Unknown Speaker 0:01 Adulting is hard, and being of legal age doesn't make it easier. In this episode, Santiago raymer. And Cassandra Dubiel. Look at the ins and outs of adulthood, and what it means for different people. This is Same Difference. Unknown Speaker 0:24 At this point, you know, the idea of adulting is super terrifying. There's a lot that, you know, as a 21 year old, I have no idea what the heck I'm doing in so many different ways. I still, if something goes wrong, like the first thing that I'm going to do is usually like call my parents and be like, please help me. Unknown Speaker 0:42 Adulting when you hear that word, it only takes you back a few years. Well, most of us born after 1990 probably think back to the endless memes on Twitter. The use of the noun, adult as a verb, actually first appeared back in 2008. While becoming an adult, is typically something we tend to associate with age milestones. adulting itself is actually much harder to define. Some might say that it's been a way for young people to make light of how they're trying to navigate the additional responsibilities that come with getting older. Especially when so many of us are in such different places when it comes to living our adult lives. Unknown Speaker 1:21 I would definitely agree with you there. I know a bunch of people from high school who are already married and having kids. And I've got other friends telling me their future job plans include gambling on women's tennis to pay their rent. I mean, we're all over the place. So I think what it means to be an adult today goes away beyond just a simple definition. At the very least, I think we can all say adulting is a roller coaster. But is it because we're just missing something and the way we're navigating our adult lives? Is the concept of adulting just broken in general? Or is it because we're in the midst of an unprecedented global pandemic? And no one really knows anything for certain anymore, we decided to try and find out by talking about it. I'm Cassandra Dubiel. Unknown Speaker 2:05 And I'm Santiago Raymer. And this is adulting in 2020. Unknown Speaker 2:30 So let's tell you guys a little bit about ourselves. I'm 21 years old, and I've actually lived at home my entire life. And I've actually also had a stay at home parents since I was about three years old. So growing up my only responsibilities, were really making sure that I was getting high marks and winning every cross country or track meet I was participating in. And to this day, I've never actually used a laundry machine. I worked in oven once with a little bit of assistance. And I'm pretty well known at my part time retail job for getting out of cleaning the bathrooms by using the excuse that I've never cleaned one at home before. So yeah, you could say I'm not exactly the most independent. Unknown Speaker 3:11 Others might say that, but I definitely wouldn't. Everyone has different family dynamics and responsibilities growing up. I'm also 21 years old and I moved to Canada from Mexico with my mother when I was six years old after she married my dad who was from here. Growing up the oldest of three kids, the majority of the responsibility around the house was on my shoulders to make sure everything in between cutting the grass weekly, to the kitchen being spotless after every meal was done. Growing up the expectations were always held high for me around the house, in both sports and academics, to the point where I would even get in trouble for getting a penalty in hockey, or if I brought home a grade lower than 90%. Unknown Speaker 3:49 But that's enough about boring old us. We've got some really amazing guests joining us on today's episode that are really going to shed some light on what adulting means in today's upside down world. Unknown Speaker 4:00 First up, we get to sit down with the award winning author and parenting expert, Alison Schaffer, who shared her incredibly insightful thoughts on her definition of adulthood and what roles parents play in that process. Take a listen. Unknown Speaker 4:15 I would say the it's a critical role in. In fact, when I'm teaching parenting or working with parents in my family counseling practice, I often talk about what is the definition of parent? What is it to parent, what's the job? What's your role? What are you trying to accomplish? And a lot of that is to understand that we need to socialize our children and teach and train them so that they are able to enter the adult world in which they're expected to function. That's considered successful parents. So a child who has parents who thwart their development is robbed of the opportunity to learn how to be independent, autonomous, a decision maker to have life skills. And so what we've seen, and I'm sure you must see it there at Ryerson, I certainly see it in working with other universities, where they have students who arrive to go to school ready for this next chapter of their life and the they have a lot of academic knowledge in their head after all they had to pass to get in and accepted into programs. But a lot of universities have a hard time keeping these students because they're failing out of university