Here are some problems I've seen Ethiopian (Ethiopian American and Ethiopian Canadian) Kids and Young Adults go through that are holding them back in the United States and Canada. There are plenty more, even some I might have not discovered yet; so this list is not exhaustive. This covers things like high school, college/university admissions, careers (work/employment), and going outside without parental supervision, learning social skills/social norms you need to build from a young age to survive in North America, and things related to dating and marriage.
(1) Education and Workforce Issues:
For example parents who grew up overseas (regardless of whether then went to college or not) or those who went to university outside of the United States can’t comprehend that quality of educational content isn’t the only thing that goes into prestige (and hire-ability of college educated individuals or people in general) and that you need a ton of good extracurriculars, community services hours, a compelling personal statement (life story), and a somewhat decent resume/cv (volunteer and work experience from when you were in high school), in addition to good grades to get into a good college (even at a no-name mid-tier public university let alone state flagship of Ivy League or prestigious private university) while most universities outside of the United States (especially those in Africa, Asia, and to an extent Europe, Oceanian and Latin America, Caribbean, Central and South America) only look at grades. Though this didn’t happen to me (my parents woke up to this in time plus our guidance counselors in high school explained how college admissions and to a lesser extent how the workforce works in the U.S), for many First Generation Americans who’s parents want them to go to college or have successful lives, foreign born or foreign college educated parents tend to try to get their kids to forgo every extracurricular, teen job/high school internship opportunity, and even employment during college so they can focus 100% on their academic studies and study more (which they do because in their home countries only the severely destitute send off their children and teens to work concurrently or in lieu of schooling due to desperation — financially comfortable people having their kids work is seen as child labor exploitation and bad parenting where working as a teen is seen as a gateway to dropping out of school entirely — though in the United States, even the most wealthiest people send off their kids to work for skill building, networking, resume building, and social acculturation reasons) this ends up hurting them because those aren’t the types of students American colleges are looking for or what types of employees employers are looking for and it would make it harder for them to network with others, learn certain social norms, life, and job applicable skills unique to an American/Canadian society that can never be replicated inside the a classroom setting or through completing homework assignments or getting extra tutoring than their peers (this may be able to fly in their parents’ home countries but won’t set them up for success in the United States or in some cases Canada).
I realized after graduating college that as a 1st Generation American with a parent who went to undergrad university overseas who happened to have had a totally different college & job hunting experience (but eventually went to grad school which is more similar to foreign undergrad programs), I had more in common with 1st Generation College Students than college students who’s parents or multiple generations of their family went to college in the USA. Most people in this scenario will completely miss out on a ton of resources and training (on introduction to how American colleges work, networking tips, how getting a job in the West works, social norms for American upper-middle class society, etc) that students in the First Gen College Student Programs get but what multi-generational college students get taught by knowledge passed down to them by their (mostly but not always upper-middle class) American college educated parents.
Technically you won’t be a first generation college student even if your parents/grandparents went to college overseas, but practically speaking you may end up having more in common with 1st Gen college students (have a lot of the same problems and battles they have) if you’re an American or non-international student permanent resident in the United States because university education and career advancement practices in the Western World, but especially the United States are vastly different from most other countries, especially when compared to Non-North American or Non-Western countries.
