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Rachel, hello and welcome to teenagers.
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Untangled the audio hug for parents going through the teenage years. I'm Rachel Richards parenting coach, journalist, mother of two teenagers and two bonus daughters. Now you know, I love putting our parenting in context, so I'm very excited that we're joined today by Dr Eliza Filby, a historian specializing in generational studies, and she's the author of the book in heratocracy. It's time to talk about the Bank of mum and dad. Hello. What is an inheritocracy?
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So there's this word that I sort of came up with to explain what's really happened over the last sort of, I think 20 years is that for anyone under the age of 45 and there's a definite reason why I'm saying 45 and not older.
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It's not what you're learning anymore, because the return on that investment in education is declining. It's stalled initially and is now in declining and declining. It's not what you're earning anymore, because wages have, by and large in in Europe, the UK, less so in America, stalled since the 2008 financial crisis. Increasingly, your access to opportunity, your access to a safety net if you need it, your access to a springboard, particularly around housing, is more and more than ever conditioned on whether you have access to the bank of mum and dad, and the social divide within the millennial demographic and now the Gen Z demographic is between those that have the Bank of mum and dad and those that do not. And we're not talking about the 1% here. We're not even talking about the 10% we're really talking about the way in which at a time when the state retracted and became smaller.
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And you know, the market, particularly in respect to housing, but also education and childcare, has become more dysfunctional. Who has stepped up and trickled that wealth down, if they had it, Mom and Dad, and now, increasingly, the Bank of grandma and granddad, and it's really creating a huge social and economic divide between young people. It's
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really interesting, because I don't think we're being really honest about it, or have really recognized it and but it's impacting everything. What can you talk more about with the impact this has on our lives?
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Yeah,
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I mean, that's what the book was about, really, because I was that diligent, conscientious girl that did really well in school, and first person in my family to go to university, and I was very much committed and and had a sincere belief in the education pathway to opportunity. Now that is true to to an extent, right? But increasingly, education and your access to even getting to university, or certainly a good university, is increasingly determined by parental wealth and and and the rise of tutoring, private tutoring, the rise of people moving house for a good school. You know, education isn't a meritocracy, and it's increasingly become one governed by parental wealth, but I grew up with this idea of education, education, education being this pathway. So I wrote the book from a really selfish perspective, which was, why is it that I worked really hard in school and I stayed at university and I got a PhD, but actually, when it came to being as I describe in the book, broke in my 30s, I had a part time job at a university. I had a cleaning job to keep basically me afloat, the safety that I needed, and then eventually, the springboard that got me into buying my first house was my parents and not my education, and we have create, created an economy now, certainly in the UK, where the Bank of mum and dad is the sixth largest mortgage lender in the UK, and your access gaining a house is more dependent on you being, frankly, loyal to your parents than being loyal to your boss.
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And so we talk about, you know, people being disenfranchised or disincentivized by work these days, and particularly amongst young people? Yeah, there's a reason for that, because work doesn't buy us what it brought our parents. And I wanted to explain, really, from my own perspective, why is it that, that that story has come about, where we are so dependent on the bank of mum and dad? The complexities of that, the regional differences within the UK. I use a lot of global comparisons as well, because this is not a UK issue. It's changed quite significantly over the last 20 years. So I was the generation, literally on the 1999 when Tony Blair stood up and said, We're going to get 50% of school leavers to go to university. That was me in that moment, and I I was also the first year that paid 1000 pounds a year tuition fees. Right now, what's happened over the last 20 years has been not only has the price of that degree gone up, and we know that the increment.
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Or fees, not just went from 3000 a year to then 9000 a year, but critically, accommodation costs.
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You know, accommodation costs have gone up around 18% since the pandemic. So you have the increasing price of university falling on parents. So the price of that degree has gone up, but also the value of that degree has gone down as more and more people have got them.
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Inevitably, it there's, there's.
