How did you launch from your parents/family? How did you launch your dependents?

[fiby41]

Launch like Matreyoshka dolls, each upcomming generation nested inside the previous one.

[7Wannabe5]

Launch like Matreyoshka dolls, each upcomming generation nested inside the previous one.

The ovum model rather than the sperm model. One thing that amuses/bemuses me about more libertarian philosophy is its tendency towards something like "denial of the ovum." Like they were not among those born with a wobbly neck and a soft sweet smelling spot on their head. Like an observation along the lines of "I didn't contract to be born" makes even a speck of sense.

[fiby41]

@7w5: Out of curiosity, what is the sperm model?

[Jean]

my parents paid for my "needs" expense during college, and i paid for my "wants".
I had to pass my years for the deal to keep going, and for some unknown reason, it was important for me to keep the rent and the health insurance as low as possible. Probably because my dad made being savy look cool to me
One downside, is that i graduated because school was easy to me, and not because i was made for an engineering career, which led me to fail at finding a job after my degree.
It took me several years to accept the sunken cost of it.

One advice would be to have your kids test how reallist their career plan is.

[7Wannabe5]

@fiby41:

Well, the human egg is the largest human cell at .2 mm and only one human egg is developed to maturity per month. OTOH, the human sperm is the smallest cell in the human body at .05 mm in length and .005 mm in width of head, and the average post-pubescent male human produces approximately 1500 sperm to maturity every second of the day, or around 4 billion per month = approximately 20-40 ejaculations at 200-100 million sperm per ejaculation. Females are born with all the eggs they will ever produce; in fact a female human fetus already has all immature egg cells it will ever have (thus, nesting doll model.) Male adults constantly produce new sperm in their testicles, and across primate species the size of testicles relative to body size is proportional to sexual promiscuity of species. Human sperm is motile, and has to fight its way through the defenses produced by the female cervix to prevent infection/invasion by dangerous elements and the three layers surrounding the human egg. Each sperm comes loaded with chemicals to break through the layers protecting the egg, and a spike on its head which is used to puncture a hole as the tail of the sperm thrashes it forward.

Therefore, the sperm model would be to kick the little buggers out as soon as possible and let them battle for survival on the basis of their own personal agency.

[delay]

Few college graduates work in the field they were educated for. I remember it was only civil and chemical engineering where the majority ended up finding work in their chosen field. In physics it was less than 5%. At least here in The Netherlands, any degree is an admission ticket for any higher level job.

One advice would be to have your kids test how reallist their career plan is.

How would you test for that?

[mathiverse]

How would you test for that?

An internship or apprenticeship in the field would often work well enough.

[Jean]

I don't know. My degree was worthless to me in the end, it wasn't an admission ticket to anything, and it has been used as an excuse to justify not hiring me a few times.

[Sclass]

I had a similar problem with my education. It was a golden ticket to nowhere. I looked good with my shiny new Stanford degrees but to anybody who really needed to actually do something of significance I was useless.

I’m not sure what to tell younger people just starting out. I see a lot of human capital wasted on the hunger games style admissions process nowadays. It looks kind of misguided. You have a bunch of loser gatekeepers making the kids do really difficult tricks to satisfy admissions requirements. Tricks that kill the mind. My feeling is the pursuit further kills the intellect and condemns the acolyte to a lifetime of servitude for diminishing rewards.

When I talk about ERE which I believe can be independent of formal elite education I’m usually scolded for giving the young people dangerous ideas. If I talk too much I may discourage them.

I like the movie Time Cop where the evil politician uses a Time Machine to go back and help his younger self but spends a good part of the dialog scolding the younger for being so weak. Sometimes I wish I could go back and have a nice little chat with young Sclass and break down what worked and what didn’t work.

Perhaps this can be found in older people. But my experience asking old timers is some of the critical parameters like employment, real estate costs and entitlements have radically changed over our lifetimes. So I guess it’s going to have to be the Time Machine.

[Jean]

If i had advice for a younger me 20 years ago, that would be to study to be a vet, because there are a lot of girls there, and vets can ve independant and get work.very easily.
The downside of being vet is easy access to a painless suicide.
So maybe my advice would be to do an apprenticeship to be an electrician, save a lot of money, and retire at 25 to go to vet school when youth suicidal thought are behind.
But since youth suicidal thought appear when there is no more plan, maybe giving yourself a plan would lead to have those thought later, when your friend moved away, and then you are more likely to act on them, so it's maybe better to waste time an money to be out of plan quickly?

