Posted on

After High School: Helping Find the Path

I wish that I had known that I had the option to go to trade school…

It was a simple comment uttered by Eldest as were driving together, her toddler daughter buckled in behind us.  It was also one of those remarks that grabs you by the scruff of your cerebellum and shakes loose an unheard huh?  She was quick to note that that she was thankful for her education – a Bachelor’s degree – but increasingly she had found that she enjoyed the process and reward of working with her hands.  I took – take – no offense despite the mental response but it’s a comment that has raised a larger question in the past several months:  How do we, as parents, help our kids ascertain their educational path after high school?

The question is especially germane today.  It’s now clear that some form of further education is necessary for most to avoid a lifetime of minimum wage jobs, but the pathway for such a crucial life decision is booby-trapped for many.  The tripwire is that higher education – Big Ed, as an acquaintance referred to it – is a business that requires a steady stream of bodies to fill the seats of the lecture halls.  The Claymore mine is the realization that there’s a clear discrepancy between the living-wage jobs available and the education required for hiring.  We’ve turned out a plethora of liberal arts degrees but there are few of those graduates with the skill set necessary to run a CNC machine.  The Punji stick is that the decline of the middle-class family has shifted the responsibility for educational financing back to the student herself; the likely accumulation of debt will eliminate the opportunity to repeat the process again.  Don’t hold your breath if you’re waiting for any college to say we’d love to have you here but we’re gonna give you a pass because honestly, it’s too much debt for you to handle.  That depressing commentary will have to come from you.

Full disclosure:  We have delivered this message to all three of our children and doing so sucks.  Hard.

I’ve thought about Eldest’s comment repeatedly in the ensuing months.  My second immediate thought was a defensive yes, you could always have opted for trade school but that’s really not the truth.  It’s not the truth because the trades weren’t a pathway made clear to her as an option through the myriad conversations across the tween and teen years.  My mantra from her middle school years starting in 2007 was we have to get you educated with as little debt as humanly possible; I was looking at the trends and numbers and recognized that student debt could be a serious impediment to a decent adulthood.  I could follow the economic news and extrapolate that back to my family at the molecular level of the economy.  I could even see that the living wage jobs were swinging back to a STEM orientation and skilled manufacturing.  But the simple reality was that the skill set that I knew, with which both my wife and I were raised, was rooted within the route of college and the liberal arts and that was the consequent focus with our kids.  My own upbringing was in a corporate mid-management level household and in my teen years, the parental conversation was to push for a degree that enabled me to make a living for myself.  It was what my parents knew.  My father was a product of the mid-20th century corporate environment and from his viewpoint, and my mother’s by extension, there were always going to be corporations that would afford a reliable income and retirement to dependable, smart employees.  My final college decision was based upon a school with both strong journalism and business programs.

Many of our life choices are informed by what we learned in our upbringing.  Working with my hands was not a significant part of my early life.  I helped my father remodel the family basement and learned to perform essential maintenance upon my car but that was stuff that my parents considered what any functioning adult should know.  There were other opportunities afforded to me by my father but I didn’t find them of interest and he didn’t push me to learn.  When I did talk to him about following him into computers during my teens, his literal response was Hell, no.  I can teach a goddamned monkey to write programming but I can’t teach one to write a proper paragraph or speak in public.  So it was the liberal arts for me, which was good because I found in college that I was, in some respects, dumber than a goddamned monkey.

So, what if I’m raising a child amidst a time of tremendous change?  What if my skill sets are not applicable to an economy in flux?  Like any other part of parenthood, there are few exact answers but I will offer the following.

First, remember that there’s a goal to parenthood:  you are raising your child to to walk out the door and support herself.  It’s the goal from the first delivery room cry and one that threads throughout her years with you.  What it means is that you don’t wait until her junior year in high school to attend a college financing night and then ask her so, whaddayawannado?  I’m not saying that it’s the credo that you tell yourself every morning when you look in the mirror but it is something that remains within the back of your mind, especially as she ages and moves further along to more diverse options within the educational system.

You must become intentional in your parenting.

Second, you have to pay greater attention to the culture and politics around you.  Foremost, understand the difference between news and news commentary and act accordingly.  It’s telling that during the past week of this Covid-19 pandemic, the most watched news programming is now ABC Evening News and not the news networks.  Pay attention to different sources of information and check for veracity.  It’s time-consuming but the good news is that we now an insane amount of information available instantaneously within our phone’s grasp.  Or you take to heart what my father said to me routinely:  pull your head out of your ass and look around.