because they actually don't have the life skills to be able to, you know, get up and get to class on time, or to turn off their devices and not get all hooked into it to social media gaming things because they've always had their parents in some of these roles. And they're really not psychically or skills related, or skills developed to handle life outside the family cocoon, because parents have really not given them that opportunity to develop. So I think it's a huge part of a parent's responsibility. And it's not something we're good at in this culture at this time in our history. Unknown Speaker 6:03 Jean Golden is a sociology professor at Ryerson University, and has been teaching post secondary students for the past 29 years. And like Schaffer, she says many of the students that come into the classroom are lacking when it comes to life skills. Unknown Speaker 6:18 So what I'm finding with students, and I've taught for over 40 years, and I find the ones coming through, are less mature and able to be in order to be able to make decisions for themselves. And in previous years, I asked how many people will live on their own how many people live with their family, I think it's a very 50/50 split. But those who live with their families still got away from their families, because they could come on campus. They had jobs. Now you've got, if I were able to ask that question, a few, you may still have jobs that you didn't lose, because of the close down that happened. Many students are living at home with your family. And it's difficult to get an escape from that. You have to do your classes, most of you from home. So how do you learn to become independent, when you're in a situation that financial dependency, housing dependency, inability to have access to your friendship group, independent of adult, so adulting, who defines it? Unknown Speaker 7:19 But many students see adulthood like Gabrielle de Silva, she's a 21 year old political science student at the University of Toronto, and to her being an adult is all about learning life lessons on your own. Unknown Speaker 7:31 I mean, I think there's something very important about being able to and having to kind of figure things out for yourself and kind of not relying on one person. Because if you're relying on one person, usually I would say your parents, that's a very specific kind of knowledge that they're giving you and being forced to figure things out for yourself means that you're exposing yourself to a bunch of different knowledge systems, a bunch of different kind of ways of understanding things. And I think that when you are a quote, unquote, adult, you kind of figure things out for yourself and figure out what you kind of think. Unknown Speaker 8:03 But even she realizes that a life of complete independence has its challenges. Unknown Speaker 8:08 So I don't live like with my parents during the year and last year, I got sick, and it kind of just kept getting worse. And I was like, Okay, I need to go to the hospital, and like went to the emergency room, did all of the things in there. I was there for you know, however many hours by myself. And at the end of it, I called my mom and explained what happened. And she was appalled that she hadn't been with me every step of the way. And I kind of realized, well, yeah, I guess you know, had I been at home, even if I was the same age have I been at home with her, we would have gone through that together. And I would have had her to you know, ask questions or whatever. But that was something that I just had to do by myself. And I felt very, very adulty in that moment. Unknown Speaker 8:51 de Silva isn't alone. Paige Kekkonen, a 21 year old journalism student says she believes that being an adult means trying your best to be completely self sufficient. Unknown Speaker 9:01 You have so many more responsibilities, expectations, knowing how to do certain things that maybe you weren't necessarily prepared for, like, you know, taxes, finding a big boy job, all that fun stuff. Unknown Speaker 9:16 Nowadays, especially young adults have a really hard time recognizing and acknowledging when they need to ask for help. I suffer from this just as much as anyone else. And oftentimes, we end up thinking that figuring things out on our own will give us the personal satisfaction we seek when in reality, we only end up causing more mental stress for ourselves. Schaffer reminds us how young adults and parents should come together as a team when it comes to learning the ropes of adulting. That means that no one feels like they have to go through the ups and downs of life alone. Unknown Speaker 9:48 I would say for if we think about the conversation to sit down with parents and sometimes I'll draw like a little graph that says like age along the bottom x axis and then capabilities, your skills along the y axis and I go, you know, look at here at the at the intersection of x and y, that's an infant. And maybe it's got like a few reflexes. But other than that it has no life skills, doesn't know how to walk, doesn't know how to talk, doesn't know how to tie its shoe, and then go to your to 18. And you think about all the skills and that you