The real wish would be to transfer my actual brain in my 2001 15 years old self

[ertyu]

I didn't end up directly using my MA in Econ, but the fact that I had it definitely helped when I was spinning my wheels - e.g. when I was burnt out and going insane and got fired from two jobs in a row and took a year and a half off which, thankfully, i could excuse w covid (second firing and time off). I was rehired in my past line of work despite misgivings over my patchy CV partly on the strength of how I looked on paper. Without the MA degree, my current teaching gig wouldn't be possible, and that would have been bad. The degree definitely allowed me access to opportunities with comfortable pay (for local standards) and ample free time.

[Lemur]

Maybe I'd tell 18 year old me to get a liscense to drive a backhoe or something. The people in my town are willing to pay thousands of dollars just to level dirt for their lawns.

[Western Red Cedar]

My advice to any young person in this situation is think about the specific job you want, then work backwards from there to determine what to study. After getting a couple ideas of what job/career you want, find some people who actually do that job and figure out what their daily, weekly, and monthly schedules look like. Informational interviews are extremely helpful, and professionals are often generous with their time if a young person actually demonstrates initiative and preparation.

Also, taking a year or two to work and get some life experience can be a great motivator to actually go to college and take it seriously. It might be also create an opportunity to establish residency somewhere to access quality public schools.

[Ego]

Old man story...

We were walking through a plaza in Madrid this afternoon and passed an American couple sitting at a cafe. The thirtysomething guy was facetiming or skyping his mother. Her nose occupied half the screen as she told him all of the places they must visit in the city. The guy's wife was sitting just behind the phone, rolling her eyes at her mother-in-law's suggestions. I could hear in the mother's voice her excitement of revisiting Madrid, this time virtually with her son and his wife.

We walked along in silence for a while and I tried to remember if I had called home at all during the year we were traveling in Europe thirty years ago. A few minutes later, as if continuing my thought, Mrs. Ego said, "I'm happy we didn't have Skype when we were traveling in the van back then."

I knew exactly what she meant. It wasn't that our parents would have interfered or been obnoxious. We all got along remarkably well.

Moments like that remind me of just how different it was to travel back then. We picked up mail at American Express offices in Athens and Rome, and we sent a bunch of post cards. Very few people spoke English and while cable news existed in high end hotels, I do not remember seeing it while traveling. In most major cities there was a news agent that resold the day-old newspapers and magazines that were discards from the international flights, and if we got our hands on one we would read the entire paper, including the ads and classifieds. There was always the International Herald Tribune, which was so expensive that we would only glance at the headlines in the display.

But, for the most part, there was a feeling that we were very far away. If an emergency happened at home, our lack of a fixed schedule made it so that they could not contact us beyond leaving word at an American Express office. If something happened to us, as it did, we had to solve it ourselves.

There are so many wonderful advantages to the connectedness we have today, but there was a burn-the-boats, sink-or-swim feel to being together alone far from home, back then.

We would be a very different couple had we not had that experience.

[Hristo Botev]

Fun prompt for a thread; admittedly I haven't read through all the other answers yet.

• Left home at 18 for college out of state, which was paid for by my parents (though I had some scholarship money, not much). I worked throughout college, but that was just for beer money.

• Peace Corps after college, through which I swapped out my parents as my benefactors for the U.S. government.

• I probably really "launched" (poorly) after I returned to the States at 25; moved to a big city and worked for an NGO and taught English. I was on my own and managed to build up some credit card debt; nothing crazy, but a few thousand dollars for stupid stuff I didn't need.

• Married at 27; started law school at 28; lived mostly on student loans and built up 6 figures in student loan debt.

• Started my legal career at 31; first kid at 32; student loan debt (from grad school) paid off at 37 (IIRC).

• My in-laws have helped us out financially by (a) paying for the wedding, (b) loaning us money at 3.5% to help with a couple home purchases, and (c) paying for big family beach trips each year.

• I expect decent size inheritances from both my dad and my in-laws, but we certainly don't think we are entitled to that nor have we based any future plans on those expectations.