Third, you’re going to have to be almost countercultural with your child in terms of screen and electronic media consumption.  The hours spent in front of a screen have obviously increased and there is little to indicate that the trend will reverse anytime soon and it will simply have to be part of your routine to monitor platforms and hours and listen to her kvetch around boredom (despite the simple fact that there can be value in children contending with boredom).  But it’s crucial that she learn to pay attention to the world around her and she won’t do that immersed in a screen.

Fourth, try to provide a wider variety of opportunities for her.  If you know hunting and gardening, then do those things with her.  But don’t be shy about crossing things up and taking her to an art exhibition either.  A large part of parenting is moving outside of your comfort zone.  An inveterate reader?  Great.  Read to her and then go hiking with her.  It not only provides a wider perspective of the world but also an opportunity to appreciate her budding personality.  One of the eccentricities of the past several decades is the proliferation of expensive advanced-instruction youth sport leagues.  The catastrophic loss of jobs and income from this pandemic is going to put a crimp in that business model and the opportunities will most likely devolve back to the parent coached/run Little League model.  It’s going to be incumbent upon you as a parent to make those opportunities happen, even if you have no experience with that.  Honestly, some of the best coaching that any of my kids had were parents with no previous experience.  Thank you, Rob, Jeff and Scott, wherever you are.

Fifth, figure out how you want to handle praise and criticism.  The first is critical for toddlers and small children but how are you going to begin balancing the two as she grows?  Boundless praise is meaningless and boundless criticism is fatal.  Ascertain the development norms for age levels and move from there.  Think about your style of delivering each and what you and your partner provide.  My kids learned that if they really wanted to parse performance for constructive criticism, the go-to person was my wife.  I, on the other hand, actually gave at least one of my kids a rousing comment of Don’t Suck before games.

Sixth, pay attention to the guidance and course suggestions that she will receive from school, especially as she ages.  Parents and teachers are natural allies but systems are built to serve the large majority of students and there are liable to be instances in which she is not part of that majority and will not be served by the recommendations.  Pay attention to what she brings home and listen to what she’s saying, then don’t be shy about calling to verify what you’re hearing.  Kids commonly mangle what they’ve been told but there can be circumstances in which they are absolutely correct.  This will come into play with course selections and loads when she’s older.  Fortunately, our experiences have been positive and the administration has been willing to work with us on multiple occasions.

But it wouldn’t have if we had missed the occasions.

Seventh, let her fail and hold her accountable for failure.  Be clear about your expectations and then do your best to hold her accountable.  It’s an immensely tricky and subjective topic:  Are my expectations reasonable?  Are the repercussions reasonable?  Are there legitimate mitigating circumstances?  How do you respond if you mishandle it (and believe me, I have done that)?  The corollary is that you should be willing to share some of your own screw-ups.  There is plenty of commentary about developing resiliency in kids but I think that the most critical element is learning that mistakes need not be terminal and that they can be overcome.

Finally, just because you believe that you are deficient in something doesn’t mean that she will be.  Part of the joy – the adventure – of being a parent is watching your child develop into the adult that she becomes.  If she comes to you with the wish to do something with which you are aren’t familiar, or just dislike, don’t automatically dismiss it.  If possible, find an opportunity to let her experience that thing with someone who is both capable and trustworthy.

I’m sure that you’ll come up with other points after reading this, since this is truly only a point of departure.  But remember the takeaway:  you, more than anyone else, have the critical role in helping her ascertain her future path.  The capacity to fund it, fully or even partially, is irrelevant.  What matters is that through the next eighteen years of her life, you and your partner will be the ones to raise and guide her, who know the fullest extent of her capabilities and have her true best interests at heart.  And the best interest is this:  allowing her to enter adulthood as a productive and moral adult with the capacity to move ahead in her life.

After that, the rest is on her.

Posted on

Notes on the Supply Chain

As the country leans into a lockdown and fear intensifies, there is another side-bar conversation about the strength and/or fragility of our supply chains.  Our out-sourcing of pharma and manufacturing has bitten us in profound ways but apart from ventilators and PPE, that is a step removed for many.  The immediate concern for most pertains to the food supply chain, which adds yet another layer of tension to an already fearful scenario.  Large numbers of people now enter the grocery store intent on finding what they can before they are potentially gob-smacked with someone’s aerosolized germs.  But what is notable about this grocery scenario and can we draw inferences for moving forward?

Yes, there are.

