Shares of Harley Davidson stock (HOG) slipped substantially this year, and the price for used motorcycles has skidded a bit too. You wouldn’t know that from all the bike-bound Valued Customers who came to town last week, but the Baby Boomer market has reached its saturation point, and Millennials just aren’t interested in the whole Born to Be Wild deal—at least not yet.
It’s hard to know what Millennials are interested in. Child Development, a respected journal that has studied adolescents since 1976, finds that 2016’s teenagers have less sex, drive less, and work for pay less often than their counterparts in earlier decades. Summarily, Boomers were hot to trot while Millennials and their younger cohorts seem content to curl up with Smartphones and watch Gilmore Girl reruns.
Child Development’s conclusion is that there’s been “a broad-based cultural shift” [so that] “in terms of adult activities, today’s 18-year-olds now look like 15-year-olds once did.”
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In the 18th and 19th centuries, children worked long shifts in mines and factories, girls routinely married and bore children as young as 14, and every family member was required to earn their keep. Over time, social and economic advances made basic survival more certain. Consequently, our parents worked and worried less than our grandparents, and we’ve worked and worried less than our parents. Now, most of our kids and grandkids take survival, and even comfort, for granted.
Arrested development though, whether generational or societal, has consequences. More than a third of Arkansas’ high school graduates require remedial work when they get to college, and employers are frequently challenged to teach basic skills to new hires. Is this because our high schools are deficient? Or, is it because we’re sending functional 15-year-olds out to take on adult obligations?
We probably don’t need to worry. Baby Boomers, in our wisdom and maturity, are doing our best to set a good example. Before we know it, Millennials will start electing the same kind of people we’ve elected, and they may even develop an enthusiasm for riding around on heavily financed noise machines.
Millennials: not necessarily Born to be Mild.