to suspect they aren't competent *because* of college.
I don't blame the professors for lowering standards (my brother was a professor at a Big Ten college and got told by the Dean that he was getting too many student complaints about low (read fair) grades in my brother's course and to make the problem go away). So all the pressures, especially on untenured professors, are to not fail students, even if they don't show understanding of the material presented. Covid lockdowns only made college student performance and expectations worse. Even engineering has lowered standards since I graduated in 2012. And there are very few Americans in engineering grad school, in our experience it's mostly international students.
Our response is that my husband is starting a business, so there's a job option we can train our children for and pass on to them. Whenever we need to hire for the business, we're not looking for a degree, we're looking for competence. I saw Palantir is now hiring high performers directly out of high school, so they can train them and skip over college entirely. It will be interesting to see if this starts a trend, or just a spate of civil rights lawsuits over "inequality." Will America be allowed to have companies that design and build real things with competent people? Or will regulation and lawfare continue to make that nearly impossible? It's an open question!
LOL, this is so fun. My dad told my sister and I to get really good at math. We both majored in math. And that also went well! (There was other advice of his that I don't love so much.)
"The odds are good, but goods are odd" was the unofficial dating motto of my college. XD
> We have had three couples get married after meeting at our house! Praise God!
Cooooool!
Including my brother! I prayed for a volunteer for my Catechesis of the Good Shepherd program at church, and a sweet young woman in my city whom I had never met and who had no friends in common with me *found my email address on the Internet from an old event I had hosted at my church* and emailed me asking to volunteer for CGS. I called her "Mary Sent-by-the-Holy-Spirit" every time I talked about her. Then she met my brother at my house for dinner and they dated and now they're married and have a baby and live three blocks from me! She really was sent by the Holy Spirit! She's possibly the sweetest person I've ever met in my life and now I get to be related to her. My cup overflows!
And my one friend who didn't have her driver's license (life stuff and there wasn't always a car to practice with/take the test) once told me, "I'm praying for a husband." I said, "Sure, that's great, but you have to get out more. You just craft at home and sometimes come to dinner at my house, you need to get involved somewhere. God isn't going to just drop a husband out of the sky." Literally, within weeks of this conversation, a new guy came to dinner at my house, met her and was immediately smitten. They started dating and then got engaged and married and now have two kids. Oh me of little faith!!!!
My life would make a great tv show, and also no one would believe it. It's too wild. 😂
The corollary to The odds are good, but the goods are odd:
Finding a girl in engineering is like finding a parking space on campus, they're either taken, reserved, or way the heck out there. 😂
So many kids enter college not knowing what they want to do -- which is fine despite the sophomore last quarter angst of having to choose a major for junior year. That's ok, but when kids pretty much waste their first year because of immaturity, it would be great to go to technical school first in a field that's pretty sure to last a few decades of high demand and reasonable pay. Then it's possible to go to college and major in a field that may or may not pay well, but is deeply fulfilling -- because there's always a part time or intermittent job as a backup option when funds are low.
I started at community college and really recommend it for everyone out of high school.
It gave me an appreciation for how privileged I was to be young and to only have school to worry about. I took English classes with single mom bus drivers and CAD classes with dads who did shift work. Getting this associates degree could mean more money to feed their kids, and yet, it was iffy if they'd be able to finish a two year degree, given the other stresses in their lives. My class sizes were small and my professors actually knew my name and I went to office hours every week for additional support, which they were happy to give.
Transferring to a four year school after community college set me up for success in that 1. I had taken almost all my math courses in an environment I was more likely to succeed (and I got a lot of Cs in math classes in college), which helped my gpa and self esteem and 2. I had a different and more focused attitude than my peers, which helped my gpa and self esteem.
