Generation Boomerang

I caught the above documentary a few days back on TV - it also seems to be available online if you're interested in watching.

A few things came to mind watching it.

On the issue of parents deferring retirement, I'm not sure that that's much more than a red herring. Canada is probably in slightly better shape with it's public pension system than some other parts of the Western world, but with a combination of increased lifespan and a lower fertility rate alongside often actuarially unsound pension plans and low levels of private savings seem to make some increase in working life more or less inevitable.

There seemed to be a bit of a contrast between weak and strong families. i.e. the weak family - the single mother with kids example in the documentary - was strengthening up by using the woman's mother for childcare. Not necessarily a bad thing - I tend to think that inter-generational families are a good idea. Yet at the same time, I'm not sure about the long-term sustainability of this a generation or two in the future.

Looking at the whole other issue of not contributing to a household and of parents aiding their children so that they don't need to take any job not deeply personally satisfying, I think that they had a bit of a point. (I'm also not surprised that they were using the example of a guy who'd gone to film school and was trying to pursue that as a career).