Family, Work, Consumer Influences
This generation is also referred to as the “boomerang generation” or “echo boomers”. It’s a Peter Pan group that is inclined to live at home longer, unlike their affluent Boomer parents who sought independent, earlier (see February’s Mobility webinar). These reluctant adults are reacting to outside factors including the high cost of living, education, and health insurance, delaying some traditional rites of passage. This deferred maturity is seen by some sociologists as a response to mistakes made by their parents involving marriage, family, work and other major life decisions.
Leveraging Youth Culture’s Benefits of Social Media
Access social media tools during your pre-departure phase to conduct research because if this is an executive level move you probably want to know where your peers spend their leisure time. That may mean a pool club, local golf courses, or a list of good family restaurants because you know these things matter. Allow the internet to work for you and then you can make informed decisions to configure your best life abroad, now that you are getting an idea of what Youth culture looks like. Discover, assess, and choose apps that enable you to access resources about your new location and consider: What’s your livability quotient? What’s important to your family? Do you have a quality of life ceiling? What are you willing to live with, without? Do you think you prefer a walkable suburb that resembles your old neighborhood, or do you want change? Does that mean an urban lifestyle, is a less populated, rural area is appealing? Whatever you want to create for your best life abroad, there are blogs, authors, experts, and websites that can help you configure a great life within the American cultural context, however supercharged it is on Youth.
Notes
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/visualnewscom/americas-perspective-on-a_b_3361939.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_culture
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennials
Amit-Talai, Vered, and Helena Wulff, eds. 1995. Youth Cultures: A Cross-Cultural Perspective. London: Routledge.
Austin, Joe, and Michael Willard, eds. 1998. Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures and History in Twentieth-Century America. New York: New York University Press.
Brake, Michael. 1985. Comparative Youth Culture. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Fass, Paula S. 1977. The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s. New York: Oxford University Press.
Gelder, Ken, and Sarah Thornton, eds. 1997. The Subcultures Reader. London: Routledge.
Inness, Sherrie, ed. 1998. Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth Century American Girls’ Culture. New York: New York University Press.
Kett, Joseph. 1977. Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America 1790 to the Present. New York: Basic Books.
Levi, Giovanni, and Jean-Claude Schmitt, eds. 1997. A History of Young People in the West, Vol. 1.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
