‘’It’s not these kids’ fault’: Do K-State students need ‘adulting’ classes?
It’s at once horrifying and strangely comforting for older generations to smugly laugh at young “snowflakes” who find “adulting” worthy of a participation trophy and a hug.
Certainly plenty of young people have brought on a lot of the ridicule, with over-the-top outbursts about having their feelings “triggered” and exhibitions of excessive pride in everyday adult accomplishments. Millennial writer Liberty McArtor once boasted of setting up a coffee machine at home. “I’m officially an adult!’” she posted online.
Now a wife and mother, she admits the social media post is “one of my life-long regrets. … Any millennial who must say ‘I’m adulting’ is no true adult. … Celebrating our own grown-up-ness traps us in a perpetual state of mental adolescence.”
Perhaps, but that doesn’t change the increasingly evident fact that many of today’s youths are ill-prepared for adult life — casualties of a combination of lax parenting, extended home stays, delayed marriage, frantic and fragmented families, K-12 schools that have jettisoned home-ec and shop classes, and, let’s face it, a glut of first-world comforts and conveniences.
All the more reason why adulting classes are popping up at colleges around the country — most recently at Kansas State University — and why all generations should get behind them.
K-State’s offerings, launched in September, are actually free non-credit workshops that grew out of an obvious need to help students navigate an ever-more-complicated young adulthood, according to Megan Katt, health educator at KSU’s Lafene Health Center. The eight workshops this semester covered car maintenance, home health care, cooking and food safety, conflict resolution, health insurance, housing rights and contracts, building good credit and interviewing etiquette.
The workshops were deemed a success, with car maintenance and credit being the most popular, and they will return next fall after workshops during the spring semester on mental and emotional resilience.
Although other such programs around the country and in Europe preceded them, K-State’s adulting workshops garnered national news as well as the usual brickbats — to which Katt replies, “It’s not these kids’ fault they weren’t taught these things.”
She’s right. In a perfect world, or merely in a bygone one, colleges and universities wouldn’t have to offer such remedial courses on independent living, and we wouldn’t have to suffer the further affront of seeing “adult” turned into a verb.
But we’re not dealing with a flawless or former life — we’re stepping up to reality. As one social media poster put it, “The fact that (adulting classes) are necessary is a humiliating commentary on today’s parenting strategies, but I’d rather the students learn how to take care of themselves than not learn it.”
Absolutely. And how adult is that?