Skylar was born a girl, meaning they were assigned female at birth by their doctors. Today, Skylar identifies as male. Their preferred pronouns are he/him or they/them.

I raised Skylar as a girl. Up until a few years ago, they were, in my mind, unequivocally my daughter. Long hair and pretty dresses were their thing, but so were hunting for bugs, dreaming of dinosaurs, and digging in the dirt. I didn’t expect Skylar to play with dolls, or for them to be a princess on Halloween when they preferred Legos and Dracula costumes. Skylar’s preferences often swung toward what society might deem boyish things, but then again, they were a sucker for a skirt they could really twirl in.

Skylar didn’t come to me as a young child and proclaim that they were not a girl or that they felt like they were born into the wrong body. In fact, there were no conversations with Skylar regarding them not feeling in alignment with the sex and gender of their birth until puberty.

When Skylar did begin to express feelings of being transgender, it wasn’t easy for me. I felt incredible internal resistance, even loss. But I also knew that Skylar did feel safe enough to explore these feelings and to lean on me for guidance and support.

Now, Skylar is moving out, leaving California for Oregon. As they get ready to launch, it makes me question if my parenting, which looking back, might be labeled gender neutral, has prepared them for a world outside our family’s orbit—a world where gender roles are fraught with divisiveness.

The word neutral has many meanings: indifferent, impartial, disengaged. When you talk about neutrality in terms of parenting, it means something completely different. In the past few years, there has been a growing resurrection of the conversation around gender-neutral or gender-responsive parenting.

This kind of parenting was already a thing by the early ’70s, when I was a quintessential girl: shy and bookish, I hated sports, loved my dolls, and could spend a perfect summer afternoon watching soap operas with my grandma. My mom was an interesting mix of traditional and hippie who insisted on good manners and “ladylike” behavior, but who also wanted me and my sister to be original thinkers and stand on our own two feet.

When Skylar was growing up, Erin M. Eichinger writes that she always encouraged them to be “free” to be themselves: someone who loved to twirl in skirts and hunt for bugs.

Eichinger set out to raise Skylar (pictured) and her other three children with an awareness of gender identities that are “unique, fluid, and complex.”

Looking back, Eichinger writes that she wouldn’t change much about her parenting style, aside from being even more conscious and intentional around language and her attitudes surrounding gender roles.

When I was around 5, Mom gave me a copy of the children’s album Free to Be You and Me, which came out in 1972.

At the heart of the album was a message about gender-neutral parenting that encouraged kids and adults to see themselves in ways that broke loose from rigid notions of what it meant to be a boy or a girl. Boys can play with dolls. Girls can run fast.  And, it’s okay for all of us to cry.   Tapping into the Gloria Steinem-style feminism of the time, the album was a reaction to a hyper-gendered postwar America, where marketers painted everything in shades of pink or blue.

Free to Be You and Me provided a new vision of how things could be. I wore that record out, playing it on my white suitcase record player until I knew every song and story by heart.

About 25 years passed from the first time I listened to the album to when I became a mom myself. My approach to parenting my three step kids and Skylar, my first and only born, turned out to be fairly gender neutral. I taught my kids that boys and girls are a lot more alike than they are different. I encouraged them to be “free” to wear whatever they like; play however they like and be however they like.

I was winging it, with Free to Be You and Me as my compass.

Skylar hopes to be a parent themselves one day, and their thoughts on gender-neutral parenting are interesting: “I would keep things neutral when it comes to my child. I would use neutral pronouns, names, toys, and clothes.”

While Skylar realizes that total neutrality would be an impossibility, they would try, at least with those in the child’s inner circle, to maintain as neutral an environment as possible.

If this caused confusion, once the child had more contact with people outside their family group,  Skylar feels that it could be a launching point for communication. “It would be a way to talk to them about gender from a young age, like kids who are raised always knowing they are adopted. They may not understand the concept when they are little, but once they do, there is no fear around it.”

Many people seem to think gender neutrality is something completely new and foreign.

What I’ve come to believe is that we have a generation of young people who are giving us a new lexicon surrounding gender. They are not describing a new phenomenon; they are, as historian Laura Lovett has noted, “resuscitating an old movement, not creating a new one.”

As far as public discussions around gender go, we have made great strides, and yet with that, comes pushback. In 2024, there have been more than 600 anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced in 43 states. In Florida, the state board of medicine is acting to block any kind of gender-affirming care for people under the age of 18, even with parental consent. In California, Elon Musk announced he’d be moving his Space X headquarters out of the state. This, in response to a bill that bans teachers from forcibly outing transgender students to their families. Musk is the father of a transgender daughter from whom he is estranged, and he blames her California private school education for “making her trans.”

Gender roles are imprecise, constantly changing, and ever-evolving. Because of this nebulous quality, they are often confusing and even misleading. As a pushback to what they see as socially imposed rules, some parents today are taking the concept of neutrality in parenting even further, a strict concealment of their baby’s gender from all but a small circle of caretakers. In doing so, they aim to make the child’s formative years completely free of gender markers or stereotypes. Think gender-neutral names, clothing, and toys. Definitely no gender-reveal parties. At some point, the thinking goes, the child will naturally express their gender with no need for any outside influence.

