Boomerang Kids To Bounce Out Sooner Due To Self-Driving Cars

They call them boomerang kids.

The word “kids” is rather misleading since the ages involved are typically young adults, so substitute the notion of kids (i.e., toddlers to teenagers) to instead mean offspring as in your kids that you faithfully raised and sent out into the harsh real-world.

For the boomerang aspects, it’s a clever metaphorical device that suggests a situation or aspect wherein you toss something into the air, and it manages to come back to you.

Based on those mindful delineations of the popular phrase, we can now put it all together and state that a boomerang kid is an offspring that though initially cast into the real-world then returns home to the nest.

When a parent drops off their son or daughter at college, the occasion was especially momentous because the conveyor belt of life was going to have their loved one get a college degree and then take a job, essentially meaning that coming home to roost would never happen again. Sure, you might see them during semester breaks and perhaps temporarily host them over their college summers, but you knew that upon college graduation they were gone for good.

Instead, the latest trend is that you end-up with them moving back into your home post-college and they are there to stay for possibly quite a while.

Some estimates suggest that perhaps 15%-20% of millennials aged 25 to 35 are now living at home with their parents.

That’s nearly one-fifth of all millennials, a staggering number that is delaying the presumably inevitable act of moving out and living on their own.

What gives?

Here are some of the key reasons cited for the trend:

·        Onerous Student Debt. Nationally, there is about $34,000 in average outstanding debt for every millennial that went to college. Ouch! That is a huge debt load for someone just beginning their career. Meager starting salaries will barely cover the debt payments, let alone also cover the costs of living on their own.

·        Exorbitant Housing Costs. Paying the rent is tougher than it used to be. In many major cities, the cost to get an apartment has risen precipitously and what you can afford is often in destitute areas. Would you rather that your offspring lived in a high-risk high-crime downbeat area, or have them at home? Our natural protective mechanism says let them come home.

·        Not Ready For Adulting. Critics argue that baby boomers have done a lousy job at preparing millennials and Gen Z for becoming adults. Maybe the coddling when the kids were kids made them soft for being able to navigate day-to-day real-world tasks. The so-called “helicopter parenting” by parents that did everything for their children seems to have backfired by rendering those youths ultimately ill-prepared for living as independent adults.

·        Ramp-Up Time Needed. Some assert that the post-college years now have to include a ramp-up period, whereby rather than immediately stepping out on your own, you use time at home to get your act together, including saving up money so that you can truly make the jump into independent living. There’s a newly inserted life-buffer that must exist between the end of college and the start of your own journey as a full adult.

Much of the media coverage of the boomerang kids tends to imply that these young adults are lazy, unwilling to tackle the real world, and are merely heading home because it’s the easiest and least demanding way to live.

I’m not going to entertain that overreaching smear.

Of course, there are some millennials that might well fit into that castigated category. I’d bet though that by-and-large most of the post-college youths would prefer to be on their own and not staying at home if they could reasonably swing doing so.

It’s also important to acknowledge that there is a portion of these boomerang kids that come home to help take care of their parents. For those angelic young adults, you’ve got to hand it to them, namely, they are often delaying their own opportunities as independent adults to care for a parent that might be elderly or infirm. Please don’t place those types of boomerang kids into the same category as the ones that are coming home because they have no gumption or spirit to do things on their own.

Advice offered to parents that have boomerang kids living with them on a post-college basis is to try and adroitly find ways to guide the young adults toward gradually moving out.

If you don’t do something constructive to help nudge the boomerang kids, they might stay longer than is needed and likely longer than is good for them and you.

There’s a crass statement that you can end-up with barnacles that won’t ever shake-off.

Particularly worrisome are the parents that seem to trap their boomerang kids into staying at home, doing so by neglecting to provide outward progression steps, yet at the same time, those parents will often loudly decry that their son or daughter is still living at home. Talking via both sides of your mouth is unseemly and will inexorably destroy the relationship between you and your offspring.

Some believe that the parent should work with their boomerang kid to establish a personal budget, getting the son or daughter to learn about taking care of their own financial affairs.

Another idea is to have the offspring pay “rent” while at home, perhaps doing so by earned “points” when doing chores (akin to a kids allowance), or taken out of whatever monies they might be making at their first job (but charging less than the more burdensome real rents if they had their own apartment).