Looking back at this I consider myself to have been a very late bloomer. It helped to be an "older" law school student, as my grades were better than they would have been right out of college. But those benefits probably had more to do with being married than just being older. I'd probably have been better off getting married much earlier and having kids much earlier. It wasn't until I had a wife and kids that I got serious about being an adult.

As for my own kids, one starting high school and the other starting middle school, we expect to pay for their college, their weddings, and we'd love to be able to help them buy their first homes (and possibly just give them each a home). I also fully plan to continue working (in some capacity) for quite some time, even after they finish college and start their own lives, with an aim towards building up some multi-generational wealth and their inheritances. There is certainly a world in which I could look at my numbers now and say that we are FI; we've got enough that applying some 4% rule magical thinking we could say we're good, and the kids' 529 accounts should be sufficiently funded. But I'd never take the risk of actually following through on an "early" retirement; there's just too much that can and likely will go sideways between now and when I cross over the Jordan.

[Western Red Cedar]

I think a slightly different way of looking at the OP's question is what is the point at which you are hurting your children with too much financial support? Does too much financial support hinder a successful launch?

[ducknald_don]

By the time they get to the age where they are ready to launch it's probably too late. If you spent the first 18 years of their lives teaching them to be irresponsible then what is going to change after that point?

My gut feeling is you are going to create more problems by trying to be too controlling rather than too indulgent.

[jacob]

The launching systems in Denmark are well-institutionalized. The government/industry sets quotas on how many students are needed for each degree (demand) and students (supply) are admitted according to GPA. Thus low industry demand/high student supply degrees have very high GPA cutoffs and vice versa. Everybody who is admitted gets the same stipend contingent on passing enough classes(*). The stipend is enough to cover books, food, and rent for a dorm room.

The government will provide this living stipend for ONE degree. However, all degrees are free (if you can get in, subject to the GPA requirements above).

(*) This also means that if students fall behind, the stipend money starts running out. Typical solutions include supplementing with a second job or dropping out. Only students can live in dorms.

The dorm rooms are a kind of halfway house to independent adulting. Typically students will have their own room+bathroom but share a kitchen, where they (learn to) cook their own food and do their own laundry. Utilities and maintenance are generally included in the rent. Thus students get a simplified version of independent living together with other students. Insofar one knows how to budget, there's enough money, but of course there are always a few clowns who blow their budget on parties and cab fares early in the month and have to eat spaghetti and ketchup for the rest of the month.

When this works according to plan, a HS student (or a public school graduate) pick the right degree right after graduating and finishes it on time. When it doesn't, people pick the wrong degree ... fall behind .. drop out ... try another degree ... take a year off working ... supplement with part time jobs ... rinse repeat ... and maybe eventually get their bearings and graduate something.

Since everybody has the same potential economic possibilities the outcome depends more on temperament and personality. For example, I went the straight and narrow path described above. My sister fell into the alternative "path" described in the last paragraph. As such, there's only so much parents can do.

Personally, I like this system and I think one could replicate it on a household basis in the US somewhat.
1) Only pay for esoteric/useless degrees (anthropology, history,...) if DD or DS has a stellar GPA(*). If DS or DD has an average GPA, pay for a business or engineering education. If DS or DD does not have an aptitude for any studying, it's off to truck school. I would not be judgmental in terms of what they end up doing as long as they enjoy it and the choice matches their capability in relation to the job market.
2) Fund a boring/modest student lifestyle that includes rent, food, and thrift store clothes for the nominal time of their education. Let them handle that budget and fail if they must. They're probably going to be whiny about it.
3) Cut off funding if they fall too far behind classes---the argument being that you're not paying for 4 years of college-style Disneyland.
4) The alternative to falling off of the path of graduating is either to move home with the parents (yikes) or being on their own. IOW, moving back should be considered seriously "uncool" amongst the kid's peers.

At least that's what I would do if I was the parent.

(*) This way, they've proven that they'll succeed in life DESPITE their otherwise useless degree. With a lower GPA, they'll need some tailwind in the form of graduation into a rising tide field where even average people succeed.

Add: I've previously recommended to friends/family that their younglings get a degree/certificate/experience in a "real job"(tm) such as hairdressing, gardening, etc. before venturing off to college. I figured experience with real work might inspire/mature the person to choose their degree with more wisdom. However, having seen where this might unintentionally lead, I'm not so sure about that advice anymore. It can easily turn into a lifestyle-trap (local minimum) of menial part time jobs because "the money is too easy". Before you know it, the kid is 35 and displaying all the intellect of a bag of bricks and correspondingly poor life choices.

