The slumping economy, the disappearance of whole categories of jobs and headcount reductions have made job hunting all the more difficult, with the result that many young people are simply moving back in with their parents. Without a master's degree, it can be difficult to find white-collar employment. Jobs are harder to find now that companies are demanding more highly skilled workers.

However, automation and globalization have created a far more competitive employment market, both in the US and around the world. The reasons for the younger generation's reluctance to grow up and their unwillingness to leave the parental nest vary from nation to nation.įor example, in the US in the 1970s, university students would generally enter the job market immediately after graduation.

'Full-time jobs saddle you with more responsibility,' she explains, 'which would leave me with no time to study English or foreign cultures.' And since she lives with her parents and eats the meals her mother prepares, she's never had to go hungry. She nonetheless has no interest in seeking a full-time job. To realize this goal will take a great deal of money, so Clare also works at Starbucks, bringing her total income to about NT$30,000 per month.īecause both jobs are part time, she receives neither National Health Insurance cover nor vacation time. In the end his family gave up and Mike gave himself over to a life of leisure.Ĭlare, 28, is a teaching assistant at an English-language cram school whose greatest ambitions are to study abroad before she turns 30 and eventually to live overseas. His father called on the goodwill of everyone he knew, but Mike's record of 'firing bosses' was simply too fantastic. The story replayed itself several times, with Mike never holding any job for more than six months. A mere two months later, Mike threw in the towel claiming that the workload was too heavy. Drawing on family connections, his father landed him a starting job as a dishwasher at a five-star hotel. But all of his family's doting has sapped Mike's will to stick with things when the going gets tough-when he runs into trouble, he quits.Īfter finishing his military service, Mike expressed interest in working in the hospitality industry. He is also the much-beloved only male in his generation of his extended family. Mike (not his real name) is a 23-year-old man with a certificate in food and beverage management from a private vocational high school in central Taiwan. Still others have nothing to say about their choice.

Others have no understanding of the seriousness of the problem. Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina begins with the familiar line: 'Happy families are all alike every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' If we were to paraphrase this notion as it applies to today's youth, we might say that young people need no reason to leave home and make their way in the world but each one that continues to shelter in the parental nest has a litany of reasons why. Is Taiwan getting ready to follow in their footsteps? Europe, Japan and the US have long been plagued by social problems. done with school but seeking neither employment nor marriage-now prevalent among young Japanese.Īround the world, downward social mobility is replacing upward, the middle class is disappearing, life expectancies are growing, societies are aging, and more and more young people are responding by rejecting the idea of growing up. The book immediately sparked debate on the NEET lifestyle-Not in Employment, Education, or Training, i.e. In 2005, Genda Yuji, an associate professor at the University of Tokyo, and Maganuma Mie, a freelance writer, published NEET, a sociological work that draws attention to the employment troubles of contemporary Japanese youth. Some 2,500 years later, not all young people agree. Some 500 years before the Common Era, Confucius said,'At 15, I set my mind on learning at 30, I stood upright.' He meant that by the age of 30, a young man should have begun to make his way in the world and achieved a measure of success.

Difference between a freeter and a neet