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There was a scarcity of professionally, professional level graduates in in the 1980s they benefited from their education in a way that, frankly, graduates do not. So it became about what university you went to, and increasingly, what subject you studied at university. STEM graduates, particularly those that are employed outside London and can command high wages in a highly skilled, highly desirable professionals, are doing very well. That education has paid off. But other degrees, I'm not going to reference Mickey Mouse degrees, but other other subjects, other universities, that education, that investment, has not paid. So I think what's interesting, and what I'm seeing baby boomers grew up in this idea of grammar school meritocracy. The brightest rises to the top, Gen X, and I'm assuming your Gen X, you know those generations born between 19 Gen X are those born from 1966 to 1980 whose kids are jailed by and large, Gen Z grew up where more and more of us went to university, but saw the gradual cost of that And the declining reward. And so what's interesting you're seeing now is a lot more parents who are in their 50s, and maybe, you know, with kids in their teens, going, do you know what? I don't think university is necessarily an absolute. I'm not overly committed that they go. I can also see the real dangers of having all of that cost for me, but also them. You know, the the average graduate is kind of accumulating debt in the region of like 50 grand. So, you
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know, and in America, it's astronomical in comparison.
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And so what's really interesting is things like the amount of parents who are in favor of degree apprenticeships, and while you learn fantastic idea, I really do think that's going to be the future of higher education. But there's a really sort of self interest, sort of motivation. There is a lot of parents going, great, they get a degree. And I don't have a secret so, so it's, it's, it's the system that has evolved where increasingly the upfront costs of that tertiary education has fallen on the parents, whilst also the long term debt burden has fallen on the student, the graduate. And you know, poor students are paying vast, vastly, huge, huge amount of sums, so much more for that degree, than than, than those that can go to university and come out with no debt at all, because their parents can pay it up front. Yeah, and
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I was one of these people, my parents didn't really look at my education at all, and I managed to get into university, but that was at a time where it was paid for by the state, and my teacher said to me, you have to apply to university. And I was like, why would I do that? And there was a whole system sort of set up to support people who didn't have money, who could go to university. And then I massively benefited from it. But I can see exactly what you're saying, and the shift has happened, and we're not really awake to it. We sort of, we know it's something's going on. But, you know, your book is brilliant for actually laying bare what what has changed.
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It's also something that really needs to be talked about. So, so for teenagers, and I know a lot of your your listeners are parents of teenagers in the UK, for teenagers, exam anxiety, it's a greater source of depression and mental illness than body image. Issues around body image, and think about the amount of time and energy and focus we put on social media and the challenges that particularly teenage girls feel around body image. What exam pressures Exactly? You know, it's up there, if not, more important to young people today, and we So, I feel like we need to have a broader conversation. I would urge any parents out there to think about education frankly, differently to how you've been told to think about it. Number one, I would say that, and I work with a lot of companies, and I'm hearing this more and more, is the career ladder is rapidly changing because of AI.
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So we know that big companies are not going to be hiring the same amount of graduates. The ultimate automation is going to take away a lot of those roles, and so they're looking for graduates with brilliant in. To personal human skills. Yes, you navigate AI, yes, all of that traditional academic skills and traditional even academic qualifications from the best universities have to be, you know, combined with increasing emphasis on soft skills. Now, how do you? How do you learn soft skills? I would argue that the education system is not really engineered to build people's soft skills. Okay, they are one area where you are socialized, but one of the critical things, and again, it's something that I hope to instill in my son, if he agrees to this
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kind of young people working massive,
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massive drop, really, since the mid 90s onwards, the number of kids that have Saturday jobs, as it used to be when I was young, just working more broadly now, confronting the public as you, as you, I'm sure, know, is the quickest way you can Learn how to be human, absolutely human, and so and in the worst job possible. I mean, I've worked in call centers, I've worked in restaurants, and honestly, those skills I still deploy today. So help your kids educate themselves on soft skills and human skills. And that's talking as well as listening. That is, you know, hearing bad news as well as good news, you know, creating that human resilience.
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I think that is really critical.