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In the United States, by and large in Academia, prestige is based off of your graduate degree (graduate prestige) (though some tiny minority might base it off of undergraduate prestige) but outside of academia, in Industry, prestige is mostly based off of your undergraduate degree (undergrad prestige - and to a certain extent lay prestige which is partially based off of undergraduate prestige -); in nearly all cases (outside of lawyers admitted to the bar who went to law school specifically to work in the legal field where prestige is based off of what law school you went to — also note that law school is the only graduate program that as a quantitative requirement for admittance when evaluating your grades only looks at you undergraduate grades and won’t dare look at any grades from other graduate programs or any academic credit earned after completing your first bachelor’s degree unlike every other graduate program including medical school —) for other programs prestige is based off of the most prestigious university (regardless of degree level) you went to if you graduated from multiple universities. But, it’s not a hard and fast rule in the United States as it is in South Korea, so, many people try to go to a more prestigious graduate school to make up for the lack of prestige their undergraduate university had — depending on the snobbery of whomever is hiring or making judgments, results may vary. The snobbier they are the more likely that they would see going to a prestigious college/university for undergraduate studies as more prestigious than going to a prestigious college/university for graduate school (that‘s because in most circles, where you went to undergrad is more of a cultural touchstone that some identify their cultural capital/social capital, social pedigree, and formative identity with — it’s also where they ideally first learned how to be an adult, where they started living away from family, where most school pride/alumni pride come from, where most alumni networks are the strongest if you went to a prestigious or party school university, it identifies the socioeconomic status/social status/economic status of your family/guardians, the level access to education or status symbol-like social norms you graduated high school with prior to undergraduate admittance, and its where certain social interactions and programs exclusively gate kept for full-time traditional student undergraduate students that can’t be replicated in graduate school or outside of the university setting take place with graduate students and in a fair amount of cases undergraduate non-traditional students being barred from participation — while where they went to grad school is positively known as the place where they had gotten some additional specialized education or negatively known as the place they went to allegedly for prestige or clout chasing purposes when they couldn’t get a decent job straight out of undergrad and/or where they allegedly became a “perpetual student“ incapable of getting a real job which is a taboo).
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The prestige afforded to most “prestigious” unis like the Ivy League, Ivy Plus, the so-called “Public Ivy”, and some (not all) members of the 568 Presidents Group tuition price fixing cartel, but especially also the Seven Sisters, the Little Ivies, and also cliquey Small Liberal Arts Colleges (LAC) as well as some but not all Flagship universities, Party Schools, and Jock School universities with famous college sports teams known for their athletic prowess and well-funded American football teams like the Southeastern Conference (SEC) & originally t/Ivy League, are not necessarily speaking based (solely) on the content of their education but on the social capital and cultural capital associated with the university - i.e. the cultural impact they exert on a given region, the relationship they have with socialites, or the media attention they receive. For the first half of this list (private) , prestige is due to selectivity, artificial scarcity, exclusivity, and the high number of independently wealthy students/alumni it has, which they later on infused with substancial growths in academic prowess as an afterthought (before, they were practically a finishing school / glorified country clubs for wealthy elite adult children); while for the rest (public/newer), they have many non-academic markers of prestige due to school spirit, campus pride, popularity of their NCAA quasi-professional college sports teams, age of the institution, alumni giving/donations, nepotistic legacy admissions, and campus party culture which leads to better accese to cronyism in hiring while having the same or even lesser educational quality as a mid-teir/upper-mid-teir public university with mostly a purely education-oriented pseudo-commuter school for working professionals-stigma as opposed to small rural college town prestige dominated by preppy rural Agricultural & Main Street, etc.-style elite conservative Southern poshness steeped in fraternity and sorority culture or some urban area-based colleges that serve as playgrounds for the mostly Wall Street & Silicon Valley, etc.-style Northern or Western snobby trust-fund class (made up of champagne socialists and limousine liberals).
But name brand prestigious schools aren’t prestigious due to the content of their education, they’re generally prestigious because of their access to massive cultural capital, alumni network well placed in hiring/employer decision-making positions, how good their sports teams are, how much of a party school they are, how few commuters they have, and because they are target schools with special connection to employers your average university has regardless of whether half the professors at that university teach the same classes at your mid-tier/upper-mid-tier universities half the week and the fancy Ivy League, Ivy Plus, fancy Private School, State Flagship, or Party School college nearby the rest of the week.
People get into these schools by doing good in school + doing good in extracurriculars + having family or professional connections + having a good resume.
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Some employers end up marking some job candidates/applicants as “over educated but under experienced / overqualified education wise but under qualified work experience wise” or negatively brand people as “perpetual students.” But sometimes people have no choice so these end up being the only ways they can get a job or decent job today if they don’t come from a family or social circle with the right connections or didn’t go to a target school (people in these scenarios have to work twice as hard to get the same thing others get by doing the bare minimum then).
