My Prescription for a Healthier Society

How two video "shorts" got me thinking about fixing some of America's brokenness

Last week, while wasting time scrolling through Facebook, I came on two “shorts” that were memorable. For those of you smart enough to avoid Facebook, “shorts” are very brief videos. I’ve heard they were mostly originally posted on TikTok but I do not know whether that’s accurate. I am going to explain the fallacies of these women’s arguments as I see them and what I think is the root of their problems. I, your wise guru, will attempt to explain and to give a prescription for moving forward.

Now, I do not personally know many (or any?) American Millenials or GenZers at this time. I am a Dave Ramsey devotee, and he often speaks about how he has a fabulous team mainly composed of young adults from those groups. But wow! There are some whiners out there who have very, very limited knowledge of reality.

The star of one video is moaning about how her life is terrible because she hates her job and is broke. The star of the second is moaning about how her life is terrible because she is a victim of racism. Both of these two video stars have absolutely no idea how privileged they are, and how foolish their complaints sound to older adults. The commonality between them is that they are both totally focused on themselves and what they get or don’t get. Both are oblivious to the facts that (1) everyone is focused on their own lives, not on the life of the video star; and (2) their own thoughts, beliefs and actions affect their own lives.

My Life S*cks

The woman whose life is sh*t complains that she lives very simply. She only has a car, a washer and dryer, a sofa and a bed, and she lives alone in an apartment. She is too tired to have a social life and so broke that next month she will be unable to pay her rent. She doesn’t know what she will do.

In her video she says that she does not live comfortably. She says she has only a sofa and a bed. I doubt this is accurate. I think she means her only nice furniture is a sofa and a bed. That is, chosen in a furniture store and bought (on credit) because she fell in love with them and couldn’t live without them. I am positive she owns at least a card table and folding chair on which to sit when eating, an end table, a couple of lamps, a chest of drawers and at least one shelf unit. She probably raided her parents’ attic but doesn’t count these things since they are not to her taste and she did not pick them out new. Rather, she is undoubtedly in debt up to her eyeballs, between all the debt she acquired obtaining her comfortable life and her student loans, which she probably has but did not mention.

The average American bachelor’s level student graduates from college with around $30,000 in student loan debt.[i] Many graduates figure they will die of old age while still owing for their educations.

When we graduated from college, my generation furnished apartments we shared with other young adults with yard sale and thrift-shop finds and drove used cars if we didn’t just ride the bus. Most of us had at least a little work experience, although the fast-food industry was in its infancy. Even as young children we collected bottles from neighbors and turned them in for the deposits and had lemonade stands in the summer. As we got older we had jobs babysitting, delivering newspapers, or mowing lawns. And we all had chores at home. We knew there was a difference between work and play. Work probably included some drudgery but resulted in a paycheck; play was all for fun but often cost money.

The world of work was not fair for single women my age. Equal opportunity in education and employment (EEO) were not mandated until we were out of college. Our degrees were pretty much useless after the EEO laws were passed and the job market changed. We also were disadvantaged because of unequal retirement plans where women were not eligible until age 30 or had to work ten years to men’s five in order to be vested. So I’m not really moved by videos like this one about being cheated by university or how impossible it is to live in an expensive city. Been there, did that, and actually wore the T-shirt proudly because I and my friends managed without complaining.

The Victim

The victim who complained of racism apparently curates every unpleasant thing anyone ever said to her and pulls them out of her mental file system at the drop of a hat. Now I’m an old lady. I remember real racism, like the Black cleaning woman we had for a while in the early 1950’s who told my mother that she had a teaching degree from a Black college but could not get a teaching job because of her race. I remember my mother’s shock one breakfast as she read about the woman’s suicide in the morning paper. Not being hired because of your race is racism.

I remember when we visited my dad’s best friend, Al, and Al’s wife at their apartment in Harlem, yes, that Harlem in Manhattan. We drove through a slummy neighborhood where parking spaces were filled with large, luxurious cars. Al and Fern lived on the second floor above a business space that was boarded up, but their apartment was lovely. I learned that Black people like this couple—Al was an electrical engineer and Fern was a registered nurse—could not purchase homes except in certain not-very-nice neighborhoods, so Blacks spent their money on fancy cars since they couldn’t buy nice homes. That’s racism.

But the poor little victim of racism today was moaning about stupid things stupid people said to her about being from Puerto Rico or about her brown skin.

