A few years ago, my Aunt Diana Bennett undertook an autobiography to share the story of her exciting life: accomplished artist, teacher, nonprofit executive, board member, and four husbands. It came out so well that I encouraged my mom – her younger sister – to do the same. And she did, last Christmas gifting everyone copies of Brenda Bennett, My Colourful Life: a history of her grandparents and parents; riding horses while growing up in Toronto in the 50s; majoring in sociology at University of Toronto in the 60s, getting dragged off the steps of the U.S. Consulate during a Vietnam War protest; and in the 70s and 80s starting successive families and a successful career as a community college professor.
With four husbands or long-term partners, my mom’s life has been equally colorful. My grandfather John Bennett liked to say it was as though the sisters were in a divorce competition. (In truth, they’ve both been through a lot and remained unfailingly enthusiastic about everything save U.S. politics.) Then again, my grandfather, a Canadian artist of some renown, was in his own competition for mistresses whom he preferred painting with as few clothes as possible. But the book’s most controversial story is less risqué. I must have been 9 or 10 at the time. Here’s how my mom tells it:
I was all dressed up for work, and I did dress professionally for the classroom. I asked Ryan to pass the mayonnaise and he slid an open jar so hard down the table that it bounced off dishes and landed all over me. I was beyond furious, so Ryan ran like crazy up the two flights of stairs. In chasing him, I tripped on my heeled shoes, ripped open my stockings, and bloodied my knee. I think it is fortunate that Ryan could outpace me because I do not know what I might have done if I had caught him.
All I remember is running for my life from a lunatic woman wearing a mayo-coated pop art sweater that could only have been characterized as “professional” in the early 80s. Also, her version is not only full of mayo, but also holes: if she was wearing this abomination for a day in the classroom, it would have been breakfast. And was she really having mayo for breakfast? That’s arguably worse than what I may or may not have done. Maybe it slipped out of my hand. Maybe the table was tilted. In any event, I maintain the mayo improved her outfit.
With my mom and step-father both working full-time, childcare came from a series of au pairs from Germany, France, England, and the Philippines. Four kids had a lot of one-on-one time with these wonderful young ladies who taught us a great deal except, allegedly, how to pass the mayo.
Up until about 200 years ago, this was the primary form of child rearing: keeping kids in close proximity to adults. There wasn’t a perception of childhood as distinct from adulthood; kids were viewed as small, less competent adults. They were kept nearby and told to do what adults did. By dint of hanging around grownups all the time, they were exposed to lots of less-than-ideal things. But there were some benefits as well, most derived from one-on-one interaction with adults.
Universal schooling emerged during the industrial revolution as a venue for children to spend their days while parents went to work in dangerous mills, mines, and factories (i.e., some of the less-than-ideal things children were exposed to). Education was a happy byproduct. But a major downside of concentrating kids in schools was less one-on-one interaction with adults. While much of the day was spent trying to pay attention to the adult teacher at the front of the classroom, one-on-one engagement was mostly horizonal (child-to-child) as opposed to vertical (child-to-adult).
Mobilization of moms during World War II reified the primacy of schools and established the childhood-industrial complex. From the age of five, children and adolescents began spending their productive waking hours at schools with fewer opportunities for vertical interaction. The apex came in the 70s and 80s with dual-income families, divorce, and latchkey kids returning home whenever and to no one in particular. (My siblings and I are grateful for the au pairs.) Although that wave receded – especially since 2020 thanks to remote work – the college-for-all movement and degree inflation extended the childhood-industrial complex’s reach. Today, young Americans live predominantly horizontal lives in schools – mostly kept apart from adults well into their 20s, and increasingly their mid or late 20s.
As the childhood-industrial complex became the sole path to adulthood, it seemed like a privilege we were bestowing on kids. For most of us who think fondly of our younger halcyon days, it’s a wonderful walled garden where children play, discover, and grow with one another – particularly alluring in a consumer culture that idolizes youth. And who’s not in favor of more education? There’s no question that compulsory schooling through the secondary level + increasing postsecondary participation yielded rising literacy rates and a higher level of basic education that equipped more young people for the jobs of the 20th century.
It’s also been easier on adults. As anyone who’s tried to get work done while taking care of kids – let alone attempted to homeschool children – having kids lolling about all the time is burdensome. Consistent with Adam Smith’s division of labor, it’s much more efficient to delegate to childcare professionals and educators.
But the burdens are non-trivial and have been mostly hidden, at least until recently. Because there are increasingly dire downsides to separating children from their elders, particularly from high school on. The kids aren’t alright – certainly not as alright as they were a decade or two ago – due to:
1. Scarce Role Models
One obvious result of the horizontal youth economy is few adult role models outside the nuclear family. Navigating the adult world is complex, well beyond what can be learned in a classroom. Observing and interacting with responsible adults is essential for learning how to behave and regulate emotions in the workplace, in relationships, and in civic life.
2. Stalled Development
The childhood-industrial complex encourages discovery rather than identity formation. Schools tell kids to find their passion and explore, often resulting in delayed choices and formation of a coherent sense of self. Adolescence stretches on and on in a semi-permanent holding pattern, including at the college level where excessive choice often leads to dead ends, delays, and a crisis of completion.
