Council to offer millennials a course in 'adulting'

Millennials are getting a hard time right now. Barely a day passes without some reference to young people having a sense of entitlement and lacking in life skills.

Cooking, managing your money, and being able to change a tyre are just some of the basic skills many young folk aren’t armed with when they enter adulthood.

But one council is looking to change all that by offering millennials a crash course in adulting.

The City of Onkaparinga in Australia is hoping to educate teenagers about some of the grown-up basics they need to survive real life once they leave school.

Speaking about the move the council’s director of community relations Philomena Taylor told the ABC: “The idea came from a young person on our Onkaparinga youth committee last year, who said it [would] be great to see a programme that talked about all those things you need to learn – and indeed what many adults wish they were taught when they were younger – as you’re transitioning from being a young person into adulthood.

“The response has been overwhelming. The program attracted huge interest on social media with a post reaching thousands of people on Facebook.”

READ MORE: The age we should have our lives in order by

The course will end this month and the council will assess how it has been received before deciding whether to roll it out.

And Australia isn’t the only country recognising that young folk might need some help with being a grown up.

Last December, a Kentucky school offered an “adulting day” to teach students in their senior year some everyday life skills such as paying bills, cooking low budget meals and writing a good CV.

For one day, pupils in their final year at the school got to switch literature for life skills as they armed themselves for adulthood.

Speaking about the thinking behind the course Christy Hardin, director of the BCHS Family Resource & Youth Services Center, told Wave 3 News: “I think that the idea occurred to me, originally, I saw a Facebook post that parents passed around saying they needed a class in high school on taxes and cooking.

“Our kids can get that, but they have to choose it. And [Wednesday] was a day they could pick and choose pieces they didn’t feel like they had gotten so far.”

Many people on Facebook applauded the idea, but others wondered why these kind of everyday skills weren’t taught as standard in all high schools around the world.

If we’re honest most of us would come out in a cold sweat at the thought of changing a flat tyre, or making a roast from scratch, so being taught those sort of skills in school rather than when they happen seems to make sense.

READ MORE: The age women start turning into their mothers

The rise in adulting courses comes as recent research revealed you don’t actually become an adult until you reach your thirties.

So if you’re twenty-something who is still baffled about how to cook a roast chicken, or how many towels you should own, then go ahead and blame it on the fact that you’re not yet a fully-fledged adult.

According to the legal system in England and Wales, you’re an adult when you hit the age of 18.

However, the latest research from Cambridge University has found substantial developmental changes occur in the brain long after this time, continuing for the first “three decades” of life.