Young Adults’ Real Crisis Isn’t Affordability — It’s Lifestyle Expectation Inflation |
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Young Adults’ Real Crisis Isn’t Affordability — It’s Lifestyle Expectation Inflation
It may be time for a renaissance of the old-fashioned American values of moderate expectations, frugality, and making do.
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The lifestyle expectations of the typical working- and middle-class American are driven by a one-way ratchet that only goes up. What we treat as the minimum for a “normal,” well-provisioned life looks like what only aristocrats could expect or achieve until very recently.
From conversations about the “necessity” of daycare to the desire for one car for every driver in a household to the notion of the “starter home,” what ordinary Americans think is the baseline outstrips what even the wealthiest of their ancestors could afford.
A recent viral post on X asked:
[W]hy don’t more people use their own parents/kid’s grandparents for childcare as opposed to daycare/preschool/nannies (which seem more common)?
[W]hy don’t more people use their own parents/kid’s grandparents for childcare as opposed to daycare/preschool/nannies (which seem more common)?
With some 1.4 million views and 4,000 comments, as of this writing, the post naturally generated discussion, bickering, and complaints. But what’s more interesting than the answers people gave are the assumptions behind the question. What we describe today as “child care” used to be called “mothering.” It is taken for granted today that modern families “need” professional, outside child care, that it’s normal and causes no problems for children when Mom and Dad outsource their duties to paid professional strangers, and that it’s a burden or an oppression that the average working family can’t afford “carers.”
This is lifestyle expectation inflation, and it’s not limited to the topic of daycare. Unlike the parents of Generation X, many modern parents think every child needs his own bedroom, every driver needs his own car, and that buying a “starter home” with plans to trade up to a McMansion is just “the basics.”
Fifty years ago, the average American would say professional daycare or preschool might be a necessity for some families but that sending the kids off to a “center” was a regrettable,........