Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

by Anne Helen Petersen

Lareau discerned a divide between parents who practiced what she called “concerted cultivation” and those, generally of lower-class status, who refused or didn’t have time to orient their lives entirely around children’s activities and future resume-building. It’s not as if these lower-class parents were “bad” parents—it’s just that the skills they cultivated in their children, including independence and imagination, are not the ones valued by the bourgeois workplace. To be valued there, you need plans, lengthy resumes, ease and confidence interacting with authority figures, and innate understandings of how the job ladder works. You need connections, and a willingness to multitask, and an eagerness to overschedule.