This reminds me of the widely read short story about “Baby X,” a fictional child whose gender is revealed to only a select few. The piece was published in Ms. magazine in 1978, just a few years after Free to Be You and Me—and it pushed readers to question the impact gender roles have on children and society at large.

While my approach of raising children with an awareness of gender identities that are unique, fluid, and complex feels right, the idea of raising kids with total neutrality seems unnecessary to me. I wonder if the practice could be needlessly confusing, leading to misinterpretations and misunderstanding for the child and those who love them, not to mention the level of watchfulness required on the parent’s part.

If I had the chance to raise Skylar again, I am not sure I would change my parenting style. Maybe I would be more conscious around language or more intentional about my attitudes surrounding gender roles.

Here’s the tricky part about raising kids: If you do a good job, the reward is that they become one of your favorite people in the whole world. The other reward is that they learn to stand on their own two feet. And then, they leave you.

So, you help them leave. You break your own heart in service of their future and you wonder if you have prepared them for the world out there.

So, here I am, helping my child take their next step. As I look into the proverbial rearview mirror, to the kid Skylar was, and to the adult they are becoming, I can only hope I prepared them well. I hope too, that when they look into the mirror, they see what I see: a funny, loving, wicked smart, and compassionate person.

What else could a parent want for their child?

The post Parenting Beyond the Gender Binary appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This article is a co-publication of Zócalo Public Square and State of Mind, a partnership of Slate and Arizona State University focused on covering mental health.

I was 12 when I went to prison. Though Mom was the one behind bars, it felt like the system shackled me, too.

Visits to see Mom at Los Angeles County’s Century Regional Detention Facility were rare. Even when I managed to find an adult to take me, I wished I didn’t have to love her this way. Pressing the black visitation phone to my ear, only tears escaped. With a glass wall between us, we used the time to silently fall apart, together.

I am just one of millions of young people who have had an incarcerated parent. For each one of us, the consequences of America’s incarceration crisis are personal and profound; we are more likely to experience a number of physical and mental health conditions, from depression and anxiety to asthma. Today, as a student at Columbia University hoping to become a lawyer, I am ready to be our advocate. I want to inspire criminal justice reform in order to alleviate the system’s lasting impacts on families of the incarcerated.

Mom is a Mexican immigrant who arrived in Los Angeles in 1991. She brought with her an 8th grade education and pennies but also daring eyes full of dreams. America quickly humbled her. She ended up working long shifts as a cashier at a Chevron gas station.

When she got home, she’d tell me all about the customers who came in. She was yelled at for simply doing her job. “Go back to your country,” they told her. Even though America rejected her, Mom was determined for my three sisters and me to belong.

“An A, why not an A+?” she would ask me after my teacher returned a test. I didn’t understand what the big deal was.

Now, as I look back, I know Mom’s toughness was motivated by love. She taught me that I didn’t have room for error; I had to work twice as hard as my white, affluent peers to be taken seriously. It is thanks to Mom that I am still a proud academic perfectionist.

Mom is, and has always been, my beloved. As she began to struggle with addiction, when I was just 12, I made sure Mom was fed and cared for. But I knew what she really needed was something I couldn’t give her: rehabilitation.

I was hopeful when Child Protective Services eventually got involved, but they only made a bad situation worse. A social worker simply showed up at my middle school one day and told me I wouldn’t be going home, because I was entering foster care. A police escort took me to my younger sisters’ schools to break the news to them gently. After all, the social worker told me, it was my “responsibility,” since I was the oldest.

The most painful part of this traumatic experience was that I didn’t get the chance to tell Mom bye. With me gone, who would make sure she was okay?

All I could do was focus on my little sisters. My twin, Ariel, and I became their maternal figures. We cooked food for them, stayed up late when they were sick, told them “I love you.” We were simply there.

As my sisters and I moved from foster home to foster home, Mom lived with my grandpa, where her addiction intensified—and made her the perfect “criminal,” as far as police were concerned. They stopped Mom one day, searched her, found a screwdriver in her purse, assumed it was a weapon, and whisked her off to jail.

Many incarcerated moms look like mine. The Sentencing Project, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, reports that Latinx women are 1.3 times more likely to be incarcerated than white women. With a Spanish accent and an inadequate lawyer, Mom had the odds stacked against her. As I had been busy serving my sentence in foster care, she started serving hers in prison.

After several years, when Mom eventually got out and regained custody, life didn’t get much better for us. Twenty-seven percent of formerly incarcerated people, according to data published in 2018, are unemployed—and she was one of them. A box on a job application signalled an automatic rejection: “Have you ever been convicted of a crime?”

She eventually got a job as a babysitter, making around $250 a week. The gig helped put food on the table and pay the rent, but I envied the child she babysat. Why did she get to be held in Mom’s arms?

To help make ends meet, I juggled a few jobs in high school. I volunteered with various foster care, feminist, and racial justice nonprofits, which I began to call my family. They empowered me to tell my story. I made speeches to California legislators and helped pass a juvenile justice reform bill. I participated in research that helped expand higher education for foster youth.