You could even use the rent payment as a form of accumulation for when they opt to move out. In other words, once the boomerang kid moves out of the house, you hand them a check for the total amount of “rent” that they paid while staying at home. This then conveniently becomes a means to have the offspring build a bit of a nest egg and fosters a launching pad for living on their own.

Here’s an interesting twist to consider: What will happen to boomerang kids in an era of true self-driving cars?

My theory is that the advent of self-driving cars will enable the boomerang kids to bounce out of the home sooner than they are doing so today.

I don’t think that the phenomena of boomerang kids will be expunged, but it will be substantively impacted and in a manner that will tend to benefit the stakeholders involved.

Let’s unpack the matter.

The Levels Of Self-Driving Cars

It is important to clarify what I mean when referring to true self-driving cars.

True self-driving cars are ones that the AI drives the car entirely on its own and there isn’t any human assistance during the driving task.

These driverless cars are considered a Level 4 and Level 5, while a car that requires a human driver to co-share the driving effort is usually considered at a Level 2 or Level 3. The cars that co-share the driving task are described as being semi-autonomous, and typically contain a variety of automated add-ons that are referred to as ADAS (Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems).

There is not yet a true self-driving car at Level 5, which we don’t yet even know if this will be possible to achieve, and nor how long it will take to get there.

Meanwhile, the Level 4 efforts are gradually trying to get some traction by undergoing very narrow and selective public roadway trials, though there is controversy over whether this testing should be allowed per se (we are all life-or-death guinea pigs in an experiment taking place on our highways and byways, some point out).

Since the semi-autonomous cars require a human driver, such cars aren’t particularly important to the boomerang kids matter. There is essentially no difference between using a Level 2 or Level 3 versus a conventional car when it comes to the boomerang kids’ aspects.

It is notable to point out that in spite of those dingbats that keep posting videos of themselves falling asleep at the wheel of a Level 2 or Level 3 car, do not be misled into believing that you can take away your attention from the driving task while driving a semi-autonomous car.

You are the responsible party for the driving actions of the car, regardless of how much automation might be tossed into a Level 2 or Level 3.

Positive Impacts Of Self-Driving Cars

One of the predicted aspects of self-driving cars is that they will radically increase access to ridesharing. Presumably, self-driving cars will be almost non-stop, roving and roaming, awaiting a request to get you from point A to point B.

This could potentially make transit less arduous and more friction-free.

Suppose your boomerang kid comes home to live and the only jobs nearby are low paying. He or she would like to live at home for a brief period to save up money, but the closest jobs won’t suffice for banking away enough dough to get out on their own anytime soon.

Via the advent of true self-driving cars, the boomerang kid might be able to take a better job further away, let’s assume a higher paying position, and use the driverless car to get them to and from work.

The parent doesn’t have to drive their offspring to work. The workplace can be further away from home. The young adult can catch some rest while undertaking the commute since they don’t need to drive the car and instead the AI is doing the driving.

Win-win.

Another avenue for some of the boomerang kids as an initial job could fit into some of the new kinds of jobs that I have predicted will emerge to coincide with the advent of self-driving cars.

For example, there will be a new position of being a self-driving car chaperone or nanny, if you will. This role consists of riding in a driverless car to assist others that want to make use of a driverless car.

Currently, if you arrange for an Uber or Lyft, the odds are that the human driver might be willing to help someone get into the car or get out of the car. With self-driving cars, there is no human driver and therefore no one can offer a helping hand.

There is also going to be the issue of having children ride around in self-driving cars and doing so without any adult supervision in the driverless car. When you send your kids off to school in a self-driving car, and though you as an adult don’t need to go along, what happens if the kids get suddenly sick while inside the car or have some emergency occur?

My guess is that we’ll see essentially chaperones or nannies on wheels.

As part of the cost of using a self-driving car, you’ll be able to specify whether the driverless car should have someone inside that can provide adult supervision, presumably an appropriately vetted and responsible ride-along.

Given the anticipated volume of driverless car use, the odds are that we’ll need lots of these new workers.

For a boomerang kid, it would be an easy starter job and get them practiced in social interaction, building or enhancing their customer service skills.