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I think the second thing is, if University is on the agenda, is think seriously, not just about the university, but about the subject. And I'm someone who is as a history graduate, and I definitely feel that whilst I love history and I think it's absolutely critical in training, you know, an analytical mind, I had to be really savvy about how I thought about my career, post academia, post education, post first degree. So thinking about what is it? And I'll give you a really classic example of this, is the declining value in the written word. Think about, you know, I'm married to a journalist. I used to, I used to work in newspapers. We think about, there was a time not so long ago where I would get 800 pounds for an 800 word article there, you know, now I would possibly get more like 150 pounds. So we think about the massive decline in appreciation in the digital age of the written word book sales. You know, I haven't yet made any money from writing my book, even though it was a Sunday Times top 10 best seller. So it looks amazing, but I think it's really important to be honest, the economics of publishing are all over the place right now. So thinking about the as we move deeper into a world governed by AI, what is that degree going to get for you what you know, it's great that you love literature.
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It's great that you love medieval England, but like, let's be more strategic in our thinking about what skills we can then transfer into the workplace, and what skills are they not on this course or in this university going to teach me that I'm going to actually need to operate and then the third thing is this idea that we finish our education at 21 again, I don't think is realistic in a world governed by AI we it's why it's madness to be sad, saddling 21 year olds with a load of debt. Because it's been estimated that if you have a child in their teenage years now, they will have around 17 different employers over the course of their working life, and five different careers, five. Now, my mother had one career and worked for the same company her entire life, but I her daughter, um, you know, early 40s millennial have had three distinct careers. So it's it's happening already, and it will accelerate in in Gen Z, Gen alpha, and that requires constant upskilling. Yes to money to pay for that constant upskilling, one of the things that they're going to have to do is constantly outpace AI, and so that that means constantly learning. You know, I'm doing three courses at the moment, one in YouTube, one in product design, and another, another business course, because I just know I'm having to constantly keep learning in order to keep my business kind of future proofed, basically. So that agility in learning, I think is going to be so important. And I don't expect the government to help to pay with that, and I certainly don't expect companies to always provide that. What I do expect is individuals to be sort of agile learners, and I think that's really important, because school is so focused on subjects and disciplines and departments, and you're a numbers person or you're a humanities person, and. And I just don't think that's really how the world is going to work in 20 years time. It's
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so funny because one of my recent episodes was on work. And this problem that we've got now that we don't allow kids to work legally in a lot of workplaces until they're 16 because of insurance reasons, but that's not helpful at all. And the other thing that you're talking about is just this, what we call explorer mode. So Rebecca Winthrop talked about this in the disengaged teen her book, and how it's so important that we try and encourage that explorer mode, that ability to continually learn and to be finding things out rather than just jumping through hoops, which is what our school system is trying to encourage. It's not what we need. It's
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miserable. I will make it miserable. I mean, it's really interesting. I found some data on Millennial parents.
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So millennial parents obviously younger with younger children, by and large, and only 12% of millennials in the UK think their kid will go to university.
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Now that is no reflection on their kids ability. What it is, is a reflection of a level of disillusionment for a generation that were told station was the path to success. And I think we, we can't expect the education system I've worked in it, it, it's like turning around the Titanic, Titanic, right? We can't expect the education system to miraculously update itself for the 21st century.
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Your
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research shows that increased financial dependency between generations has actually affected parenting approaches.
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What have you been seeing? So I, I started the book with this idea of kid adulthood one. So it's this period of life between 18 and I sort of bookmarked it between 18 and 35 and saw the gradual, sort of invention of this new life stage, this new life stage that I quote, coined kiddo hood. And it's a period where not just the affluent, but also the less less affluent as well, are increasingly reliant, as you go through the generations, still on their parents. So we talk now about the hotel of mum and dad and and almost the expectation now that to a certain degree, older children, adult children, are still very much living with their parents, well into their 20s, some into their 30s. More more sons than daughters, I should add. So that that level of financial dependency, there's also, of course, a recognition that parenting is now a 30 year financial investment. 30 years is the age at which pair guys got a seven and a five year old.
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That is a massive shock.
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Most parents expect to be financing their kids to the age of 30, right?
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That's the that data correlates pretty much in the US, the same, Canada, same. It's the expectation, the part of that is the overwhelming cost of housing, particularly in the big cities, and the need, almost as I said earlier on, for the bank of mum and dad to step up and help on on that sort of first particularly as a first time buyer. There's also, I think, and we talked about this a bit before we started filming, is this evolution of the helicopter parents, that sort of the, you know, starts the CO conversation starts in the 80s, paranoias about child safety, Stranger Danger warnings, all of that.