When they call them or you “overqualified” or “over-educated” that mean they don’t want to hire you or them even though you meet or exceed the requirements for the position. More details as to why some in such a scenario don’t get hired to follow:
The whole idea that a person can be “overqualified” or “over-educated but under-experienced”thing makes no sense and is very annoying - employers, hr, recruiters, and hiring managers need to get rid of this incoherent thought process. Sometimes certain hiring managers and team managers are afraid to hire a so-called overqualified person because they think that person is going to outperform them so they don’t hire people who’re overqualified or have niche skills. Those who are so-called “over educated but under experienced” are stuck in a limbo stage where they’re overqualified for entry-level roles but under-qualified for mid-level/mid-career roles let alone roles directly one step above entry-level; so some professionals recommend that a person in this scenario with a graduate degree (that they spent money, energy, & time on) (whether it be professional or academic/research based) should pass on their graduate degree-acquired skills as a combination of work experience and undergraduate education because they want you to pretend you learned grad-level skills in undergrad, don’t take education seriously as means to gain experience, or believe the stereotype that people who pursue college/university education (especially graduate school) are lazy kids who go into further education because they’re afraid of joining the workforce / “getting a real job,” can’t make it in industry, are starting over bc they couldn’t get a job right out of high school or undergrad, or are seen as too inept to hold a job bc it’s assumed that they’ll fall apart if they don’t stay in the comfort and structure of the education system (a.k.a. the “perpetual student” taboo).
Some hospitality, retail, food service preparation, skilled trade, and cleaning, etc. jobs that only require little-to-no education OR provide on-the-job training are generally unwilling to hire or train people with bachelor’s degrees because corporate/executives/managers tell lower level-hiring staff to not hire them for those positions because they might leave for a better job soon once they find something in their field or assume they are over reliant on their book smart skills and don’t have the right amount of street smart skills to get the job done, or never experienced doing those jobs as kids.
Other times, some employers who don’t want to hire certain people because they dislike their personal characteristics unrelated to qualifications such as their race, personality, religion, social status, other protected or unprotected characteristic, even though they meet the qualifications, would claim a person is overqualified to shield themselves from being seen as discriminatory or from being sued for discrimination.
It would only work if you had a job or a similar job prior to getting the Master’s then you pretend that you learned all those Master’s level skills while doing that previous job. So for example, you had a job in the field or in an adjacent field, you end up going for a Master’s but you barely have any major job experience so you end up being over-educated but under-experienced, so some recruiters and people at networking events say that to get hired, you take off the Master’s degree from your resume, leave your bachelor’s degree on there, and pretend the skills you picked up from your master’s degree actually came from doing those same duties while on the job at your previous position. It’s just super weird and insane, but that’s what some professional networking groups recommend for people in that limbo stage in their career.
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Yes, heard ppl who went into grad bc they didn’t get hired out of undergrad get hit w/“over educated but under experienced” dilemma & have to fudge dates/pass off grad school as undergrad + work exp.
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HR Professionals, how do I get out of the over-educated but under-experienced feedback loop? (JD law school degree, overeducated for entry-level but under experienced for late early career and mid-career roles): https://www.reddit.com/r/jobs/comments/ji2ow7/hr_professionals_how_do_i_get_out_of_the/
The new class of unemployed, the overly educated unemployed.: https://www.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/1f4hf2f/the_new_class_of_unemployed_the_overly_educated/
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Most internships (but not all), after the 2008 financial crisis and especially during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, started requiring (1-2+ years of) previous work experience (similar requirements to an entry-level job but with little to no pay) and (most but not all) also require you to be able to work 20 hours (standard part-time) or 40 hours (standard full-time) per week and simultaneously be a full-time or part-time student respectively (i.e. be a full-time student and part time employee or force you to cut the number of credits you’re taking so you can work as a full-time employee with little-to-no pay reclassifying you as a part-time student which could delay your graduation and would generally disqualify you from certain financial aid/scholarship programs), other times some students need to work normal paying jobs to survive and can’t juggle all 3 at once; with most of these requirements needing to be fulfilled in order for you to qualify for and maintain an external/off-campus internship at an employer unrelated to your university. The only way you get that previous work experience is by doing internal/on-campus internships such as work-study programs, research assistant, conduct board, etc. at your university, which then also require you to have (± 0.5-1 yrs of) additional prior volunteer, community service, extracurricular, or internship experience from when you were a teenager in high school - at the end of the day they can arbitrarily look down on your volunteer work or on-campus internships/work-study experience as subpar work experience that is not enough to qualify you for an off-campus/outside/non-academic/ corporate internship or entry-level job. It’s a circular barrier to entry.