This kind of position can also be expanded to include running errands for people.

In our gig economy, we’ve seen an expansion of online services that allow you to book someone to take care of your daily errands. With the click of a keyboard, you can request someone to get your clothes at the cleaners or take your dog for a walk.

Boomerang kids could become independent contractors that perform errands, doing so in conjunction with the use of self-driving cars.

Again, these aren’t necessarily aspirational roles, but at least it gets the boomerang kids into the real-world, making some money and gaining work experience.

In fact, many companies won’t hire a recent college grad until they have gotten some work experience under their belt, which is ironic since those post-college youths often can’t get anyone to hire them for their first job. It’s a frustrating Catch-22.

Via the predicted appearance of self-driving car-related jobs, the boomerang kids can start to rack-up real-world experience.

Boosting Boomerangs More So

Pundits tend to believe that self-driving cars will be owned solely by large companies that assemble large fleets of driverless cars.

According to that theory, individual ownership of cars will fall by the wayside and nobody other than big firms will own driverless cars.

I’m a bit of a contrarian in that I believe there will still be individual ownership of cars, and yes that includes true self-driving cars.

My assertion is that there will be an entire cottage industry of individual ownership of self-driving cars.

Despite the belief that driverless cars will be extremely costly, you’d be willing to get a sizable loan or fork over a chunk of your savings if you knew that the driverless car would make money for you. Today, we buy cars and don’t expect them to be moneymakers. In the future, we’ll expect and assume that’s what cars are for.

Enterprising individuals and families will buy a driverless car for their own use and make money. After using the driverless car to get to work for the day, the rest of the time it will be available on a network for use by paying ridesharing passengers. The same goes for nighttime when the owner is asleep at home.

Here’s where the boomerang kids help connect the dots.

You might decide that a good “first job” for your offspring would be to manage the activities of your driverless car.

I say this because there will be an administrative effort required to track how the self-driving car is doing in terms of making money. Someone too will need to make sure that the proper maintenance is being undertaken, and that repairs take place on a timely basis.

Each moment that the driverless car is not in a ready mode for ridesharing is lost revenue.

A boomerang kid could be tasked with doing the accounting of your small business that owns and oversees the money-making self-driving car. They would also coordinate the driverless car use and ensure that the maintenance and repairs are being done as needed.

This would be a great experience at being an entrepreneur and open their eyes to the elements that go into running a business.

Indeed, I could imagine that some exceptionally resourceful boomerang kids will perform these functions and save up to buy their own driverless car, expanding upon the family enterprise of using self-driving cars as a side income.

Conclusion

Overall, the use of self-driving cars has the potential of reducing the amount of time that a boomerang kid might end-up residing at home.

Those boomerang kids can leverage driverless cars to choose jobs that might be higher paying and further away from home, allowing them to save money faster, and therefore sooner be able to live on their own.

The responsibility involved in overseeing a family-owned driverless car could provide initial job experience and spur the boomerang kids toward entrepreneurial efforts.

Plus, once a boomerang kid moves out, they can potentially live in a safer and less expensive apartment by living say in the suburbs and commuting to work in the crowded downtown city area, using a driverless car to readily make the commute tolerable.

There’s both a push and a pull effect that self-driving cars can have on alleviating the boomerang kids’ phenomenon.

Unfortunately, we don’t yet know when self-driving cars will become widespread, and nor do we know what the cost of ridesharing with a driverless car will be. It could be that we are years away from being able to immerse driverless cars into the boomerang kid equation.

The aim to bounce out boomerang kids is partially sought to reduce the drain on parents, some of whom might allow their entire retirement savings to be consumed by allowing their offspring to remain at home. That’s not good for the parents and the inadvertent woes that they might suffer down-the-road when they are nearly penniless upon reaching retirement age.

My view is that most boomerang kids find themselves in a pickle and they are searching for a viable means to extricate themselves from it. They don’t particularly want to stay at home, and they are unsure of the drain on their parents, who might be hiding it from the offspring to bravely show their unhesitating support and love for their kids.

Self-driving cars could be an innovation that aids the boomerang kids and simultaneously aids the parents. It could be a tool that will spur a faster and better bounce, keeping the boomerang from conking anybody on the head and knocking them out of life’s pursuits.