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And then sort of also this idea of investing in your child. You know, it's almost kind of in that sort of Neo liberal age, we adopt the sort of language of economics into parenting, and we start talking about with we parent, it becomes a verb, not a noun. We're not parents. We we parents, as Richard Bruce says, but also we invest in our children. And the problem with investments, when you invest in something, what that does is create expectation. And so we invest in our children with an expectation that that investment materializes and they do well.
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And it's partly this sort of increasing helicopter parenting that emerges also at the same time, more and more women are in the workplace and spending more and more time in the workplace and less time at home, increasing a decline of free play and much more surveillance parenting so children have Less time basically being on their own, but also a tightening of social mobility, a closing a lot of the doors around economic opportunity, and a fear that our kids will suffer downward social mobility. There's a there's a really interesting sort of convergence of a series of.
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Actors that mean that parenting becomes this thing we do for 30 years, and it's really expensive. It used to be that kids was a net economic gain, right? You have more kids to work on the land now they're on economic drain, okay, which is one of the reasons why people are having fewer children. But it's, it's this constant need to invest in your child, to cure them on a path to opportunity that potentially you had or you want them to have because you didn't, and and that puts an in all amount of pressure on you as parents, right? Puts an amazing amount of pressure on your finances. It creates a huge social divide, which means there's no meritocracy, right?
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Because this stuff is not based on merit anymore. It's based on the bank of mum and dad, and also it creates an extreme level of pressure on the child, particularly around this and
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the parents as well. I mean, I think the American Surgeon General recently issued a warning about the level of stress parents are feeling because of what's been going on. And you did mention that you think there's kind of been this over parenting and how that can hinder growth. And I know, having spoken to I've got two bonus daughters, one of them's 27 the other 30, and they talk to me about how it's played out with some of their friends, where they've gone out into the workplace, and the people who seem least happy are the ones who've had the most help from their parents, which I thought was fascinating. And when I say help, I mean, you know, the parents have constantly, sort of just jumped in to help them whenever something's gone wrong, and they've always paid for things. What are your thoughts?
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What do you get from your research? Something
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that I do, and I talk a lot about in the book, because I wanted to explore that the challenges of actually economic, of having economic privilege, and having your mom and dad hover, or sometimes, you know, snow plow, as they say, snow plow, parent, parenting in America, move out, remove any economic obstacle. And actually that, I'll tell this story of someone I interviewed in the book, because I think it illustrates this point really well, that there was, there was one millennial I spoke to, a someone from a very privileged part of southeast England. Had grown up in luxury, had nannies.
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Both his parents were lawyers, but, you know, very loving family had had prep school and private school, and then straight to Oxford. And he graduated from Oxford, and his parents like, right, what do you want to do? And he said, You know, I want to become an actor.
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So his mother actually had access to for free, a zone, one flat that he lived in. He said, I didn't need to know throughout my sort of, not just drama school, but acting years, I didn't have to work. It was only sort of for sort of pocket money, but essentially, my parents paid for everything. And he said, You know what? I just really wish they hadn't, because what happened trying to be an actor. He did not become an actor in that sort of, you know, economically viable sense. And he then subsequently found his his calling, got married, and has since had a child. And he is very angry at himself, not his parents, for wasting that time, wasting that money, and wasting that investment. And he sees it as he said, I'm very embarrassed by those eight years when I should have placed it he had to kick up the bum and done something productive, done something and what's interesting is, he married a woman who had no help from the Bank of mum and dad. Was so financially savvy that by the time they came to buying a house their first home, his parents contribution was matched by something that she herself had entirely saved and and, you know, he, he speaks about her with such level of admiration, because he never, basically, was forced to do that. But also he speaks about his son and the life that he's giving his son with a great level of reservation, because he says, you know, I'm not going to be able to recreate the life my parents built for me. And part of that sort of is down to the amount of levels i The, you know, the many years I pissed around, doing nothing, and spent spending money that I should have, you know, made or saved.
