Another byproduct of the Self-esteem follow Your Dream Parenting Movement that started in the 1960s is what Rachel Dwyer, Ohio State University, writes of in What, me worry? Young adults get self-esteem boost from debt.
Dwyer writes of a study involving 3,079 young adults (for 32 years) who participated in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 – Young Adults sample (NLSY).
The NLSY interviewed the same nationally representative group of Americans every two years, and the survey was conducted by the Ohio State’s Center for Human Resource Research on behalf of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
What researchers discovered was that the more credit card and college-loan debt held by young adults aged 18 to 27, the higher their self-esteem and the more they felt like they were in control of their lives.
The effect was strongest among those in the lowest economic class. The survey reveals that many young people do not understand the mess they are getting themselves into until after age 28.
The results from this survey offers more evidence that self-esteem should not have generated an industry to feed its growth.
When I searched YouTube, I discovered more than a thousand videos on “How to Boost Self-esteem”.
On Amazon, there were 158 results and for Google there were 6,310,000 results. The first Google hit was a five-step plan from the Mayo Clinic.
In fact, since the “average” America parent has been obsessed with the self-esteem of their children since the 1960s, this resulted in the public schools inflating grades contributing to dumbing down the curriculum.
Continued on June 20 in What, Me Worry about Debt! – Part 2
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
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