I am the safety net for my family. I want more for us than sharing a one-bedroom apartment forever. So, hammer in hand, I shattered the walls. Statistics suggest I should have been held back, or dropped out of high school altogether. I’m lucky to be among the 2% of children with incarcerated moms who will graduate from college. Even when you are wealthy and white, it’s rare to get into Columbia, with its 3.73% acceptance rate. As admissions decisions are released this spring, I’m not expecting many kids like me to receive acceptances here, if they even applied.

Being complacent about these inequities is the real crime. Since 1991, the number of children with incarcerated mothers has increased by 131%. Throwing more moms in jail is not the solution to underlying problems, like addiction and mental illness, that require rehabilitation and treatment. My mom was still an addict post release, just an addict with a felony. Given that kids in foster care are more likely to end up in prison themselves, I easily could have joined her.

Mom tells me to move on. She often comforts me with words like, “We’re together now Angel, let it go.” But when she hugs me tight, I can feel she’s afraid to lose me again. In a way she already has: I’m on the other side of the country. Most kids look forward to college as a time of independence, but I’ve already been on my own for far too long. Mom didn’t regain parental rights until I was almost 18 years old. At least my younger sisters get to grow up with her.

My emotional pain will never truly heal. I still flinch when someone knocks too loud at the door, because that’s how the police and social workers always arrived. I know someday when I am a lawyer, tears will cascade down my cheeks as I walk through the courtroom doors. It was in court that my lawyers gave me a teddy bear, every six months, after denying me parental reunification.

All of my experiences ensure that I will fight harder for my future marginalized clients. I know what it means to be seen as a criminal because you’re Black, a woman, a foster child, and the daughter of an incarcerated mom.

I was 12 when I went to prison. I wonder when I’ll be free.

The post My Mom Is Out of Prison, But I’m Still Not Free appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Today’s Californians often hold up equity—the idea of achieving a just society that is completely free from bias—as our greatest value. Gov. Gavin Newsom says he makes all decisions through “an equity lens.” Over the past year and a half, institutions from theater and dance ensembles to tech companies and media conglomerates have publicly pledged themselves to equity, along with diversity and inclusion.

But their promises of newly equitable systems—and the growing industry of equity consultants—are no match for the power of parents.

Fathers and mothers with greater wealth, education, or other resources are more likely to transfer these advantages to their children, compounding privilege over generations. As a result, children of less advantaged parents face an uphill struggle, disparities are growing, and social mobility has stalled. More Californians are giving up on the dream; a recent Public Policy Institute of California poll found declining belief in the notion that you can get ahead through hard work. Our democracy, which is too dominated by the children of the rich and powerful, is in crisis.

My solution is simple, and while we wait for the legislation to pass, we can act now: the rich should give their children to the poor, and the poor should give their children to the rich. San Francisco Socialists can sell their kids to Lassen Libertarians, and owners of large homes might swap children with their homeless neighbors.

Now, I recognize that a few naysayers, hopelessly attached to our existing systems of privilege, will dismiss such a policy as ghastly, even totalitarian. But my proposal is quite modest, a fusion of traditional ideals and today’s most popular political obsessions.

Child removal might even bridge the visions of the most progressive anti-racists and the most Trumpian anti-immigrationists. I expect such wide-ranging support because my policy builds on the wisdom of great thinkers—from Plato to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett—who have recognized the perils of allowing people to form families according to their own values.

In his “Republic,” Plato started with Socrates’ sage advice—that children “be possessed in common, so that no parent will know his own offspring or any child his parents”—to argue for abolishing the family in the service of defeating nepotism, preventing the amassing of great fortunes, and creating citizens loyal not to their sons but to the larger society.

To make all this possible, Plato offered ideas that sound familiar today, from compulsory education to—millennia before Gavin Newsom’s conception-to-college agenda—health and exercise recommendations for women during pregnancy and children during those crucial first five years of life.

Ever since Plato, philosophers, from Marcus Aurelius to Rousseau, have wrestled with the conflict between the selfish human desire to protect one’s family, and the need for democratic citizens to think first of the larger society. Marx’s buddy Friedrich Engels attacked the family as the foundation propping up capitalism. Even the great 20^th-century liberal John Rawls once suggested doing away with the nuclear family.

In the 21^st century, the Platonic ideal that our greatest citizens—technologists, performers, athletes—belong to the people has become a cliché.

“I’m an orphan,” the late singer-actress-activist Eartha Kitt once said. “But the public has adopted me, and that has been my only family.”

My proposal for universal orphanhood also aligns with powerful social trends that point to less interest in family life and child-rearing. Californians are slower to marry, and are having fewer children—the birth rate in our state is at an all-time low. So, in giving our children to the state, we wouldn’t be giving up much.

Surveys suggest many of us have already chosen politics over family members, whom we rarely see anymore because we don’t share their views. But unlike so much in our divisive politics, my proposal would be unifying, fitting hand-in-glove with the most cherished policies of left and right.