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And I think in his story, and there are a number in the book like this is actually show me the way.
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Don't completely make it easy.
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You know, do and facilitate and enable me. Don't disable me with money or help. I think what I see a lot in and frankly, my own life, I will say many years did I spend indulging in a PhD when I should have been earning money or certain. Certainly focusing my life is, is actually you're just, you know, the Bank of mum and dad is disabling as much as enabling. And I have one example that I thought was really interesting, is one guy I interviewed whose dad gave him a deposit for a house, but acted like a bank, and so he has to pay him back, and he has to pay him back with interest. And I think that he said himself, I can't default with my parents in a way that I could probably default with a bank. And I thought there's an interesting tale of
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of parental discipline. Yeah, it's an interesting one. And I think a lot of parents would go, Oh, I wouldn't want that relationship with my child. But a friend of mine was exactly like that. She was one of those kids who had a very fortunate upbringing and but her parents took that approach. Whenever she said, Oh, she said, I want to learn to fly, and her father said, Right, okay, let's set out your plan.
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How are you going to do it? And what we have to do is work out the economics, because you're paying me back. And it really focuses the mind. It's very normal in Indian culture to all live together and to support their kids in a different way.
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What can you talk more about?
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What you discovered with that?
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That's really interesting because
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I interviewed one woman from Mumbai who is now living in London. But, you know, I'd really like to interview about the sort of the cultural differences in in India when it comes to the bank of mum and dad, you know, even that phrase doesn't really translate. And she said, why are you writing the book on the bank of God?
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Genuine? The first 10 minutes of the interview was like, This is not an issue. And she's quite right, because, you know, culturally, she said, I have had parents who, from the earliest years, were saving for my wedding and saving for my education. She had had access to her education. She got to study animation in New York for five years. Extraordinary opportunity, she managed to through her marriage to her husband, his parents had paid for them to live in London. She, and this is the critical point is she then, very much expects that to be paid back, paid back, not in the form of the loan, to be repaid because she remembers encountering some people in America where she was like, Yeah, I met, like, you know, friends of mine who were like, talking about having to pay back their parents. And she was like, that would never be an issue.
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She said, Where, where the kind of reciprocal dynamic of that relationship plays out is, of course, you know, she said very confidently that within a matter of years, they would return to Mumbai and live with her parents as her parents got older. And that kind of expectation and flow of responsibility and money both up and down the family tree, is just that level of intergenerational sort of dynamic that actually, interestingly, you're seeing more and more of in Western societies. Are, in fact, becoming more Asian in that respect. But then are we?
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Because we also have an aging society where the expectation is that we look after our parents, that in many instances, we can't, or we won't, or it's not evenly distributed across the siblings. And I think the traditional expectation is that that elder care falls on women as well. And so in one size, uses a certain complexity around elder care falling on a demographic of women who not only need to keep working, but also want to keep working and don't want some of
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whom are actually parenting, because we got this sandwich generation of people whose parents have become elderly and they're looking after teenagers. Yeah,
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exactly. And a lot of teenagers are looking after the elderly. I mean, quarter of Gen Z in the UK look after older grandparents, so that there is a greater degree of intergenerational care and and that kind of flow of responsibility going up and down the family tree. But also, you know that I spoke to one woman in the book Carol from Wales, and she was saying that she was one of three. She didn't get married or have children like her siblings. She ended up living with her parents for a lot longer than she thought she ever would. Her father died. She then took her mother under her wing and looked after her. And she ended up caring for her mother for over 14 years and for the last three her mother was bed bound. Now that responsibility fell on her, in her words, because she didn't have children and she wasn't married, unlike her siblings, did significantly less of the care. And in her own words, she felt trapped, and she felt trapped to a degree that caused amazing. Amount of resentment amongst within her family. And I think we also need to sort of kind of have a sort of society reckoning of what an aging society means. It's not it's not just that you may be sandwiched in between looking after your kids and grandparents. You may have to leave the workforce. You may have to take out a second, you know, remortgage your home for care costs. You know, there's a whole host of complexities around elder care that I frankly, feel like we're just not really talking about to the same degree. My goodness, now we're not talking about the Bank of mum and dad and how much our parents have helped us, or you are listeners, helping your kids and the nut and I'll just finish with this, the number of parents in their 50s that I interviewed around this wonderfully, brilliantly said to me, I have been through the social care system with my parents. I know how you know challenging it is, how awful it is. I do not want that for myself, and I don't want to be a burden to my children. Now, that's quite right. Who does want to be a burden their children? But the fact is, is that social care is now more expensive than eaten, and it's going up faster than the cost of housing, and we're living approximately 15% of our lives in ill health, managing illnesses. So as much as you don't want to be a burden to your children, the realities are that you probably will be, to some degree.