Let me start by explaining my background.  First, I have not only been the stay-at-home parent who has done the bulk of the shopping and cooking for that time, but I am also a data-driven economics geek.  My wife, BH, now takes a greater role than earlier and much on the generated lists now emanate from her facile mind.  But in the early years of toddlers and small children, this was predominantly my responsibility.

Where this merged with economics was in 2009-2010, in the aftermath of the Financial Crisis and deep recession.  At that moment, the Federal Reserve Chairman was Benjamin Bernanke and it was clear that The Powers That Be had advance notice of problems at his 2006 start; his area of academic expertise was in the errors of the 1929 Fed in responding to that year’s Depression.  Bernanke had argued that the Fed exacerbated the stock market collapse by failing to provide liquidity for the market as it  struggled.  His response, unproven and academic, was that the Fed should have provided as much liquidity as possible and the collapse in late 2008 provided the opportunity to test his theory by supplying liquidity via the first of multiple rounds of Quantitative Easing.  The debate, loud and rancorous on Economics and Finance blogs, was whether this untested theory would work or instead spark rounds of runaway inflation.  My own questions went to how this would affect my own family.  Because I was involved in the establishment of a local cost-of-living survey in my distant past and had spent time conferring with its national creators, I decided to lever this experience into the creation of a kitchen table project, the PracticalDad Price Index.

The Index kicked off in November 2010 and focused upon a market basket of 47 common grocery items.  My intent was to see what happened to the prices of this local basket as the QE program – and its successors – rolled through the economy.  It continued monthly until  personal circumstances dictated it’s ending in September 2016.  An offshoot of this focus upon pricing for almost six years was a new appreciation for the food supply chain.  It’s not typically notable unless something is wildly amiss, such as a run on toilet paper in a pandemic but over that span, there were distinct changes in the grocery supply chain as grocers and suppliers adjusted to the ongoing decline in purchasing power by a weakening American consumer.  What is notable about the supply chain?

First, the name itself is misleading.  We talk about the supply chain as though it was a singular monolithic entity with a single controller, but it isn’t.  The supply chain is a dynamic – almost organic – entity, involving the input of hundreds and thousands of retailers and suppliers in a geographically and economically diverse nation.  It evolves over time to respond to the data fed to it via market and economic research and the sheer volume of literally billions of transactions involving an untold number of products at different price points.  It is continually changing as grocers and producers meet consumer changes in spending power, habits and trends.  Some entities fail in bankruptcy or are taken over by competitors.  Others offer cheaper alternatives for sale to the consumer.  The point is that it can and does change in real time.  Personally, I don’t envision so much of a chain as the visible sinews and tendons of the economic body working both individually and collectively at the same time.  One sinew would be dairy and another produce, yet others involving meat sources and consumer non-durables such as health and beauty products.  Each sinew answers to distinct inputs and trends with the collective result of an economy reliably providing needed goods to the consumers.

Second, the supply chain is built to respond reliably within a certain timeframe BUT the pandemic has shortened that ruinously.  The inputs that drive the process are now wildly disordered and the processes are momentarily overwhelmed.  The consumer, already declining, has had a catastrophic loss of income.  Entire sectors of the economy are suddenly and completely closed.  There is an immense and out-sized need for certain items, particularly related to disinfectants and cleaners, that utterly outstrips the ability of those sinews to meet those needs.  There is concern that the food sinews will be compromised for fear of viral infection among those workers.  This doesn’t even touch upon toilet paper, the disappearance of which suggests that most Americans believe Covid-19 will completely deforest the continental United States.

It was reported this week that dairy farmers in some regions were forced to dump raw milk, an infuriating development when millions are suddenly unemployed and food banks increasingly stressed.  My original take was that it reflected a collapse in dairy pricing, as occurred during the 1929 Depression; in that period, farmers and herdsmen destroyed crops and dumped milk because it was the only way to bring supply into equilibrium with a break-even point that supported even minimal prices.  Another article explained the rationale behind the decision to dump and while immensely frustrating, it makes sense.  In the Great Depression, episodes of dumping only occurred after years of being mired amidst years of poverty that wouldn’t support even minimal prices.  This episode is founded again upon the concept of time; the inability of dairy producers to find the packaging that would allow the product to come to market to meet the suddenly soaring demand.  The supply chain is not built for and cannot adapt to a shortened time frame.

Third, the factor of time now also drives many of our shopping habits.  American workers and families have felt the pinch of demands upon time and this has carried over to the grocery shelves.  Many products are now processed in some way or pre-packaged with the intent of minimizing the time required to cook and serve.  The cost for such products however, is driven upwards because the much of the labor for preparation has been taken up into the manufacturing process.  In essence, time truly is money and it’s a trade-off that many Americans have made for decades.

