Demographers tell us that Millennials are young adults aged 18 to 33. They’re often the ones you see sipping a latte at Starbucks, checking their Twitter feeds, or texting their friends.
According to a Pew Research report entitled “Millennials in Adulthood,” they are incredibly well connected to friends, family, and colleagues via all the latest digital platforms. But as University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox says, when it comes to “the core human institutions that have sustained the American experiment ”” work, marriage, and civil society,” the Millennials’ ties “are worryingly weak.”
Let’s take them in order. Concerning work, less than half of young people aged 18 to 29 are employed full time, and the numbers continue to fall. Wilcox says, “Work affords most Americans an important sense of dignity and meaning””the psychological boost provided by what American Enterprise Institute president Arthur Brooks calls a sense of ”˜earned success.’ ”
I recall reading a seriously unglamorous statistic that the best way to assure long term Christian faith and church life is, wait for it, good Christian education of a formal and sustained sort, for our next generation coming along. The wisdom of Deuteronomy and the catechesis of the reformers and roman catholic church both.
I’d like to see some kind of silver lining in what one reads here, but it looks very scary. It tracks with the statistics that indicate how little retirement savings are being set aside by this same demographic. One can wonder if a real coming storm is being confected.