"The Young, Restless – and Essential" - The Lake

[Kenneth Warren]

[Stephen Calhoun]

And as women, particularly those with advanced educations, are marrying later in life, a large number of these talented young women are single. As the labor pool continues to drain, cities that appeal to young single women will stand in better stead than their non-appealing counterparts in the competition for college-educated talent.

This is interesting and reminds me of two moments in our Madison Avenue Saturday bar scan. One was on a group of dressed up ladies in this cohort leaving a bar at Bunts and Madison, and, earlier, watching a bigger group get into a cab-van at Elmwood and Madison. It was a cold night but this latter group was not wearing coats so one can presume the door-to-door service had to do with something. We, of course, had no idea what their destination was.

The singles scene was mostly a foreign world to me, (since I was a hippie living in Vermont,) when I was in my twenties, thirty years ago, so the contemporary scene is even more other worldly. I do know that on the east side at the top of Cedar Hill, the Starbucks with all its super industrious grad students whacking away on their laptops, potentially matches together the ambitious of both genders.

It would be interesting, and the PRIZM clusters do this to some extent, to break down this cohort by way of evaluating where young adults are at in the different versions of career and professional development. Because Lakewood couldn't be expected to attract too many University Circle students, the city-likely-doesn't attract this echelon.

On the other hand, Lakewood presents strengths vis a vis people working their way through college and grad school. Lakewood is also a good place to save money while one works at the first rung or two of a professional career.

However, this is speculative given lack of data.

[Stephen Calhoun]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/30/AR2006033001341.html

What's Happening to Boys?
Young Women These Days Are Driven -- but Guys Lack Direction

By Leonard Sax
Friday, March 31, 2006; A19

The romantic comedy "Failure to Launch," which opened as the No. 1 movie in the nation this month, has substantially exceeded pre-launch predictions, taking in more than $64 million in its first three weeks.

Matthew McConaughey plays a young man who is affable, intelligent, good-looking -- and completely unmotivated. He's still living at home and seems to have no ambitions beyond playing video games, hanging out with his buddies (two young men who are also still living with their parents) and having sex. In desperation, his parents hire a professional motivation consultant, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, who pretends to fall in love with McConaughey's character in the hope that a romantic relationship will motivate him to move out of his parents' home and get a life.

The movie has received mixed reviews, though The Post's Stephen Hunter praised it as "the best comedy since I don't know when." But putting aside the movie's artistic merits or lack thereof, I was struck by how well its central idea resonates with what I'm seeing in my office with greater and greater frequency. Justin goes off to college for a year or two, wastes thousands of dollars of his parents' money, then gets bored and comes home to take up residence in his old room, the same bedroom where he lived when he was in high school. Now he's working 16 hours a week at Kinko's or part time at Starbucks.

His parents are pulling their hair out. "For God's sake, Justin, you're 26 years old. You're not in school. You don't have a career. You don't even have a girlfriend. What's the plan? When are you going to get a life?"

"What's the problem?" Justin asks. "I haven't gotten arrested for anything, I haven't asked you guys for money. Why can't you just chill?"

This phenomenon cuts across all demographics. You'll find it in families both rich and poor; black, white, Asian and Hispanic; urban, suburban and rural. According to the Census Bureau, fully one-third of young men ages 22 to 34 are still living at home with their parents -- a roughly 100 percent increase in the past 20 years. No such change has occurred with regard to young women. Why?

My friend and colleague Judy Kleinfeld, a professor at the University of Alaska, has spent many years studying this growing phenomenon. She points out that many young women are living at home nowadays as well. But those young women usually have a definite plan. They're working toward a college degree, or they're saving money to open their own business. And when you come back three or four years later, you'll find that in most cases those young women have achieved their goal, or something like it. They've earned that degree. They've opened their business.

But not the boys. "The girls are driven; the boys have no direction," is the way Kleinfeld summarizes her findings. Kleinfeld is organizing a national Boys Project, with a board composed of leading researchers and writers such as Sandra Stotsky, Michael Thompson and Richard Whitmire, to figure out what's going wrong with boys. The project is only a few weeks old, it has called no news conferences and its Web site ( http://www.boysproject.net ) has just been launched.

So far we've just been asking one another the question: What's happening to boys? We've batted around lots of ideas. Maybe the problem has to do with the way the school curriculum has changed. Maybe it has to do with environmental toxins that affect boys differently than girls (not as crazy an idea as it sounds). Maybe it has to do with changes in the workforce, with fewer blue-collar jobs and more emphasis on the service industry. Maybe it's some combination of all of the above, or other factors we haven't yet identified.

In Ayn Rand's humorless apocalyptic novel "Atlas Shrugged," the central characters ask: What would happen if someone turned off the motor that drives the world? We may be living in such a time, a time when the motor that drives the world is running down or stuck in neutral -- but only for boys.

Leonard Sax, a family physician and psychologist in Montgomery County, is the author of "Boys Adrift: What's Really Behind the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys," to be published next year. He will take questions at noon today athttp://www.washingtonpost.com.

This article reprinted in full without permission for the purposes of discussion and review, as permitted by Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976.

[Joan Roberts]

This is interesting and reminds me of two moments in our Madison Avenue Saturday bar scan. One was on a group of dressed up ladies in this cohort leaving a bar at Bunts and Madison, and, earlier, watching a bigger group get into a cab-van at Elmwood and Madison. It was a cold night but this latter group was not wearing coats so one can presume the door-to-door service had to do with something. We, of course, had no idea what their destination was.

Mr. Calhoun.

May I kindly and gently call you to task on something?

You often challenge others to prove speculative or objective opinions or assertions, yet in the above, you seem to be making a presumption of your own.

How did you know the "well-dressed" barhoppers fit into Ms. Colletta's "cohort"? Did you aslk to see their CVs? Did you overhear their conversations about IT trends or globalization theories? Is it possible that they were a bunch of waitresses or cashiers who used their credit cards to buy some tarted-up outfits at Value City? Do you equate well-dressed, slim, and attractive with well-educated? Or do you expect folks to wear grimy, "I work minimum wage and tips" t-shirts for a night on the town?

I would posit that the more educated, the ones with a more satisfying job and promising future, would be less likely to tie on one on successive weekends.

My speculation can beat up your speculation.

I agree with the original premise that younger, well-educated, professional and business-types will gravitate to "vibrant neighborhoods"and "interesting streets." I would also suggest however, that the definition of a vibrant neighborhood would include things like movie theaters, unique and necessary retail, music venues. It's not just about "mass quantities", which is Lakewood's stock, trade, and forgive the term, "brand"