Let me point out that if Jews curated and then moaned about every slight they received, we would not be winning Nobel prizes and running billion-dollar businesses. We learned as children that stupid people say stupid things, and their stupidity says nothing about us—but getting upset about their stupidity makes us stupid. No one had to tell us to pull up our big-girl panties; we learned to pull them up about a day after we stopped being pinned into cloth diapers.

Bad Kids? Bad Universities? Bad Parents? Or…

So, what caused these two young women, simply examples of many, many pathetic videos on the Internet, to become losers?

While the education system is certainly not what it should be, and universities can only be evaluated in the correct context (if you don’t roll your eyes at that, see this snippit of a congressional hearing), I do not believe the blame rests with them. For many years the place for teaching values has been touted as the home.

So that brings us to the homes. Are these young women’s parents to blame for their immaturity? We hear a lot about “helicopter parents,” parents who hover over their children long after previous generations of parents waved goodbye to their kids and embarked on new lives without parental responsibilities.

Helicopter parents are overly protective of their progeny, and have been throughout their children’s lives.[ii] “One of the biggest problems with helicopter parenting is that kids don’t get a chance to learn how to navigate the world on their own. And that can have negative emotional and mental health repercussions,” according to the website of Newport Academy, a chain of outpatient and residential teen treatment centers. According to the webpage, helicopter parenting includes behaviors such as:

• Cleaning a teen’s room for them

• Sending multiple texts each day to a child away at college

• Intervening in a teen’s life to prevent them from failing at a task or other effort.[iii]

Clearly, overly involved parents stifle their children’s growth. As any good teacher knows, a child who never makes a mistake is not learning much—the work is probably too easy for them. Failure is necessary for success. Thomas Edison had over 1,000 failures before he created the first successful light bulb.

Photo by the author of a sign she made for the classroom of her sewing school.

Every article I found about helicopter parenting says that these parents generally had uninvolved parents themselves. So blame for these whiny young adults who would rather sit in their own puddles than go out and achieve should fall on the grandparents?

I do not think so. I think the fault lies squarely with the Feminist movement and its insistence that “womanly tasks” such as housework and childrearing were silly and unimportant. Women would find fulfillment in the world of work, they said, and their children could be raised by welfare mothers and former drug addicts.[iv]

Feminism has been white-washed by the internet, which is controlled by so-called “fact checkers” with left-wing credentials and algorithms that are designed to reject conservative information. Superficial research on the movement does not uncover the truth. But this old lady remembers. I and my friends were the guinea pigs of the movement.

In the mid-1970’s, when local licensing of day care was just beginning, I was a social service worker for the Idaho Dept. of Social and Rehabilitation Services, later the Dept. of Health and Welfare. As such, I was responsible for licensing day care homes. At that time there was no educational requirement for day care operators. The law had strict safety and health standards. Operating a day care home was encouraged as an excellent home business for women who would otherwise be on welfare.

About 18 years later, after a crash in the high tech market in Boston rendered me unemployed, I considered retraining as a day care administrator. Since I already had a master’s in elementary education this would not have been an onerous undertaking. Before deciding, though, I visited some of the highest-rated day care centers that catered to middle-class families in the Boston area. I was appalled at what I saw.

The centers were run by overworked administrator-teachers whose assistants appeared to be former welfare moms. Most of these assistant teachers were badly educated themselves and pathetically inept. The children at those centers were incredibly needy. Loud-mouthed kids got attention; the quiet ones were ignored. There simply weren’t enough competent adults to provide adequate consideration of their needs. That the kids were desperate for attention was obvious: within five minutes of entering a classroom I, a complete stranger, would have two or three children hanging onto my skirts.

All the articles I read attributed helicopter parenting to moms and dads who were neglected as children. But they were not neglected because of bad parenting, as the articles imply. They were neglected because their parents had been raised in daycare centers where the majority of teachers had been hired off the welfare rolls.

That first generation of daycare-raised parents (the grandparents of today’s inept young adults) succeeded because their parents had been raised by attentive parents, most of them with a full-time mom and many with grandparents nearby as well. But many of the parents of today’s young adults were not so fortunate. Many of their parents never had decent parenting. When they were brought home from daycare after a long day, they were fed, bathed, maybe read to, and put to bed. Their parents had very little to do with raising them, with answering their thousands of questions, with teaching them moral values.

The situation in the USA today is dire. Even today, 39.6% of assistant daycare teachers just have high school diplomas. More than a quarter (26.3%) have bachelor’s degrees and 18.5% have associate degrees,[v] leaving 15.6% unidentified and quite possibly high school dropouts. This means more than half of daycare assistant teachers—the primary adults in children’s lives—probably have almost no education.