The left’s righteous efforts to introduce 21^st century ideas around racism and gender identity in our schools are facing a fierce backlash from parents who insist on passing on their own values to their own kids. Transferring parental responsibilities to the state would end parenthood and this backlash, helping dismantle white supremacy and outdated gender norms.

My proposal also would give Democrats the opportunity to build a new pillar of the social democracy they seek—a system for raising children, called “Foster Care for All” (and overseen, perhaps, by the secretary of the new Department of Adoption—Trading Places film director John Landis). With this foster system replacing parents, Democrats could stop pretending that they will ever enact universal pre-school or child care, which they’ve been promising—and failing to deliver—for a generation.

Over on the right, you’ll see people posing as defenders of parents. But 21^st century Republicans are happy to jettison fathers and mothers in service of their greatest passions, like violating migrants’ rights. The Trump administration proudly separated immigrant parents from their children to cruelly discourage people from pursuing their dreams in this country. Once you’ve gone that far, it’s only a short walk to a wholesale separation of all Americans from their progeny.

Then there’s the pro-lifers. The idea of universal orphanhood dovetails nicely with the conservative campaign to end Roe v. Wade and all abortion rights. After all, my proposal would require the government to demand women bear children that they may not want—until we create the child-manufacturing technologies that now exist only in Matrix films.

In fact, a suggestion from Justice Barrett, in a recent Supreme Court hearing on a case that could overturn Roe, inspired me to write this column. She posited that abortion rights are no longer necessary because all 50 states now have “safe haven” laws that allow women to turn their babies over to a fire or police department after birth. My proposal would merely make mandatory such handovers of babies to the state.

Perhaps such coercion sounds dystopian. But just imagine the solidarity that universal orphanhood would create. Wouldn’t these children, raised in one system, find it easier to collaborate in solving the great problems of our state and the world—like climate change and poverty?

Now, I don’t expect universal support for universal orphanhood. A few contrarians, lost in the empty chasm between American extremes, might object to this rational proposal on emotional grounds. They might argue that pursuing your own conception of family is fundamental to freedom. Or that our differences and biases, for all the damage they can do, also give human life much of its meaning.

They also may suggest that people don’t really want to start or finish at the same point in life. They may even say that what we really desire is what the title orphan of the musical Annie insisted upon: “I didn’t want to be just another orphan, Mr. Warbucks. I wanted to believe I was special.”

But you shouldn’t pay those critics any mind. Because, unlike you and me and California’s leaders, they just can’t see how our relentless pursuit of equity might birth a brave new world.

The post My Modest Proposal for Universal Orphanhood in California appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I can. Over the years, for the sake of my children’s enrichment, I have ordered gold-standard wrapping paper, reusable polyurethane bags, various types of overpriced produce, several mugs embossed with childhood art of questionable quality, and a decidedly non-miraculous miracle sponge.

Most working parents I know have a love-hate relationship with the PTA, that benevolent oligarchy in yoga pants. PTA parents are cliquish and relentless, but hard-working and sincere. And ultimately, they’re not the ones to blame for all of the needling flyers, fundraising packets, and soul-crushing suggestions that if you don’t buy gourmet grapefruit, the field trip to the petting farm won’t happen, and everyone will be sorry.

No, the real problem is a system that has yanked the parent organization from its roots: an advocacy group, founded in the 19th century by women who couldn’t vote, which has successfully pushed for kindergarten, mandatory immunizations, and child labor laws. There’s still a National PTA, based near Washington, D.C. But over the years, many school-based groups have lost faith in its agenda—or decided the dues weren’t worthwhile—and gone independent.

And without a common purpose or an overarching mission, many PTAs have evolved into school-based fundraising machines, largely divorced from the “teacher” part of the name, and generally turned inward. (By the time the country song “Harper Valley PTA” came out in 1968, its clannish reputation had been sealed.)

In the process, PTAs have replaced true community with something that’s essentially the opposite.

Alexis De Tocqueville gushed, long ago, about Americans’ peculiar version of enlightened self-interest, the way selfish motives still somehow led people to lend their time—and property—to the greater good. “The principle of self-interest rightly understood,” he wrote, “produces no great acts of self-sacrifice, but it suggests daily small acts of self-denial.”

Modern parenting culture, though, allows for no denial. For many, the birth of a child is the start of true civic engagement—a stake in the future, a reason to get involved. But that self-interest is channeled to the community that’s exclusively yours.

It starts with the way many American states fund education, with shrinking state aid bolstered by local property tax rolls, so that haves and have-nots are enshrined. Even within smaller towns, school funding is a zero-sum game: Every tax hike becomes a face-off between the needs of kids and the fixed incomes of the elderly, every school board debate a proxy for anxiety about real estate values.

On policy, we’re no better. When it comes to pitched battles over education, where you stand is often a function of what your own child needs. In Massachusetts, a recent ballot question—which would have lifted a legal cap on charter schools—pitted desperate urban parents, eager for good options, against parents who feared erosion of support for public schools. The measure lost, but in the end, nobody won.

And because we don’t fund education as we should, we’re slaves to fundraising drives, easily co-opted by corporate goals. When I was in high school, a local supermarket chain ran a contest: Win an Apple computer for your school by collecting some vast sum in grocery receipts. “Isn’t that unfair to poorer districts?” I asked. My father called me a communist.