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I love that. I think that's such an important point. And I think I think the politicians aren't talking enough about this. There's been a massive every time I see the statistics coming out, there are fewer and fewer babies being born, and there is a massive growth in old people and my kid.
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Even the other day, my kid turned to me and asked me about money and, you know, inheritance and and I said, the thing is, darling, we need to save money, because otherwise you're going to end up having to, like, leave work and look after us. So we need to have this as a nest egg.
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You know, rather than handing it out to you at this stage, there needs to be something building up as well. I think,
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I think that's really I think that's really interesting that you say that, and I think it's really good that you're honest about that, because a lot of parents are being more generous to their kids than they can afford to be.
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And haven't talked about social care at all. And I was interviewing one woman who was 61 and she said, Oh, you know, my mom died young. I don't think it'll be a problem for me. I just want to see that my kids are secure. And I thought that's a really interesting, benevolent way of thinking about it, but also really worrying as well, yes, yes. And
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it's funny, because we were talking about dogs just before we came on, and how a friend I've been talking to when I said, Oh, don't you have insurance for your dog? And she said, Oh, no, they just die of cancer. She'll die. And I said, No, but they don't, they don't, and you love them, and then they end up having to have huge, expensive medical care over a significant period of time, as they kind of slowly decline, and that's what happens to human beings too. So, and also, you had a whole chapter in your book about how inheritance works, and
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there was an example. Sorry, I know it is,
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but I want to unpick it. And actually, my podcast is always about positive, so don't worry. We will be talking about how we can tackle this. But I think we have to kind of put it all out on the table. We have to think about this stuff, because I think that the mental shift hasn't happened for a lot of us, and I think it's important. But I also, I'm really, I'm interested in coming back to this relationship of money. So you've got people, you've got sort of Generation X, say, who've got a certain nest egg, or even the older the boomers. And there's money higher up the tree, and they're trickling at that. You know, some of it's going to be released reasonably soon, but there's the money is being held, and the younger people coming through don't have access to it, except through their mum and dad. But that changes the dynamic. You're being infantilized by your parents.
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They're sort of saying, well, it's all right, I might give you a handout, but you have to be nice to me in this, this is a different dynamic, isn't it, of
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economic infantilization that I don't think is particularly good for the individual society. Because essentially, you're saying that work doesn't pay parental wealth does, and you're also saying that I can never really break or cut the umbilical cord. And unfortunately, and I speak as a mother who really struggles with this is when you are pregnant, the baby is inside of you. When you give birth, the baby comes out of you as they go to school.
00:34:34.099 --> 00:36:23.239
They become individuals as they enter teenagehood, their friends become more important than their parents. As they enter the world of work, they build their own wealth. They are literally getting further and further away from you. That is the process of, you know, of building a human being that can survive on their own. You know, if we get to the most sort of sort of anthropological about. This that is the whole point of being a parent is to create a resilient, independent person that is independent and resilient. Of you, and I would say to that, and a multi generational holidays is something I'm massively fascinated by. So I'm saying like taking your 20 somethings and your 30 somethings on a multi generational holiday that you're entirely paying for by the way, which is the massive trend the last 10 years, is questionable, because when I asked millennials, would you go on that holiday if you were paying or it was being shared, the majority said no. But when you asked baby boomers, would you go on that holiday? Do you think others would come on that holiday if the you know, if it was shared, the majority said yes. So there is an economic imbalance within companies that we have to basically just again, be honest about and say, Yes, we love each other. Of course, we love each other. But underscoring a lot of that is an economic dynamic that is in balance, and by way that some not all, because there's a lot of millennials that are financially supporting their parents, and a lot of Gen Xs that are still, you know, financially supporting their parents. So this is not, you know, we can't, we can't be too general in in our descriptions here, but we also can't assume that we just love hanging out together,
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not just that.