want your 18 year old to know before they go out into the world and live independently on their own. Although what's the list of things you want them to know how to like manage money? Do you want them to know how to do a little laundry? Do you want them to know how to cook something other than ramen noodles? Do you want them to know how to change the tire on a car, at least know the oil schedule. And then suddenly you realize there's a massive list of life's skills. You know how to cut the grass how to you know, so many things. And so what ends up happening is parents wake up at like 17, when their kids are 17 and they start touring campuses, they start thinking about this next phase of life. And they realize that they're woefully behind in these skills. And then they try to like dump all this on them in the last year, which is the year that most students are freaked out about entrances and getting into camp that they don't want to sit in, learn how to cook in the kitchen with their parent, they want to hang out with their friends. So a lot of it is about you know, trying to smooth this out and to make that trajectory from zero to 18, a little bit more of a smooth incline. And, and to find the time when you see a child has the competencies and could learn a new skill if we spent the time to train them. So we talk about TTFT take time for training. So your child probably could learn to do the laundry, which is actually a very simple task. There's a lot of dials and buttons, but the truth is he mostly use two. Who are we kidding? Yeah, you know, they could learn to use the laundry at a very early age, if you spent the afternoon showing them how to do it. And then maybe you spend a month doing it with them. And then finally, when you see that they're doing it all independently back yourself out of the equation, and you say, you know what, I watched you, I saw the you did it all you've learned everything there is to learn. And then you want to pass the responsibility over to the to the child and, and literally, I use the words, wow, you can do it. I never have to do it for you again. Because what ends up happening is parents will train their kids on a few things. But then as soon as the child doesn't do it their way or does it sloppy or not to their standards. The parents swoops in, rescues them from that responsibility and takes over again. So we have this expression that very responsible parents raise irresponsible children because they're just they can't let it go. They just may have to fire themselves. And that's very hard for parents, parents who don't like mistakes don't want their kids to fail, or who have made parenting their sole meaning and purpose in life and don't want to lose their their purpose. Who am I if I'm not parenting my kid, I don't know who I am outside that rule. Unknown Speaker 13:03 I guess I consider myself one of those students who's really, really behind the last non work related adult thing I did involved trying to reheat some pizza in the oven a couple months ago, when my dad jokingly suggested that I tried to figure it out on my own. I quickly realized I had no idea what temperature I even needed to have the oven on, let alone how long I needed to be cooking the pizza for. Well, that wasn't exactly ideal. Over the past few months, I'd say I have learned some life skills. But I'm finding it hard to really try and be independent when the pandemic has me working and learning from home nearly 24 seven, Unknown Speaker 13:42 You're definitely not alone. Now more than ever is the time to learn and develop new skills to help us through these difficult times. I know for me, I'm not sure if I would have been able to keep saying during lockdown without learning to practice meditation, yoga, and chakra healing. I know that might sound like a bunch of hippy mumbo jumbo but I swear, just taking that little time to focus on ourselves and our breathing will do wonders for our lockdown, but still growing minds. Funny enough, my mom had been pushing me to join her in starting these practices pretty much every morning I lived at home. But it took an independent five months at my new place and a pandemic of epic proportions for me to realize that my mom really was right all along. Unknown Speaker 14:29 Oh, that's really cute. Moms really do know best. Schaeffer says the best way for us to make sure we're still keeping our sense of independence during these challenging times is through communication and open dialogue between child and parent. Unknown Speaker 14:44 It's hard enough to not hyper parent over parent, get your kids business micromanage when they're away from home. When back before COVID you still saw parents calling to say did you get up? You still see parents calling the universities to say, I don't like how my son's paper was marked, I want to challenge the grade or I want to give them an extension or you know, interfering with that independence and autonomy and taking responsibility for learning. You can only imagine how much harder that is, if you're actually a parent that has now your first year student who is at home doing online learning right under your roof, because we didn't have