This is where the women (yes, it’s still mostly women) of the PTA and independent “PTO” come in—working hard for their kids and no one else’s. It’s not a matter of greed or cold-heartedness, but of structure. In my town outside Boston, the elementary schools in the fanciest neighborhoods hold fundraising galas with silent auctions, and host smoothie bars for the teachers. The ones like mine, filled with dual-working-parent and working-class families, scrape by with bake sales and patched-together carnivals—heartfelt and sweet, but far less lucrative. There is teacher appreciation, for sure, just no smoothies to go with it.

And because so many “extras” deemed important to enrichment are left to the schools to finance, a cottage industry of fundraising schemes has cropped up, purveying products no one really needs. PTAs are deeply susceptible to these ideas.

It all amounts to taxation by guilt, essentially unfair, and inefficient to boot. Once, I spent $25 on a book of coupons to various stores I was unlikely to ever set foot in, on the promise that half of the proceeds—$12!—would go back to the school.

I’ll forever regret that I didn’t put $25 in an unmarked envelope, drop it in the school office, and run in the opposite direction. For the good of the children.

The post PTAs Are the Opposite of Community appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That mystery, however, can be dangerous.

Younger Americans are more likely to use the Internet, but seniors are joining at faster rates than their younger counterparts. As of 2015, 81 percent of Americans between the ages of 50 and 64 use the Internet at least occasionally, as do 58 percent of those who are 65 and older. The Internet has proven to be an amazing resource for seniors, particularly those with physical limitations. It opens doors to keeping in better touch with family, pursuing new hobbies, and discovering new communities of people with similar interests.

But it also unlocks a whole new world of vulnerability. According to the FBI, seniors are specifically targeted online because they “are most likely to have a ‘nest egg,’ to own their home, and/or to have excellent credit—all of which make them attractive to con artists.” Furthermore, the FBI says,

“People who grew up in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s were generally raised to be polite and trusting. Con artists exploit these traits, knowing that it is difficult or impossible for these individuals to say ‘no’ or just hang up the telephone.” Con artists view the senior population as uniquely vulnerable, and they have come up with creative ways to try and exploit those vulnerabilities.”

Some of the new swindles resemble old door-to-door, mail, and phone scams, except that they now take advantage of massively efficient Internet communication. Think of the myriad of messages containing sob stories ending in pleas for large sums of money, solicitations for charities that don’t exist, offers of free prizes and gifts, or attempts to scare out personal information with threats of cutting off Social Security payments, health care coverage, or banking account access. There are also popular schemes in which a pop-up window informs a person their computer has been compromised and will be shut down unless the outside party is granted access to the machine. Or a message appears from what seems to be a friend or relative telling the user to “check out this awesome website!” Although these aren’t age-specific ploys, many scammers specifically target seniors, assuming that they are unfamiliar with the ways of the web and are easier to con.

So what can we realistically do about it? The success of these hacks and scams have led many software developers and security professionals to gripe about the so-called “stupid users” who simply cannot be saved from themselves and their terrible passwords. While it’s true, in a tautological sense, that removing all humans from the network would make it exceptionally secure, being “stupid” and being “poorly educated” are two very different things. There are a lot of smart people out there that simply don’t have the right information to keep themselves safe online, including seniors. As Slate columnist Josephine Wolff wrote in her beautifully titled piece “Calling Humans the ‘Weakest Link’ in Computer Security Is Dangerous and Unhelpful,” these mistakes show that technology is failing the human users, not the other way around. “The whole point of computers,” she writes, “is that they’re supposed to improve the lives of people, and yet, strangely, it’s the people who end up being painted as the problem.”

Yanking grandma and grandpa (or anyone else who doesn’t know how to respond to technogeek phrased pop-ups about ActiveX controls) offline is clearly not the answer. But given the rate at which seniors are being targeted, we could be doing a better job of getting basic information to this particularly vulnerable group. There are lots of places that offer excellent educational resources about online security and privacy, particularly from AARP, yet they don’t seem to be reaching their target audience. To understand why this information isn’t flowing, I had to reach out to people who don’t work in cybersecurity, who aren’t Internet natives like myself. I needed to talk to people who are much, much different than myself. So I called my parents.

My mom is a paralegal at a huge law firm, and she’s really good at it. She navigates complex tax and real estate regulations like Misty Copeland navigates the stage. My dad is retired now, but he spent years in banking, working his way up from teller to vice president. They’re very smart people. But they didn’t grow up with the Internet.

“So,” I asked my parents, kicking back on the couch in the home where I grew up, “Where do you get most of your information on online safety?”

“You,” they said in unison, without hesitation.

“Well, okay,” I said. “But other than me. Like if I’d gone into, I don’t know, forestry instead of tech. Where would you be getting that information?”

“There’s no really good place,” my dad said after thinking a moment. “The TV frightens me, because they just focus on fear, not what to actually do.”

“Do you think they should put something educational on TV about cybersecurity instead?” I asked. “At a level anyone could access?”