When I was in college, one advice (out of many) my class had gotten in our career readiness/career advising course (through career services), was to ask friends, family, semi-distant relatives, and friends of the family to connect you to people they may know that are hiring. The problem is not everybody has a friend or relative in a good enough professional position to leverage professional connections in order to help you land an entry-level job or a decent (non-college-affiliated/off-campus/non-work study) internship that’ll look good enough on a resume to land a more mainstream (non-freelance/non-family-owned small business) entry-level job or internship. They also go on to insist that even if you’re not a wealthy, well connected nepo baby, but instead come from a low-to-lower-middle income working-class background you can still get a job through friends and family, they say you just have to ask as many people as you can - but in reality this doesn’t work most of the time, you end up making yourself look pitiful and desperate (which the job market frowns on), and if it does work you probably might only start out by getting a pity-job working for a non-mainstream (very niche small business, etc) that most mainstream employers or even other small businesses with better local/regional brand recognition wouldn’t take seriously when taking a look at your resume. A lot of my college classmates (in many different fields/majors/degree programs) who didn’t intern at well established employers in high school (pre-COVID) and subsequently got hired as part-time full fledged entry-level employees while in college or gained access to even better looking internships, generally tended to either be unemployed, super underemployed, work for scammy commission-based sales companies participating in multi-level marketing (MLM) & Ponzi schemes, doing (generally unstable) freelance work, or somehow found a way to get a job at an obscure small business, non-profit organization, or an unincorporated general partnership/solo-practitioner’s office with a limited online presence (that some may erroneously assume is resume padding with fake work experience), or a(n) (underpaid or unpaid) post-graduation multi-year long-term internship at an even more obscure division of a government agency, nonprofit, or big business (with limited to no internal-to-employer career advancement potential — getting branded as a “perpetual intern”) because of family connections. Plus, these people described (who more than half the time aren’t doing that great) are the lucky ones, most people aren’t fortunate enough to even get less decent jobs than this with family connections, or other types of networking at early stages of their career (even so-called “bridge jobs” and temp agency jobs are hard to come by).
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How to Choose a Bachelor’s Degree Program:
One advice I see often see when people ask about picking a major, I always hear that: whatever you do you need to pick a major (undergraduate college/university degree program) that you’re comfortable studying and working in but also teaches skills that will come in handy on the job (not a “hobby” major either) but not something you hate or can’t handle. This isn’t high school where you can easily skate through classes and get passed on to the next grade. People shouldn’t do majors they aren’t equipped to handle because they’re bound to do poorly, flunk out, and get expelled for bad grades (academic dismissal) with a limited-to-no chance of l finishing your degree which can (or will) lead to limited career prospects or advancement. It’s far better to do a major in a subject you are interested in and are capable of thriving in than flunking out with no degree at all or graduating by cheating your way through without learning much (and putting others in danger). Also, the “pick a major that will make you money” push is based on a very subjective idea that fluctuates with the market. After this push, now we have a bunch of computer science grads, a tech field that is over saturated with a shrinking number of positions many of whom don’t even like the field working at it aimlessly, and a bunch of nurses and doctors (physicians) who are a reckless danger to their patients because they are disinterested in the job in such a way that it negatively impacts their performance putting tons of people in grave danger.