a ritual that sort of said, you know, before you were like, my little baby, and I did all this for you, but now we're sending you off, because we're not sending you off, where's the ceremony? Where is the handing of the of the, of the stick of the responsibility of, you know, we really don't have anything to make parents realize that their roles and responsibilities have greatly changed and in a short amount of time, and this creates all kinds of tensions in the family. Many students will say, look, you wouldn't know what time I was getting up if I was in residence right now so why are you in my face, just because I'm on the second floor of the house? It is so much harder for parents, we have to work with both parties, I have to work with the parents to say they'll manage this is their time in life, let's get really clear on whose jobs and whose responsibilities and what freedoms come with being at this age. And we also have to speak with the students to say, you know, Hey, be helpful to your parents, they're really trying to show some trust and faith in you as you navigate and, you know, maybe make some mistakes and make some bad calls and a few bad decisions. But the more you can show them that you're up for the task, the better it's going to be. So it's a little bit like, I like to use the metaphor of rock climbing, where a parent is sort of belaying their child as they ascend the wall of life. If the parent doesn't let out enough rope, how can you ascend? How can you grow? How can you, you know, get to the heights of your life. But if you totally let go of the reins as a parent, and your child is not prepared, and they don't have a grip on life, they're gonna fall crashing to the ground. So it's a negotiation between I got it, I got it and Okay, okay, I'll let go. That has to be kind of brokered. So I think that those brokering those kinds of things can happen by sitting down at this time with our with parents and the students that are at home, and really getting clear about the conversation of some of those things. So you're now living in my house, you used to be my child that I cared for, but now you're a little bit more like a boarder, who's living with me. Let's Let's outline things like you know, what happens with car privileges? And who's responsible for meals? And do you need to tell me whether you're home for dinner or not, because I just need to be respectful of what I'm going to cook for dinner, whose job is it to get up in the morning or, you know, laundry, whatever it might be to sit down and really have a robust conversation about what the new arrangements might look like. And that might be in and of itself, the kind of like the ceremony, the hi, you're here under different terms and conditions. Let's talk about what that looks like together and get those expectations ironed out. You know, as they embark on the year. Unknown Speaker 18:14 Well, I can definitely say that life at my house during the pandemic hasn't been about negotiation. Back in March, my mum threw down an all out ban on the TTC, and told me that I better not go around picking up a bunch of additional hours at my job and traveling around the city. So I literally haven't been downtown to work or see my friends since March. And it feels so strange not doing something I was so used to every day. Unknown Speaker 18:39 For those of us like Paige and I weren't living at home throughout the pandemic, things are a little different. While it's hard not seeing family and close friends for so long. I feel like this pandemic has given us something we seemingly always chased. Time. We have an undetermined amount of time on our hands to really get our shit together in ways that weren't possible before. Unknown Speaker 19:03 I think it's different for everyone. I think for a lot of people, people my age, you know, like a young adult may have moved back home, you know, so I think for a lot of people, they backtracked, you know, now they have that supervision again, and now they have their mom doing their laundry. For me, that wasn't the case, thank God. So I would say one of the major differences is definitely seen online on top of like school stuff online. So I have like a planner and like a to do list that I write for myself every day. And I like to check it off to feel like I'm, you know, doing something and I have some structure with my day. But I think that's a, that's something I'm going to use and carry forward even when this pandemics over. I find it like a very helpful thing to do is like to make yourself accountable as well. Throughout this pandemic adulty now, especially because we're in something that's so global, and we're in something that's affecting not Just ask, but everyone around us adulting today is being responsible, like staying home, wearing a mask making sure that you're following, you know, social distancing, and that you're not being stupid and having parties and stuff. I think that's a huge thing, which is showing me at least a lot of people who have become mature and have started adulting versus maybe people in first year who haven't hit that yet and are still going out. One of the biggest things is seeing how