My mom frowned and shook her head. “I don’t think so. If they put something informational on TV, people would probably flip the channel to watch Star Trek instead.” I couldn’t disagree.

“I do learn a lot from work,” my mom said. “We have a good IT department. I guess there are classes at the college. But if you’re not involved with computers in some way, you don’t think about that stuff.”

“And what you learn from the experts at work doesn’t always translate to home,” my dad added. “I have a lot more to worry about here at home than I did in the office.”

My dad is right—workplace training covers only certain topics. But that training has really stuck with them. For example, my parents are pros when it comes to understanding spearphishing attacks. They know that an email isn’t always what it seems—that it might be a deliberate fraud by someone who knows about their personal habits, likes, or dislikes, and is using that information to entice a target to click on malicious links, or reply with personal information. “I’m paranoid about opening emails,” my dad said. “You have to know first who they’re really from.” Solid advice. At my mom’s work, the security team even sends fake spearphishing emails that redirect to an online training course if the links are clicked. It’s a great idea—although it requires a savvy educator.

“It has to be at a level that people understand,” my mom emphasized. “I like learning, but I like to learn quickly. What are the clues that something’s wrong? If it looks like junk in the email address, for example. Or how you should never click a link that’s sent to you if you don’t know what it is. Those are a few things that everyone could do that would help some.”

We talked a lot more about Internet safety. My parents agreed that without a smart and communicative security department at work (in the alternate universe where I am a park ranger), they wouldn’t have any source of good information. Since 13 percent of the U.S. population is 65 and over, and that percentage is growing, we can’t depend on workplace training to keep the older generations safe online.

I left my parents’ house feeling pretty happy with their level of knowledge. I also left with the understanding that they were lucky. They learned a lot from their corporate security departments and they have a daughter in cybersecurity who’s willing to personally engage with them after they retire to ensure they stay safe as vulnerabilities and and attack methods continue to evolve. It’s hard to create new pathways for knowledge—especially pathways that can reach everyone. As my mother reminded me, most aren’t the caricature of the hopeless senior completely incapable of learning anything new. The problem isn’t that seniors can’t learn. It’s that no one is there to teach them in the first place.

Some workplaces can and have filled this role, but it’s certainly not a guarantee. Even when they have, as people leave the workforce, they will need some other source of help continuing to stay safe online. As I mentioned earlier, AARP has some excellent resources for seniors, including tips on avoiding identify theft, spotting spearphishing scams on social media, and explaining ransomware, but you have to be motivated to seek them out. Some senior centers have stepped up to provide classes on computer safety, which is great, but not everyone who needs them can or will take them. Television depictions of cyber are grossly misleading. Mainstream media coverage of these issues is sporadic and can’t be relied upon to reach everyone at the right time.

But if you’re concerned about your parents, there is one last line of defense: you. So let’s all bake our parents a pan of brownies, sit down with them, and have a talk about the Internet. It might get a little awkward, just like the talk they once gave you. But protection, not abstinence, is the way to go when it comes to Internet safety. And who knows, maybe you’ll also learn a few things when you do.

The post It’s Not Your Grandparents’ Fault They Keep Getting Scammed Online appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

 
Stanley Hall grew up in the tiny village of Ashfield, Massachusetts, near the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains in the northwest corner of the state. At age 18, he left home for Williams College, just 35 miles away, with a goal to “do something and be something in the world.” His parents were farmers. His mother, Abigail, wanted her son to become a minister, but young Stanley wasn’t sure about that plan. He had different ideas about college; he saw the four-year degree as a rite of passage—a chance to follow his passions and to explore.

Though Stanley excelled academically at Williams—he was voted smartest in his class—his parents considered his undergraduate years a bit erratic. When he graduated from college, he told his mom he didn’t think he had the “requirements for a pastor.” Even so, he moved to New York City and enrolled in a seminary.

The big city was intoxicating, and living there persuaded Stanley to abandon his religious studies short of a degree, and at the age of 25, after securing a loan, he set off for Germany to study philosophy. While there, Stanley traveled extensively, visiting the theaters, bars, and dance halls of Berlin. “What exactly are you doing over there?” his father sternly asked him. He added physiology and physics to his academic pursuits and told his parents he was thinking about getting a Ph.D. in philosophy. His mother questioned the benefit of a Ph.D. “Just what is a Doctor of Philosophy?” she asked.

His parents wanted him to come home and get a real job, and even Stanley wondered what was next. He felt he was drifting through his 20s.

“I am 25 and have done nothing for myself, scarcely tried my hand in the world to know where I can do anything,” he told his parents. But he continued his studies and explored Germany for a few more years. By then, Stanley was out of money, in debt, and without an advanced degree, so he returned home to the United States after his parents refused to support him financially. He was 27 years old.

Stanley Hall’s story is similar to that of many young Americans today. They go off to college, resist their parents’ pressures to choose a job-connected major, and then drift through the years after college graduation, often short of money or any real plan. But here’s the difference: Stanley Hall grew up in a totally different America—the one of the late 1800s.