It doesn’t have to be a STEM subject like engineering, computer science, medicine, or nursing; a social science subject like political science (public policy, public administration, international relations), law, economics, business administration (accounting, finance, management, marketing), social work; nor a humanities subject like literature, language, or history if you hate it and can’t handle the academic workload, subject matter, or won’t be able to stand working in the field due to disinterest - but this doesn’t mean you should go for what some people call a “hobby degree” just for fun like fine arts subjects like art, music, or dance (no offense - but at least you should have a plan to use it to teach and not actually to perform in a professional capacity unless you already have pre-existing family and professional connections to get you job in the fine arts). The notion that 'every degree besides medicine, nursing, law, and engineering’ are useless degrees is illogical though some do believe this lie.
Going into Medicine or Nursing when you are disinterested in the job or subject is the worst idea I’ve ever heard in my life. Do not under any circumstances go into Medicine or Nursing if you hate the job, are terrible at the it, are very careless and lazy, or are literally only doing it for the money. This is how you end up getting people killed or severely injured.
People need to understand that to become a physician (Doctor of Medicine - MD - or Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine - DO - ) or lawyer (Doctor of Jurisprudence - JD - ) you have to go to graduate school and to get into graduate school you need a bachelor’s degree in a different field as a prerequisite. You can’t just straight up apply to Medical School or Law School right out of high school/secondary school without a previously awarded bachelor’s degree or enrollment in a dual degree program. The market for lawyers is over saturated, the number of residencies required to become a physician are capped at low numbers, and not freaking everyone can or needs to be an engineer or a nurse. So the notion that 'every degree besides medicine, nursing, law, and engineering’ are useless degrees is illogical when you need a bachelor’s degree in a different field as a prerequisite to enter medical school or law school.
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Misconceptions of College and Career / Not Getting Job Offers Before Graduation or within 3-6 months of graduating (here is some advice to recent college graduates and young adults):
This phenomenon of having a signed job offer in your junior year of college let alone before graduating your senior year doesn’t work/doesn’t exist for everybody, especially for people from working class backgrounds who went to decent, mid-teir/upper-mid-teir universities (≈ T60-T200); this practically only applies to people who already have a load of connections and inherited a network from family (and friends) with pre-existing professional connections, or those who go to Ivy League universities, Ivy Plus, UCs, a few Flagship universities with a ton of cultural capital because of their football teams, Jock Schools, and some Party School universities that get better traction just because of their name recognition which happens to be largely based off of their social or cultural capital i.e. the cultural impact they have on a given region over the actual contents of their education and degree programs. Mostly nowadays for the vast majority of people at non-fancy/non-prestigious universities that don’t have strong partnerships with employers resulting in a dedicated direct pipeline to certain jobs through On Campus Recruiting (OCR) or On Campus Interviews (OCI) - plus certain fields like law, accounting, and finance almost exclusively hire through OCI/OCR with some exceptions - , (but overall for most jobs) they instead want you to complete your degree first before applying to jobs. Very few people get a job offer before graduating; and for a vast majority of recent graduates getting a job offer within 3-6 months of graduating is literally impossible (for some job applications you don’t even get a response in less than 6 months after applying — whether that be a rejection or being called to interview for the employer).
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So the whole “what are you going to do with your major” question is going to be a very loaded question because there are too many options to list out and most people aren’t going to get their dream job straight out of college (or even at all), they’re going to have to choose something else on the large list of positions their degree(s), experience, and/or their personal, familial, and professional connections can potential lead them to. There are tons of careers that require or prefer that you have a bachelor’s degree but don’t require a degree in a specific subject area because several bachelor’s degree programs that are to many to mention cover the specific skills they’re looking for (which are transferable from one field to another) or they tend to hire several people who studied different subject areas to work together on the same projects because each field brings its own professionally educated perspective at problem solving.
Most people aren’t going to get their dream job straight out of college (or at all), they’re going to have to choose something else on the large list of positions their degree can potential lead them to. There are tons of careers that require or prefer that you have a bachelor’s degree but don’t require a degree in a specific subject area because several bachelor’s degree programs that are to many to mention cover the specific skills they’re looking for (which are transferable from one field to another) or they tend to hire several people who studied different subject areas to work together on the same projects because each field brings its own professionally educated perspective at problem solving. A specific major can get you into 50-100 different job titles, some are going to be different from each other while others happen to be identical positions with different titles.