people are reacting to this pandemic entirely. You know, adulting, for me right now is making sure I'm staying safe, making sure that the people around me are staying safe, and that I'm doing my part to implement that. So it's, you know, even as simple as that, like, not necessarily having a new task every day, but making sure that you're following the rules that the government has put in place, and following the precautions that health officials are urging people to do, and doing it in a way that's complicit and will hopefully make this go away faster. Unknown Speaker 20:56 Wow, do I ever agree with that? The amount of people our age, not taking things seriously, at all just blows my mind. Literally a couple days ago, I'm on Facebook, and I get a message from a guy who's one of those stereotypical Facebook friends who's like a friend of a friend of a friend. And long story short, I've literally never met him before. And to be honest, I still have no idea who he is. He asked me if I want to hang out. And I'm just like, Dude, it's a pandemic. Are you actually kidding me right now? His response is I'm going to chill out and live a little. And I'm just like, sorry, no, why would you want to hang out with someone you've literally never met before right now? Am I missing something here? Unknown Speaker 21:38 Absolutely not, that would have been a weird message to get regardless of COVID. I think every aspect of adulting in 2020 has left a lot of people around our age, scratching their heads, trying to come up with creative ways to continue going about their daily lives, while still obeying public health guidelines. It's just one of those things where no one really wants to be left behind when everyone is always telling us that these years are supposed to be some of the best of our lives. So we should be living them to the fullest. Unknown Speaker 22:09 I think one thing we've learned about adulting is that it's largely subjective. And that moment, we realize, hey, we're doing this is different for each and every one of us. Like Schaefer says, it's a process. Unknown Speaker 22:25 One of the problems in in our culture is that, you know, adolescence, but if we look back, and you know, historically Middle Ages, or whatever, you know, you would have think of Cleopatra, like she ran Egypt at 14. So we have not only extended adolescence into years where you would have been on your own with a wife and having kids and your own, you would have been completely independent from your family. So I don't necessarily mind that it's taking us longer to mature that we know the brain, again, takes doesn't really finish the rewiring process that happens during adolescence and until the early 20s. But the competencies to be able to be more to be able to manage on one's own independently. I do believe that that happens a lot earlier, when I'm working with an 18 year old, a 19 year old, those are young adults, and they really are able to be self directed, autonomous, they're still stumbling through how to how to be an adult. But I think if you're doing life properly, you should spend your whole life developing yourself. It's not like you hit 21, and then you flatline as an adult, you don't have another growth spurt. If you're really doing life, well, you're constantly improving and growing yourself right until the day you die. But I think you can certainly do it using your parents, not as somebody who controls you, but that your parents can become a sounding board, they can become Sage counsel, they can be become a wise advisor, there's someone that you go to for support and for their opinion, but you're still left to be an independent decision maker on your own. And you'll make some bad mistakes. And if you know that your parents are there and they got your back and that you can be resilient and rebound. I think that's really, that's really comforting. Unknown Speaker 24:09 If you can take anything from this, take this. Our generation needs to practice patience. Now more than ever, whether it be seeing our friends and family, our goals, the pandemic, or even that assignment that you've got due at 11:59 but still haven't started. I bet your parents have told you at some point that good things come to those who wait. And if you haven't already figured it out. It means may be right more often than you give them credit for. People lose because they want things fast. And now, when life is long and unpredictable. Our inability to understand and appreciate how long life really is, leads to impatience, leads to short term decisions, leads to unhappiness. With sin, you name it, instead of wanting things to happen now. Like for the pandemic to end or for bars to open back up. Train stead to be present and appreciate how far it come. It's all about the attitude for gratitude, my friends. Unknown Speaker 25:26 There you have it adulting 101 with Cassandra Dubiel and Santiago Raymer. And thanks to our executive producer Emily Morantz, associate producer Manuela Vega, artwork by Ben Shelley, theme music composed by John Powers. I've been your host Gracie Brison and shout out Amanda Cupido liquid laundry detergent. And remember, fitting in is overrated.