Salaries reflect the low level of education required. In Columbus, Ohio, a city I chose because it is representative of a broad cross-section of the USA, day care assistant teacher pay, $14.58 per hour, falls between McDonald’s sandwich maker ($12.60 per hour) or Kroger cashier ($12.66) and UPS package handler ($21.00)

Is the well-being of today’s children just worth what a fast-food worker or grocery cashier earns? What does America gain, what do America’s children gain, from having this level of adult as the primary care-giver? Welfare mothers and high school graduates with one or two semesters of “childcare” classes behind them mean well and can be loving, but is that all that little children need? Or do they need mental stimulation?

Little kids, unless they are stifled, are question factories. They are naturally curious about the big new world they are entering. They ask question after question. But when the adults around them are, first, overwhelmed by the sheer number of children needing attention and, second, unequipped to answer the questions, the adults end up stifling them. I saw that when I visited day care centers years ago, and the situation today is worse. Today every adult has a cellphone to occupy their time, and I strongly suspect that unless children are screaming, many day care assistants are busy checking social media.

What this means for young adults today

The ignorance and total lack of moral clarity of today’s pro-Hamas rioters is shocking. I remember riots against the Viet Nam war in Harvard square in 1971; I was in night school in Boston, lived near Harvard Square, and had to walk home through dark streets at 10 pm because rioters closed main roads and the subway. Those people had some idea of why they were rioting, and they had a chance to accomplish something because they were US citizens rioting for an American issue in the USA.

Today’s riots are in a country that is not directly invovled in the conflict about which they are rioting. Most of today’s rioters screaming “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” cannot begin to name what river or what sea, nor what the chant means. Those caught by roving video artists say things like, “Well, it’s good to be free, right? That’s why I’m chanting.” When told that a free Palestine from the river to the sea means the deaths of millions of Jews they look perplexed. Those chanting “Death to Jews” because of “genocide” and “apartheid” cannot define those terms.

How can a thinking person shout for death to human beings for crimes that they cannot define, cannot locate on a map, and aren’t real anyway? They can because their earliest teachers—and the earliest teachers of their parents—were largely people who themselves were uneducated and never learned critical thinking. These young adults cannot think and probably (because of their age and because they are out of school) cannot be taught to think.

But their teachers should not be blamed either, when society has said that children do not need better teachers. Daycare pay is too low to attract people who are educated and intelligent enough to teach little children, whose brains are just beginning to develop thinking skills.

Prescription

1. The student loan crisis needs to be resolved. It is absurd that the USA is still issuing student loans while talking about loan forgiveness. As I said in a recent essay, young American adults would be better served by spending a year or two in a service project or job than going directly from high school to college. High schoolers, many of whom have no work experience, cannot possibly know what career would be a good fit. Two years of life experience would go a long way to helping them figure this out. It would also give them time to save money for their education. Working up to 20 hours a week while in school would help their grades, according to a lot of recent research.[vi]

2. While some financial literacy education is presently required in some states, it should be a high school graduation requirement across the board—and it should be based on the no-debt model, not the “good debt vs bad debt” plan. “Good debt” includes buying things that save you time and money and borrowing for school or to consolidate debt,[vii] although why a consolidation loan is “good” and the debt being consolidated is “bad” only a fool could determine. Debt is debt; it means buying things you cannot presently afford, which probably means you do not have an emergency fund and are probably not saving adequately for retirement, a home down payment, etc. It means you are enriching the banks and credit card companies rather than yourself.

3. Clearly, if the USA wants better-informed and more sensible adults, the education of small children needs to be ramped up. Day care teachers need to be better educated, and for that to happen, they need to be paid a living, professional wage. Their job is as important as any other teacher, they should have similar requirements for employment, and they should be paid accordingly. Higher day care salaries would probably raise the cost of day care, which would mean many women would be better off financially staying home and raising their own children. This would be good for children.

4. The traditionally womanly tasks of providing warm, safe, and stimulating homes for children and supportive homes for husbands should be encouraged and taught. Two good things for families that came out of the Corona shutdowns is the increase in the number of homeschooled children, which requires one parent at home, and the availability of remote work, which permits many parents to stay home. In many places, homeschooling has increased by over 50% since the Corona shutdowns.[viii] But this is just the beginning. Much more work and encouragement is needed.

