What a wonderful article. I think that there are two sides to this coin: the nature of the debt and the nature of the repayment. Even the smallest and most well mannered debt is a problem if there is no path to repayment. And even large, nasty debt is ok as long as the people borrowing have done their homework and have a solid plan to repay. So this article did a great job of profiling the debt but it didn’t go into enough detail about the borrowers. If interest rates have been so low, and the borrowers have been somewhat lucid, even this large debt can be paid off without any crisis?
Helicopter parenting basically augments the kids decision making. The parent guides them through everything. When the consequences are real, even permanent sometimes, and the it’s up to the kids to do the right thing, and they know it, and they’ve been educated properly on it, then you get a person who is healthy. They develop risk assessment and management and use it in their adult life where, surprise, you have to make essentially life or death decisions every day. You can rack up 30k on your credit card in a single swipe and, for a lot of people, that would be a kind of death. Almost every decision we make has irreversible consequences. The earlier kids learn to deal with that, the better. As long as they are educated and prepared in some way.
People from my parents generation are ignorant about the body. My dad treated his body like a rented car and he died for it. I’m pretty sure that anybody with any level of biological education and sensibility will not be troubled too much by this problem.
I knew a girl from a bad part of la. She was Latino. One time she complained to me how the cops harass her friends when they walk around the neighborhood. I asked her what kind of clothes her friends wear, and she obviously replied that they wear saggy pants and black hoodies and so on. I said that if I were in their situation, I would dress in clothes that are impossible to get you mistaken for a drug dealer or a gang banger — simple jeans and a tucked in shirt with a collar. That would be my plan if I were in their situation and I wanted the cops to stop. She just scrunched her eyebrows and said that “we don’t have to change they way we dress!” Well you don’t have to go to college or start your own business or wear any clothes at all but unfortunately you are subject to the economy and the world and you can’t have a nice life and never do anything at all to deliberately secure that end. Sorry.
At 16, she could have chosen to do a million things that would have messed up her life. Kids can choose to hurt themselves in many ways. We can’t “not allow” kids to do jumps on their dirt bikes or venture into danger in other ways. Once they are given freedom from constant adult supervision, they have to act in self interest. You think that being 16 somehow absolves them from the responsibility of surviving. That’s ridiculous and unnatural.