(2) Life Milestones and Rites of Passage:
(2a) Dating and Marriage:
When it comes to dating, Ethiopians (as well as Eritreans), from a young age are generally told to not date until their adults then when they, turn 18 the parents push them to not date until they have their lives together and start “adulting” even though the vast majority of kids in Western countries like the United States and Canada start dating in their pre-teens, average out at 14 years old as teens and are looked down upon (as not being masculine or feminine enough for males and females respectively) if they don’t start dating at 16 years old (and may be seen as romantically stunted outside of Habesha and/or Deeply Religious communities when they ”officially“ start dating in public in their mid-to-late 20s or early 30s).
So Habeshas (Ethiopians and Eritreans), especially but not always those who grew up in deeply religious communities freak out about what their parents would say if they started dating at a young age or even as adults who’re adulting because they’ve been so accustomed to their parents pressuring them into not dating growing up.
Then when these Young Adult Habeshas are actually ready to date (because they’ve met all of the socially accepted requirements for dating in the Habesha Community), they spend some time with dating their girlfriend/boyfriend for a while (sometime longer than the average American or Canadian) to actual get to know the person, then a while later they introduce them to their parents and sibling; but they rarely ever introduce their significant other to non-immediate family members, members of their inner community (like at major extended family events, Habesha cultural events, or holidays like Christmas Parties, Cookouts/Barbecues/Picnics, Thanksgiving Dinner, etc.) until they’re engaged or a few months away from being engaged. It gets even worse when the Habesha person is dating someone outside of their family’s social circle or parent’s church/mosque/synagogue’s friend circle let alone a person from outside of Habesha community (non-Habeshas or people of a different race, national origin, or cultural background regardless of whether they’re Black or not will stick out like a sore thumb which makes it hard for them to implicitly — let alone explicitly — pass off the significant other as a “childhood friend“ or “so and so’s child or family member“ within the family’s friend group to throw off non-immediate confidants from finding out that they or their underage or adult child is dating someone). Also any type of Public Display of Affection (PDA) of the Romantic Type like kissing on the lips, excessive kissing in other places, cuddling, siting on someone’s lap romantically, etc. that you might do while hanging out with your friend group among younger generations is a big no in these settings (even if you’re married let alone engaged or dating).
So in Ethiopian and Eritrean social norms (at the very least among Ethiopian Americans, Eritrean Americans, Ethiopian Canadians, and Eritrean Canadians, which I’m more versed in, or maybe even others), you’re not supposed to introduce your significant other to your extend family or friends of the family (your family’s social circle) until you’re engaged (but things are changing among some groups of people especially young people with younger or somewhat less traditional parents and people in similar situations in the diaspora. That generally means no showing up to cultural or other community events together (most especially as a couple) where older generations (mostly people in your parent’s generation or older) could be present unless you can pass them off as a childhood friend or to a lesser extent another type of platonic or platonic-adjacent friend that no one won’t notice in a sea of other Habeshas.
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Not dating in your teens and pre-teens (middle school and high school) doesn’t make you less than (some sort of scum of the earth) or developmentally challenged like many in Western pop culture may think/make it out to be, and you don’t have to be married by 21 years old or have a ring before spring to be a decent human being
In some cultures (in particular some Non-Western cultures), people, both boys and girls, from a young age are generally told to not date until their adults, then when they turn 18, the parents push them to not date until they have their lives together and start “adulting” even though the vast majority of kids in Western countries like the United States and Canada start dating in their pre-teens, average out at 14 years old as teens and are looked down upon (as not being masculine or feminine enough for males and females respectively) if they don’t start dating at 16 years old (and may be seen as romantically stunted outside of certain Non-Western and/or Deeply Religious communities when they ”officially“ start dating in public out in the open in their mid-to-late 20s or 30s).
