Are we enabling young adults to be lazy?

Last week in parliament, Education Minister Evarist Bartolo gave a very telling speech about what he rightly described as one of the country’s gravest problems: the over 7,000 young people aged between 18-25 who are known as NEETS: “not in education, employment or training”.

I find this statistic shocking. What we are saying is that there are thousands of young people basically frittering away their days doing absolutely nothing. They are content being couch potatoes, slumped in front of their TV or PC with eyes glazed over, playing video games and chatting on FB. Or they hang around with friends like them who are just aimlessly wandering around town, with no real purpose in life except to perhaps get into trouble.

Of course, the reason that they can do this is that there is someone (usually, their parents) who is paying for the cable channels, the Internet, the iPhone and even the very couch they are slumped on. With a roof over their head, food in the fridge, and all their needs covered, it is easy for them to just coast through life without a care in the world. Heck, who wouldn’t like that kind of cushy set-up? The idea is enticingly tempting. Wouldn’t we all love to just drop out of our own adult responsibilities to live such a completely oblivious life, knowing that there are others who are willing to pick up the tab and take care of everything so we won’t have to?  

But even as I write that I know it would be simply against my nature. I have been working since I was 19 and before that I always had some kind of summer job, so doing nothing is something I simply cannot comprehend. And while the occasional lazy day is necessary when we need to de-stress, prolonged, perpetual laziness of the kind which is signified by NEETs is a concept I find it hard to wrap my head around.

At an age when one is supposed to be fired up with energy and ambition, waking up each morning with enthusiasm for life, I find it difficult to understand how we have so many young people who are just drifting through an almost comatose existence. Speaking of comatose, it is not unusual to hear about young adults in this age group who seem to sleep all day long, which is hardly surprising given that a lack of motivation can lead to apathy and depression. Sleep becomes a refuge: a warm dark blanket of escapism during which they do not have to deal with a world which seems to be moving along without them.

So where is this increasingly widespread laziness stemming from? Well, I hate to get all ‘Freudian’ on you again, but I do believe these things are always traced back to childhood. If kids are not “trained”, so to speak, from a very early age that they have to help around the house because that is what being part of a family means, then how on earth can you hope to magically instill any kind of work ethic or sense of responsibility in a teenager?

According to a recent article on this issue in The Wall Street Journal: “Giving children household chores at an early age helps to build a lasting sense of mastery, responsibility and self-reliance…”

But what is even more interesting is why parents have stopped insisting on chores:

“In a survey of 1,001 U.S. adults released last fall by Braun Research, 82% reported having regular chores growing up, but only 28% said that they require their own children to do them.

“‘Parents today want their kids spending time on things that can bring them success, but ironically, we’ve stopped doing one thing that’s actually been a proven predictor of success – and that’s household chores,’ says Richard Rende, a developmental psychologist in Paradise Valley, Ariz., and co-author of the forthcoming book Raising Can-Do Kids. Decades of studies show the benefits of chores – academically, emotionally and even professionally.”

Although this study was carried out in the US, I see a similar pattern here where well-meaning parents end up enabling their children to the extent that they do everything for them. The result is a generation which does not want to lift a finger, not around the house, nor anywhere else for that matter.

There is, of course, another reason (highlighted by Minister Bartolo) why so many young people are unmotivated, which can be traced to a general lack of ambition within the family into which they are born. This is a culture of dependency which is being passed on from one generation to the next where the concept of merely ‘getting by’ on social benefits is considered the norm. In these cases it is even more difficult to ignite that spark of motivation needed to break away from the vicious cycle because there are no role models to aspire to.

The messages which we absorb unconsciously as we are growing up stay with us forever, and it makes all the difference to whether we view work as something which gives us dignity or whether it is something to be shunned at all costs.