Too much public policy in the last 25 years has been based on posturing, lobbied for by corporations for their own greedy purposes, and promotes the increasing polarization of our political parties, instead of for the benefit of society.

Where to start and how to accomplish the four changes listed above? Ordinary people need to start making their own short videos with their stories that touch on these points. With the polarization and divisions in government today, only a groundswell of pressure originating from the right will make a difference. Leftists are very busy sounding pathetic, like the two women referenced at the start of this essay. But conservative mothers, fathers, and young adults can make a difference. I challenge you to begin.

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[i] Welding, L., Average Student Loan Debt: 2024 Statistics. Best Colleges, updated January 11, 2024, https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/average-student-loan-debt/, accessed March 25, 2024.

[ii] Phillips, H., What is Helicopter Parenting? VerywellFamily.com, updated November 28, 2022, https://www.verywellfamily.com/helicopter-parents-do-they-help-or-hurt-kids-1095041#:~:text=Helicopter%20parenting%20refers%20to%20an,the%20detriment%20of%20the%20kids., accessed Marh 25, 2024.

[iii] What is Helicopter Parenting? Newport Academy, https://www.newportacademy.com/resources/restoring-families/the-effects-of-helicopter-parenting/ , accessed March 25, 2024.

[iv] When I worked as librarian in a college library, I helped a student find the first article about the importance of day care for children’s wellbeing. At the end of the article it explained the research in detail. While I do not remember the details, I remember that the children involved were kids of women on welfare in a drug rehab program. The surprise to me was that the authors expressed surprise that the children did better when they spent time in daycare than when the mothers raised them alone.

[v] Zippia Team, What is an Assistant Daycare Teacher and How to Become One, Zippia: The Career Expert, Updated March 14, 2024, https://www.zippia.com/assistant-daycare-teacher-jobs/, accessed 25 March 2024.

[vi] Hess, A. J., Students who work actually get better grades—but there’s a catch. CNBC, https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/04/students-who-work-actually-get-better-grades-but-theres-a-catch.html Updated Oct. 10, 2017, accessed March 25, 2024.

[vii] Good debt vs. Bad Debt. Debt.org, https://www.debt.org/advice/good-vs-bad/#:~:text=Examples%20of%20good%20debt%20are,for%20having%20borrowed%20the%20money., accessed March 25, 2024.

[viii] Jamison, P., Meckler, L., et al, Home schooling’s rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education. The Washington Post, October 31 [2023?], https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/interactive/2023/homeschooling-growth-data-by-district/, accessed March 25, 2024.

[1] Welding, L., Average Student Loan Debt: 2024 Statistics. Best Colleges, updated January 11, 2024, https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/average-student-loan-debt/, accessed March 25, 2024.

[1] Phillips, H., What is Helicopter Parenting? VerywellFamily.com, updated November 28, 2022, https://www.verywellfamily.com/helicopter-parents-do-they-help-or-hurt-kids-1095041#:~:text=Helicopter%20parenting%20refers%20to%20an,the%20detriment%20of%20the%20kids., accessed Marh 25, 2024.

[1] What is Helicopter Parenting? Newport Academy, https://www.newportacademy.com/resources/restoring-families/the-effects-of-helicopter-parenting/ , accessed March 25, 2024.

[1] When I worked as librarian in a college library, I helped a student find the first article about the importance of day care for children’s wellbeing. At the end of the article it explained the research in detail. While I do not remember the details, I remember that the children involved were kids of women on welfare in a drug rehab program. The surprise to me was that the authors expressed surprise that the children did better when they spent time in daycare than when the mothers raised them alone.

[1] Zippia Team, What is an Assistant Daycare Teacher and How to Become One, Zippia: The Career Expert, Updated March 14, 2024, https://www.zippia.com/assistant-daycare-teacher-jobs/, accessed 25 March 2024.

[1] Hess, A. J., Students who work actually get better grades—but there’s a catch. CNBC, https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/04/students-who-work-actually-get-better-grades-but-theres-a-catch.html Updated Oct. 10, 2017, accessed March 25, 2024.

[1] Good debt vs. Bad Debt. Debt.org, https://www.debt.org/advice/good-vs-bad/#:~:text=Examples%20of%20good%20debt%20are,for%20having%20borrowed%20the%20money., accessed March 25, 2024.

[1] Jamison, P., Meckler, L., et al, Home schooling’s rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education. The Washington Post, October 31 [2023?], https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/interactive/2023/homeschooling-growth-data-by-district/, accessed March 25, 2024.