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I think what I understand from this discussion as a parent of of both a millennial and some Gen Zs is that we need to be much more open discussing, how does inheritance work in the family, be honest about the things that they're up against, but also how society has shifted.
00:36:46.539 --> 00:37:43.059
I think, I think one of the most important things is to recognize the societal shift that's taken place over the last sort of, I would say, broadly speaking, 50 years, but really heavily in the last 20 it used to be that children were scared of their parents. In the last 20 years, I would say that's been completely inverted, and parents have become scared of the kids, and there's a level of deference that now is to the child to a certain degree that's really healthy, right? Because young people have a voice and a sense of autonomy, and, and, and there's a there's a much more democratic feel around most dinner tables, right? And that's great. We shouldn't live in fear of our of our elders. But there's also something that's been fundamentally lost there, and I see it a lot in workplaces. So if you've got Gen Z who've grown up in households where it's very much like, what do you want for dinner? My grandmother would never have said, What do you
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want? I don't say that. I just here's dinner.
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This is what's on dinner. Yeah, this is
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what do you want. Where should we go on holiday? You've got YouTube, you know, where should we you know, where should we next live? You know, there's an extraordinary amount of data, and Gen Z is even deciding where the family lives, you know. So the degree that they have a voice around the dinner table is something that's new. Then they have a voice on social media, because there's no deference on social media, of course, you can call out anyone or anything, and then education, too. There's no deference as someone that works in education, in education, right? There's no difference to your elders in education, but there's still an expectation of deference in the workplace. So these young Gen Z is that are coming into the workplace have never it's not their fault, by the way, earned that culture of hierarchy and deference because it wasn't on their tech, it wasn't in their school and it wasn't certainly around the dinner table. And so one of the reasons why a lot of businesses are struggling with Gen Z talent is because they're like, hang on, why don't you put up and shut up and work your way up like I did. And this, this is a triangle, a hierarchy, and a triangle in which you're down there and we're up here, and you should be deferential to us. And of course, a generation that's not grown up with that level of deference, it's actually something they're having to learn at speed as well. So I think, I think understanding that and being much more aware of social, economic and I think particularly educational trends, is one of the most important things you can do as a parent. And really think about not what do I want for my kids, not even what do they want is, how is society evolving? What skills, what level of savviness are they going to need to, frankly, survive in the 21st century?
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This is already involving into an incredibly tumultuous time, geopolitically, economically, culturally and technologically.
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And we want our kids, obviously, to survive, but ultimately thrive. And that's going to take agility, yes and resilience. And how do you build that in them?
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Is one of the most important things, and don't expect educational institutions to do it. Do. No,
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they're not.
00:40:00.719 --> 00:40:19.079
That's not what they're teaching. Brilliant Dr volby, what a fantastic, fantastic conversation. I'm so grateful for you. I'm going to put the your details in the podcast notes. There'll be a link to, well, there'll be the details of your book and a link to how people can find you. You also have a podcast, don't you? What?
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How would you like
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a YouTube series coming out in spring called it's a relative deals in lots of these issues. And by the way, you're not allowed to interview my son in 15 years time to see if I
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just talked about
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I probably don't practice what I preached.
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It's really interesting because I've actually started bringing my girls in to have conversations.
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I have an entire system, which is to do with having an allowance, and I didn't want my kids to ask for money in the workplace for the first time. I wanted them to be able to discuss it with me. So I set up this system, and I've actually had my oldest daughter come in and have conversations with me about what worked and what didn't. And it's actually really interesting. It's very interesting. So, yes, awesome, awesome. Okay, if you found this useful, please, right now, send it to at least one other person.
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You can find me on my website, which is www.teenagersuntangled.com you can email me at teenagersuntangled@gmail.com I'm on all the social media, which is the same with the luck Dr bilby, have a great week. Bye.
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Bye for now you