Fourth, observations from recent grocery trips indicate several things.

  • The scarcest items are those that either require the least amount of household labor to prepare or require a higher amount of pre-market processing or travel in order to bring to the shelves.
  • The produce sections at the entrances of multiple groceries have been consistently well-stocked, except for lettuce (which is hilarious since my wife routinely reminds me that lettuce is mostly water and the least-vegetable vegetable on the planet).  I have been surprised to find that bananas and citrus are still plentiful although that might change as the travel network degrades.
  • Canned goods have been in persistently high demand for their long shelf life but they have remained available; this is liable to change if the virus depletes the workforce in the plants.  Likewise for canned soups, pastas and sauces, peanut butters and orange juice.  There are instances in which there are less popular types of canned vegetables or beans in greater quantity as people ignore them for the more commonly preferred types.
  • Non-dairy and specialty milks (Lactaid/soy and almond) have been depleted but there has been a reasonable supply of locally sourced standard milk (whole, 2%, non-fat).  Likewise for yogurts and cheeses.  Specialty yogurts requiring greater processing are depleted while simpler yogurts have been there in sufficient amounts.  Locally sourced and block cheeses are available while the shredded variety is more depleted.
  • The meat cases were sporadic.  I’d noted lesser amounts of ground beef and boneless/skinless chicken while there were still sufficient amounts of other meats.  This observation was confirmed on the grocer’s website with the note that price was higher and availability more limited but that this should remedy itself within the near future.  Eggs were in sufficient amounts but the price per dozen had almost doubled and the grocer noted that that should revert back to norm shortly.
  • Breads were completely out of whack as those products requiring further processing are in short supply:  Schmidt’s 647 loaves are a prime example.  Other popular standards were sold out and one local grocer was replacing them with simply store baked white bread loaves.  My experience with one of those was that it grew mold far more quickly than its commercial bakery opposite, indicating a lack of preservatives.
  • While there’s been consistently brisk movement in canned vegetables, I noted on occasions that the 19th century predecessor, glass jars of pickled vegetables, were almost untouched.

What are the takeaways moving forward?  I’m operating under the premise that this pandemic will come in waves, like it’s 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic, and is likely to last into 2021 before ending.

First, the supply chain will reassert itself and adapt to the new conditions of problematic supply/processing and fewer consumer dollars.  The gist will be to save dollars by shifting the labor cost back out of the factory and into the household.  For example, instead of spending money on highly specialized yogurts, consumers will opt instead to purchase the simpler variety and add their own fruit or flavoring.  Instead of spending on canned beans, consumers will opt to reassert their time in the kitchen by remembering to put dry beans in a pot of water the evening before cooking.  Food preparation will become a more deliberative and time intensive activity as it was for our great-grandparents and forebears.

Second, consciously or not, people will begin to expand their own food supply chains so that they aren’t reliant on a grocery store.  I expect a return to gardening with the rise of the Corona Garden, much as the Second World War saw the rise of the Victory Garden.  As stay-at-home orders have rolled out across the country, there has been a significant increase in seed sales as well as a near sell-out of chicks.  Communities are likely to follow their 1970s  predecessors and set aside lands for more community gardens for those who do not have sufficient personal space to support a garden.  Another example of this would be our joining a CSA last year for produce, cheese and eggs.

Expand your supply chain within the store itself.  Seek out alternative foods that are more plentiful than the standards and try them.  Middle is presently back in the household for the duration.  When he joined me the other week at the store, we were discussing his new appreciation for Indian and Halal and when we went to the small foreign food section, it was almost fully stocked with rices, sauces, spices and chickpeas.  And yeah, the guy did a creditable job on an Indian meal.  Think of it as an adventure if you’re an optimist and a you’ll eat it and you’ll like it experience if you’re a pessimist.

Third, take time to do more planning.  Consider your menu choices as you walk through the next one to two weeks and buy accordingly.  As a society, we will no longer have the money nor the inclination to meander through a grocery store browsing for the next great impulse buy.  I suspect that lingering will be a thing of the past in stores.

Finally, be mindful of others when you are shopping.  Our community’s church sponsored food bank noted a 360% increase in the number of families requesting food assistance over the course of a single week.  During non-growing periods, the food banks are going to be more dependent on canned and processed foods and those able to still get to the store will be in a better position to purchase fresher foods and cook for themselves.  Also consider essential workers and their families and leave the more easily prepared foods for them, because cooking isn’t likely to be on their agenda after a busy shift.