We think this kind of lengthy takeoff is a relatively new situation for parents, but it’s not. Sure, the timetable to adulthood is definitely longer now than ever before and affects far more people, but even at the turn of the 20th century, when the economy offered fewer career choices for people like Hall and far fewer had college degrees, young people still roamed around throughout their 20s.

Hall eventually started a career—he earned an advanced degree, taught at Antioch College and Harvard University, married in his mid-30s, and became president of Clark University in Massachusetts. While at Clark, he developed a fascination with the period in life between childhood and adulthood. He founded the American Psychological Association, and in the early 1900s, he wrote an influential book that coined a new life stage that he called “adolescence.”

Hall described this transitional period from childhood to adulthood, between the ages of 14 and 24, as being full of “storm and stress.” Industrialization and automation, along with child labor laws, meant that teenagers no longer had to work in the factories or on the farms. And the emergence of the high school movement in the United States required children to acquire more education before entering the workforce.

In reality, the adolescent stage in the early 1900s was much shorter than Hall described. Employers didn’t demand that most teenagers go to college, so they were able to get a solid full-time job after graduating from high school, followed quickly by marriage and parenthood. Then around the middle of the last century, the job market began requiring that more young Americans add a college degree to the equation. The timetable to adulthood lengthened to the middle of a person’s 20s, although it was still short by today’s standards. After World War II, the GI Bill allowed returning veterans, mostly men, to go to college for free, and the fast-growing postwar workforce quickly absorbed them. They got married, bought houses in the developing suburbs, and had kids, achieving all those key milestones in their 20s. Between 1950 and 1960, the percentage of men 19 to 24 years old living with their parents fell by half.

That post–World War II era cemented in our minds an idea that remains to this day: teenagers graduate from high school, earn a college degree, secure a job, and move out of their childhood home—all by the age of 22 or so. But the 1950s turned out to be an anomaly in a century-long extension of the timetable to adulthood. World War II forced many adolescents, drafted to serve, to grow up before they were really ready to be adults; the GI Bill made it easy and cheap to go to college; and companies were quick to hire a new crop of college-educated veterans, as the United States faced little global competition from countries still rebuilding from the war.

Yet by the 1960s, the trend of a quick launch to adulthood was ending, and by the 1970s, young 20-somethings started living with their parents in larger numbers. In other words, the “boomerang generation,” named for college graduates who return home to live with their parents today, existed 40 years ago, too. It was just much smaller.

The difference between then and now is that manufacturing was still the foundation of the U.S. economy. In 1970, factory work accounted for 25 percent of jobs nationwide (compared with 10 percent today). Even in the bad economy of the 1970s, a college degree wasn’t necessary for financial success, allowing more than one pathway to solid middle-class jobs for most young people. At that time, the wage premium for a college degree—how much more the typical bachelor’s degree recipient earned compared with a high school graduate—was below 40 percent. In 1976, Newsweek ran a cover story asking “Who Needs College?” with a picture of two college graduates in their caps and gowns on a construction site with a jackhammer and a shovel, suggesting that as much as “27 percent of the nation’s work force may now be made up of people who are ‘overeducated’ for the jobs they hold.”

But the 1970s marked the last full decade when a large slice of the population didn’t need a college degree. The recession of the early 1980s effectively killed off manufacturing in the United States, and the next decade’s technology revolution essentially mandated education after high school. The economic benefits of World War II had finally ended. The increase in the wage premium started to speed up for college graduates, and after 1983, it turned into a runaway train. In 1983, the wage premium was 42 percent. Today, it surpasses 80 percent.

The high school movement of the early 1900s, which brought about the new life stage of adolescence, turned into the universal college movement as we neared the end of the 20th century. College did not become that much more valuable, but the loss of many blue-collar jobs caused the high school diploma to become much less valuable. More education was necessary in a knowledge economy, and acquiring that education required a longer timetable between adolescence and adulthood. Beginning in 1980, the next three decades would see a massive run-up in the number of students enrolled in college (both undergraduate and graduate students), leading to further delays in passing the milestones of adulthood, from marriage to buying a house, and forever changing how we view what had been a predictable transition from education to the workforce.

The post How the Knowledge Economy Delays Adulthood appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It is hard to describe why this news hit so hard. Joann was not exactly my friend, though few people in life have been friendlier. She was not a relative, though sometimes she felt like one. She held a role that, in some ways, was more important than those.

She was my friend’s mother.

There’s no doubt that parents–at least for people like me who are lucky enough to have terrific ones–are the biggest and most positive influences in life. And there’s truth in the cliché that “it takes a village” to raise a child. But in the space between your village and your home, the parents of close friends can be the most valuable of guides and intermediaries.

The power of the relationship between kids and their friends’ parents relies on both proximity and distance. You see a lot of your friends’ parents, particularly if you hang out at their house. But neither side of the relationship chooses the other. You don’t pick your friends’ parents, and your friend’s parents don’t pick you. (True, some parents try to choose their children’s friends, but it usually backfires.)

Joann and Cameron McArthur

Ask anyone who has attempted to coach their own child in a sport; it’s more difficult than coaching someone else’s kids, because your own kids don’t listen to you in the same way that they listen to a trusted outside adult. Your friends’ parents don’t have to live with you, so they don’t have the same obligation to negotiate with you, be responsible for you, or spare your feelings. They are freer to be honest and open. Often, it’s through our friends’ parents that we first learn different ways of looking at the world.