I started college at the $10/quarter Chicago City Junior College when classes were on TV and we mailed in our papers, went downtown twice to take tests. For Chemistry 101, though, I had to go to class at 8 AM -- left at 5:45 with the kids to walk to the train station to take them to day care, with oatmeal cookies stuff in each mitten for their breakfast, then took my train to downtown class. What was great was that most of my classmates were nurses coming off the night shifts to take the class. We could talk (and eat sort of a breakfast) during a break. Their determination to get their degrees reinforced mine, and I saw how challenging their lives were. Wouldn't miss that for the world. (Later, I was able to transfer to the University of Chicago, another story for another time.)
Aww, the cookies in mittens reminds me of the March girls with hot apple turnovers in their pockets walking to school
I had forgotten about that!
Oh this is fun; loving the vivid details!
Love this idea. I wonder what fields are in high demand and pay well for the next decade? This is me visualizing my now-13 year old daughter as an HVAC technician.
Lots of information about this online; sometimes it varies greatly according to location. Keep in mind that interests and natural abilities are just as important. When I was your daughter's age, my school had a beloved guidance counselor who allowed us to take a vocational development quiz as many times as we wanted. It was interesting to see how fast our answers changed over the year as we discovered more things about ourselves and different areas of study and work. Now a lot of such quizzes are available online. Of course, if your daughter hates the idea of such quizzes, that's another clue!
I don’t think my parents consciously handed down any scripts-they were too busy trying to pay the bills; most of what I understood as such came from my elder siblings. At 10-15 years older than me, much about college, starting careers, etc. was dramatically different and the prevailing scripts were quickly becoming obsolete by the time I graduated HS. Tuition had almost doubled at the university they attended; even the best resume wasn’t very successful in the aftermath of the 2008 recession. I felt pretty deceived at the “good grades will result in success” message that most adults in my life constantly presented to me as a teen.
Even though my parents didn’t overtly offer any scripts about parenting, my mom clearly struggles to comprehend the new paradigm. I recently started reading David Graeber’s “Utopia of Rules,” and his explanation of how bureaucratic our society has become articulates why raising children is different now vs. 35 years ago better than I ever could. There are definitely more rules and more paperwork, as we’re reminded at every pediatrician appointment and summer camp registration rush. Signing up my kids for preschool and developmental therapies has blown away the amount of work required for my college applications, for instance. Negotiating medical bills is far more complicated and time consuming than it used to be before insurance became what it is now (not to mention getting consistent access to our own very young kids’ medical records, which is confoundingly not so simple because insurance companies build their information systems around who *pays* for the insurance rather than relationship to the patient, despite healthcare privacy rules requiring it.). I often get the sense that my mother and older siblings think I’m being high maintenance about the administrative side of parenting for no reason, but Graeber’s book made me feel more sane. Having a kid with special needs who requires much more interaction with the red tape of education services and medical bills only exaggerates this reality.
My experience has challenged my conception of how I will hand down wisdom to my own children, who will certainly come of age in a world that yet again operates under a totally new set of rules.
This resonates so much with me. Recently I was talking to my retired dad (in his early 80s) whose entire career was spent working for the Texas Rehabilitation Commission. He's trying to urge me to seek help from the local rehabilitation commission for our special needs child who is currently looking for a job and... I quail at the amount of bureaucratic paperwork that I expect would be involved. Much more than is involved in job applications for entry level jobs. I tried to explain this to him and he just cannot grasp how much more bureaucratic everything is. There was a huge disconnect between his expectations and mine.
Yes, alas. A friend of mine entering a religious order had such a loooooooong and bureaucratic entry process. And some of the very old nuns were like "Why is taking you so long? When I entered I just showed up and they picked me a room?"
The slower process solves some problems, but it creates a bunch of new ones!
I feel like a lunatic any time I try to explain the sheer number of hours I have spent waiting on hold to get on *waitlists* for appointments or to fix administrative issues with insurance. My mom has basically said if she ever had been faced with doing that much work to get extra services for kids, she would have just…not. Which I imagine is the reality for a lot of people who need them. Not exactly an encouragement to hear “well, quit then” when sharing our difficulties with family.