3. Lack of Responsibility
With little verticality, kids are rarely asked to make consequential decisions or held accountable. They complete countless assignments but make few meaningful commitments. They’re evaluated but not entrusted, including by so-called helicopter or snowplow parents. Because failure rarely has real-world consequences, kids are free to spend far too much time on screens and enter adulthood with limited self-regulation and executive functioning.
4. Underdeveloped Soft Skills
With the vast majority of interactions horizontal and increasingly digital, social learning reinforces adolescent norms rather than adult expectations. Kids enter adulthood having navigating popularity and gossip, but with little sense of adult expectations for communication, collaboration, and conflict resolution. They’re fluent in the language of memes and brainrot, but interpersonal skills are more laughable than professional. In many ways, the soft or durable skills gap employers complain about is a direct result of artificial (and childhood-industrial) extended isolation from adults.
5. Student Loan Debt
An obvious drawback: the longer in school, the more student loan debt piles up. The pile is now $1.8 trillion high, or about $40,000 per borrower. For students who make it through graduate or professional school, loan balances often top $100,000. Debt to this degree limits choices and can have a feedback effect: further prolonging adolescence and all of the above by delaying key adult milestones such as moving out, home buying, and family formation.
6. Mental Health
Whether due to student loan debt, lack of purpose or identity, or inordinate exposure to immature behaviors like social comparison, groupthink, and bullying, anxiety among teens and young adults is at an all-time high. With few adult regulators on their emotional worlds, small setbacks can feel catastrophic. Diagnosed anxiety disorders among teens are up 50-100% in one generation. The most recent National Survey of Children’s Health estimates 1 in 5 teens is diagnosed with a mental health condition. For college students, it could be 2 in 5.
7. Delayed Work
Predictably given its origins, the childhood-industrial complex has devalued paid work. The percentage of teens taking jobs has declined 50% in a generation. And the workforce participation rate of 16-24 year-olds has followed the same downward trend. A small part of the decline may be due to crowding out by older workers and immigrants. But most comes from a culture of monomaniacal focus on academics and enriching extracurricular activities in order to burnish applications for the next level of schooling. As college admissions whisperer Jeff Selingo wrote in the Washington Post, “upper-middle class families and above have made the determination that college admissions officers devalue paid work and that if you’re not pursuing a hectic schedule of activities you’ll be less appealing to colleges.” This college-centric formula doesn’t leave much room for mowing lawns, scooping ice cream, or bussing tables.
Delayed work reverberates across every one of the other aforementioned challenges and fuels the expanding childhood-industrial blob. Because jobs beget jobs by building soft skills, responsibility, and work ethic so predictive of success in good first jobs. So the longer work is delayed, the longer it takes to career-launch into adulthood.
This has never been more true. For over a decade, specific digital and platform skills demanded by entry-level jobs have been harder to learn in the classroom than in a work environment. And now, by making it simpler for anyone to learn anything and gain rudimentary proficiency, AI is in the process of devaluing classroom-based learning. Concurrently, by automating the straightforward work that entry-level professionals used to do while they learned the ropes, AI is elevating employer expectations for new employees i.e., higher value client work, project work, product work. And because higher value work is unfathomable without relevant prior work experience, AI is widening the career launch experience gap into a chasm. So while the need for education isn’t changing, the modality is undergoing a tectonic shift. Declines in the importance of classroom-based learning are being met with corresponding increases in the value of work-based learning.
The problem is that work-based learning – apprenticeships, co-ops, internships, projects – is incompatible with school as we know it. Because real (rather than simulated) work-based learning requires an employer and an actual adult employee on the other side, providing the student with a modicum of direction, oversight, and feedback. Work-based learning demands verticality and won’t work with the separate school economy we’ve evolved to manage the youngest third of the population.
The good news is that a parallel work-based learning system to complement our classroom-based learning system from high school on will go a long way to addressing every single one of these problems. And while it may not require increased investment in education, it will mean shifting dollars from schools, classrooms, and professional educators to the intermediaries, sponsors, employers, and professionals needed to make work-based learning a reality for millions of young Americans. Because the direction, oversight, and feedback – as well as administration, marketing/selling, selection/hiring, and ideally paying students for relevant, in-field work – involve time and expense that few employers want to deal with unless we make it turnkey and worth their while.
When adults went to work in dodgy work environments like factories and mines, the separate childhood-industrial complex and concomitant horizontal relationships made sense. But no longer. In the post-industrial age of AI, adults who care about ensuring the next generation does at least as well will need to lend a hand and establish vertical relationships outside their families. No longer can we leave the education of our children to educators.
Thanks to the self-perpetuating childhood-industrial complex, for far too long we have overinvested in classrooms and underinvested in work-based learning. And now, as we enter the second quarter of the 21st century, the childhood-industrial complex is way out of balance.
Take it from the first professional educator in my life: my mom. We need to bring some balance to the table lest the mayonnaise inadvertently slide off and leave an oily mess.