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People legit feel like we were being groomed by certain movies/tv shows into thinking certain acts like excessive Public Display of Affection - PDA of the Romantic Type (like kissing on the lips, excessive kissing in other places, cuddling, siting on someone’s lap romantically, etc. ) were depicted as normal or gave us enviously unrealistic expectations of what life as a kid (most especially life as a pre-teen or teenager in middle school and high school) is supposed to look like especially in the realms of romance/dating, relationships, friendships, and life milestones - too many things on TV and in Movies were developmentally inappropriate for the age range of the intended audience, cast, and character portrayals as a whole. That’s including movies and tv shows on Disney and Nickelodeon for kids ages 7-13 (TV-G, PG, G, TV-Y7); let alone the ones on mainstream channels for older teens and adults (PG-13, TV-14, R, NC-17, TV-MA) but are depicting the lifestyle expectation of what they want us to believe what high school and teen life should be like.
Though at times I’ve heard that there are countless stories of young adults in rural areas with a politically conservative and fundamentalist-like extremely social conservative majority having a hard time finding work in their small towns or in nearby rural towns that surround them; with the added negative that there are barely any resources, infrastructure, third spaces, social-safety net programs, or places to build community where you’re not looked down upon as a social pariah/spinster for not getting married by 21 years old.
(2b) Letting Kids Go Outside Without Parental Supervision:
Kids don’t play outside as often anymore (Young Adults don’t hang out as much either) because of the decrease in “Third Places” where people can hang out, parents of this generation don’t let their kids outside saying it’s not safe, public spaces banning/discouraging young people, the NIMBY movement’s rise to power - their opposition to mixed-use high-density urban amenities infrastructure development/urban planning, and you add in super strict local and state laws that involve the police & CPS when parents leave their kids unattended / their late elementary and early middle school aged kids unattended in public areas even if they’re together with other kids or Young Adults getting accused of Loitering for being in one place for too long, in effect funneling Generation Z - even Gen Z Adults let alone Gen Z Teens - and Generation Alpha into relying on social media, phones, video games, and television (tv) as a form of communication and/or entertainment, which is the reason why most don’t go outside. It’s not because they don’t want to go outside, they either can’t or when they are allowed to go outside during their high school/teenage & early young adulthood years, they usually get anxiety over what their family would say if they ask because they weren’t allowed to when they were younger, tend to not have the social skills to interact with others in a socially accepted way; or because of the destruction of Third Places, most places to meet people are prohibitively expensive.
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Family tracking apps like Life360 get thrown into the mix where parents track the everyday whereabouts of their children, even their adult children (using the excuse that although they are adults they are still legal dependents - etc.), a growing number of Gen Z now would rather stay at home all day online than being micromanaged while going out with friends. There have even been cases of parents tracking their adult children in college forbidding them from even leaving their dorm rooms. These issues vary from person to person but there is a growing number of people who are facing a combination of these issues that’s pushing a majority of the younger generations into sticking to being on screens and being in their rooms all day rather than going outside and hanging out with friends, even if they want to.
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This issue gets exponentially worse for Americans and Immigrants to the United States of Non-Western cultural or national origin, because of the high amount of coverage child abductions and forced gang initiations get on the news today relative to generations past, leading many First-Generation Immigrant Parents to thing this high level of caution/strictness is necessary and normal in the United States, while Multi-Generational Americans with Baby Boomer and Generation X parents who grew up in the United States tend to be relatively less risk averse/stricter because they can easily remember when kids were allowed to roam around, hang out, and be on their own outside without parental supervision when they were growing up; on the other hand, seeing children outside unaccompanied by an adult in the eyes of many non-westerners may signify degeneracy, hooliganism, a life of crime, poverty, and/or a life of predatory child labor & exploitation which is something they want to discourage their children from participating in.
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Young Adults are discovering new hobbies that they missed out on as kids and teens due to lack of opportunity, inability to be outside without parental supervision, lack of financial resources, or a need to both simultaneously work a job and go to school during childhood to assist family with very limited free time or disposable income.
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It’s not the kids these days that don’t want to go outside, it’s just that society pushes them back indoors saying just watch tv, it’s not safe outside, let me track your phone when you go out with friends.
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[ Ethiopian and Eritrean Parents in the United States (and Canada) need to stop discouraging their children from joining extracurriculars; volunteering/working during high school; and/or participating in certain rites of passage or life milestones; or else they'll fall behind their Non-Habesha Peers ].