I've actually been pretty fortunate in this regard. My parents were thoughtful enough not to hand down "scripts" too uncritically. However, I would say one way of being that dies the hardest is my mom's "using your gifts/talents," i.e. in an intellectual type job. (never quite clear what this was, since she's an academic and rails about the evils of academia nonstop.) I can tell she's not exactly disappointed, but perhaps underwhelmed by my banking on the Reserves, homemaking, and homeschooling indefinitely for my intellectual stimulation.
Parenting uses SO much intelligence! It's still possible to bury oneself in studying parenting books (and now, online articles) -- but any endeavor that uses heart and hands as well as mind and spirit -- leads, I think, to a more wholistic becoming. It's wonderful to learn from one's children as well as with them. Congratulations on your current choices.
When I read in the University of Chicago Magazine about a book by two alumni, Rachel Wiseman and Anastasia Berg, "What are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice," I wondered at once if you had read it, Leah. It's exploring the moral and philosophical reasons for choose to have a child, or choosing not to have a child -- based on the fact that Millennials are having fewer children, and very late in life. "Is life, however imperfect and however challenging -- however fraught with political disagreement and disaster, worth living?"
I would say that this issue, like the AI challenges and fears, comes down to a spiritual issue. It can help to realize that spiritual challenges that loom so new and different now, are basically similar to the spiritual challenges of not only previous generations, but previous centuries. What's Absolute Truth? What is of absolute value, above all else? How do we know what God wants us to do here and now, this moment? This day?
On an enforced retreat due to knee injuries (yes, pride leadeth to a fall and stubborn pride to another fall) -- I reread all 9 of the Susan Howatch novels about the Church of England -- a kind of spiritual direction in fiction. These are the only novels I read that lead me to not just highlight, but hand write notes for reflection. This time her novels led me into older writings by R Somerset Ward -- "The Way," for example (available free at Google). (My new scripture verse: "God is within her; she shall not fall.")
I've also found inspiration in Ben Rhodes' NYT essay "100 Days: That's All It Took to Sever America from the World" -- because it ends with the inspiration for us stop looking back -- to look forward, envision a better future, and work to create it, one step at a time. If we do this with humility and trust in our spiritual guidance, one step at a time, we can take the necessary risks with joy.
I have their book on my shelf, but, well, children slow me down.
This is one of my stock phrases at the moment!
Does Ross's recommendation to live in reality (and Leah's too, for that matter) remind anyone else of Puddleglum's speech in the Narnia volume "The Silver Chair", where he rejects the witch's claim that her world is the real world? It certainly comes to my mind. Here is the speech - a great C.S. Lewis bit of writing.
“One word, Ma’am,” he said, coming back from the fire; limping, because of the pain. “One word. All you’ve been saying is quite right, I shouldn’t wonder. I’m a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won’t deny any of what you said. But there’s one more thing to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things-trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we’re leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that’s a small loss if the world’s as dull a place as you say.”
Great connection with the Dispatch.
It was easier in the sixties when every city was loaded with subcultures that joyfully rebelled against every parental script. So it was easy for women to find men who expected to share household chores and make decisions consensually. (Consensus decision making was THE way to go, despite the ensuing long, long meetings that joining most groups required.) Luckily, thrift was also trendy at that time, plus organic gardening, alternative education in many flavors, and soon, the simple living movement and the back to the land movement. Unless we lived in high rises, cross-breeze windows substituted for air conditioning, and there were no rules about how many children or which genders could share a bedroom. All this can be reclaimed -- or the things we choose to reclaim -- and made into a new and better lifestyle. It requires a determination to ignore or resist the deluge of advertising (especially AI ads that are based on the vast knowledge that retailers know about us). This is possible -- by "getting by with a little help from my friends" plus prayer and the grace of God.