Growing up in Pasadena in the 1980s, I had a wealth of friends’ parents from whom to learn. The Lois, just down the street, taught me about the joys of Vietnamese culture and cuisine–and about the value and difficulties of three-generations-in-one-house living. The Vicks said wonderful things about the law, philosophy, and history, and demonstrated how to care for a disabled child. The Thorells, parents of another classmate and baseball teammate, taught me how Trojan football explains the universe as we know it. And then there are singular acts of friends’ parents’ greatness–such as when Mr. Borovicka took me along to Game 1 of the 1988 World Series, which Kirk Gibson won with the greatest home run in the history of Los Angeles.

But even in this constellation of friends’ parents, Joann McArthur and her husband Cameron shone. Their marriage was like that of my parents in central ways–loving, engaged, and full of laughter–but almost nothing else about their house was familiar. My folks are journalists, as are my wife and I, and one thing about our sub-species of humanity is that we tend to comment on the action as we go about living. This can be healthy, but it can also create distance between yourself and life.

In the McArthurs’ house, there was little such distance. There was more hugging, more unbridled joy, and maybe a bit more yelling. My friend and his siblings had curfews and were sometimes grounded, forms of discipline with which I was unfamiliar.

The McArthurs were passionate, and cool. They were the suburban Southern California answer to Q in the Bond films: they always had some gadget or method for solving problems. Between the two of them, they could fix almost anything. They could pack anything into any container. And they could talk to anybody.

Joann and Cameron with their grandson, Maddon

Cameron worked as a property manager, putting out fires and opening doors for property owners and bank branch managers all over the Southland. Joann was a bookkeeper. Those jobs gave them behind-the-scenes glimpses of wealthy people that taught them–and those of us lucky enough to hear Cameron’s stories–that big shots have the same clay feet as the rest of us.

The McArthurs supplemented their income by buying fixer-up houses, moving into them with their three children as they fixed them up, then selling them once the fixing was done. As a result, they moved about once a year. Their ability to pull this off–while maintaining their equanimity and a happy home life–seemed to me then, and now, to be an act of magic bordering on witchcraft. Their secret, I learned through observation, was to have fun and to laugh at the difficulties of constant movement and home repair.

In this, and so much else, they were ahead of their time–learning to cope with rapid changes before the 21st century turned us all into tumbleweeds. But if you had asked them, they would have told you they were traditionalists. The McArthurs insisted that their kids work in their teens, often in jobs involving manual labor–a now unfashionable practice. It gave my friend an enviable discipline and ability to deal calmly with hard situations.

I should add that the McArthurs were also Christian. Very Christian. Joann’s faith was so profound that I, as an agnostic, lack the words to describe it. She was an evangelical, and she attempted to share her faith with the world (her license plate was TKU JSUS) and with me. It never took, but I was flattered by the effort–and I learned what God, and the example of Jesus, could mean to someone.

People like Joann–religious and conservative–are often caricatured in my profession, the media, as closed-minded and cut off from the world, fighting culture and reality. The McArthurs were the opposite of that. They went everywhere and met people from every corner of Los Angeles. When they had friends over for parties, they gathered together some of the most diverse assemblies of people I’ve ever encountered.

The McArthurs taught me that the world tends to confuse strongly held values with intolerance. When I would relate some vaguely off-color story from the schoolyard or the playing fields, Joann would listen carefully, laugh at the right places, and say something like, “I can’t approve, but I’m really happy you shared that with me.” The McArthurs also demonstrated you could be old-school and new-school at the same time. They were unusually frank about sensitive subjects. The most sophisticated advice I ever received about sex, its wonders and its consequences (the short version: that good, frequent sex was essential to love and marriage, but that sexual intimacy when shared thoughtlessly could be destructive to body and soul) was delivered by Cameron and Joann at their kitchen table. (My own father, perfect in nearly every other way, liked to avoid this topic by suggesting, with abundant good humor, that I “go learn it in the street.”)

The McArthurs’ generosity knew few bounds. I took advantage of free meals and extra beds at their house well into adulthood. They gave me way more than I gave back. Joann always kept in touch with notes and emails, even when I didn’t respond in kind. Even after Cameron died four years ago, Joann remained joyful and full of love. This spring, she got remarried. At the same time, she got her cancer diagnosis. This was rotten luck, but her faith never wavered.

A few years back, when my wife and I ran into our own bad luck as we tried to have a child, Joann offered the best, fiercest advice. “Don’t give up,” she said. “Pray hard.” When I reminded her I was uncertain of a higher power, she told me to pray anyway, and she assured me that she would pray extra hard on my behalf just to be sure.

Those prayers were answered with the arrival of my son Ben. I can’t think of the gift of his birth without thinking of her. And I pray now that Ben and his younger brother Tom will be as lucky in their friends’ parents as I was in mine.

Joe Mathews is Zócalo’s California editor.

*Photo courtesy of JefferyTurner.

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