[black_son_of_gray]

Only pay for esoteric/useless degrees (anthropology, history,...) if DD or DS has a stellar GPA(*)

[...]

(*) This way, they've proven that they'll succeed in life DESPITE their otherwise useless degree. With a lower GPA, they'll need some tailwind in the form of graduation into a rising tide field where even average people succeed.

I agree that a certain kind of student will be successful pretty much regardless of what they study, the classic example being that Harvard students go on to be successful because they were already capable of getting into Harvard, not because of any magically better education that Harvard provided them.

I'm actually a little shocked at your usage of "useless" here, though. How are you defining that? Like, in an economic/financial return/"job card" sense?

I ask because, over time, my thinking around what constitutes a "useful" degree has grown substantially fuzzier. On some level, I think progress towards actualization is integral to "launching" as well. (Open question: would you rather have an actualized adult child who is less successful financially, or a financially successful adult child who never progresses past parroting the expressed values of their society/institutions?)

The sciences are generally considered "useful", but my undergraduate degree in biology gave me essentially two opportunities: 1) low paid lab technician (making maybe ~30k in mid 2000s), 2) grad school (stipend of mid-20k at the time). Grad school was where I actually learned how to think like a scientist (undergrad was ineffective at this). My financial opportunities after grad school were similarly lackluster (especially considering the time sunk into getting there). Case in point: I was offered a professor position, the holy grail that most grad students hope for. Its starting pay was less than I was making at my then post-doc position! But the transition to independent thinking/learning and problem solving that grad school in the sciences provided has been probably the most important element of my education, as it relates to lifestyle and life satisfaction, ever. That was what 'launched' me from familial/societal/institutional patterns of thinking, the first big step towards actualization, even though financially I was launched about as high as an underpumped bottle rocket. (I did not graduate with debt, though.)

I don't think going to grad school (or even college) is necessary. That said, I imagine certain "useless" degrees like philosophy, history, etc. have similar outcomes, and likely provide key elements of independent thinking sooner. I imagine that the arts--presumably considered to be some of the most "useless" financially--are also very good at this. Now, would I encourage my child to go $200k into debt to get a degree in studio photography at a mid-tier state school? Probably not. Debt like that is monstrously destructive*. As part of a double-degree program? Maybe, but still probably not. Depends of the other degree. Only go $20k into debt? Maybe! But if they had a full-ride to RISD? Hell yeah. But then, RISD is the Harvard of the arts...

Otherwise, I think the positive-reinforcement scheme of more support for better grades is a good one.

*Destructive financially, yes, but the knock-on effect is that the stress/limited optionality that results is probably very destructive to actualization as well.

[jacob]

@bsog - My answer would be along the lines of "there's a time and place for everything"/"Not before the student is ready ..."

Maslow's pyramid is a good way of framing it. The pyramid should be self-supporting rather than top-heavy.

Lessons in independent thinking are likely wasted (if not outright counterproductive) on a 19yo if they don't have the demonstrated discipline or the brain power for a HS GPA that is substantially above goldfish level. People mature at different rates, but at this point most undergraduates are mainly interested in getting laid and/or getting drunk.

Consider that the independent thinking that is taught or selected for in grad school is contingent on students already being near the top of their cohort in terms of demonstrated analytical skills.

If students are to be taught how to question things, it's better if they first have and demonstrate a solid grasp of what they're questioning. Otherwise, it just results in sophomoric shenanigans. It's no different than how good art requires an understanding of previous art as well as the technical skills to express new art. Otherwise, it's just random finger painting.

IOW, if a student has managed at high HS GPA, they're probably ready or at least better prepared for lessons compatible with a higher level of ego development. Otherwise, their time is---in my opinion---better spent practicing accounting or engineering until they get better at analytical thinking.

I think this is where the "system" or the "parents" can put in some constraints on youthful ambition. Most young adults think they already know everything. As such a reality check is a good idea, like, if the kid can't even solve a simple calculus problem they probably shouldn't spend five figures on philosophical lessons analyzing Dasein.

My assumptions: There's a hierarchy of learning. Each stage builds on the previous. It is most useful to learn from one stage ahead. Most HS graduates aren't that far in their development yet.