"Study: Millennials don't eat cereal because 'bowls don't clean themselves'"

From the Palm Beach Post:

We may be facing the end of cereal as we know it.

A new study found that millennials are ditching the breakfast choice because of the pain in having to clean the bowl.

According to The New York Times, 40 percent of millennials recently surveyed by Mintel said cereal was an “inconvenient breakfast choice because they had to clean up after eating it.” The poll found that millennials, or those aged 18 to 33, favored smoothies, protein bars or oatmeal instead.

“They have to embrace that people love the flavor and texture of cereal and the vintage nature, but it’s not about breakfast,” Christina Tosi, the New York pastry chef who founded the Milk Bar cafes, told The New York Times. The Times added that to combat the lack of millennial cereal eaters, companies will continue to create healthier and organic options.

These facts coincide with a recent report from The Washington Post that found sales of breakfast cereals declined by 30 percent in the past 15 years in the United States. Their report added that it likely was linked to another survey….

In 2014, Braun Research found that only 28 percent of parents made their kids perform household chores compared to 82 percent of parents who said they used to perform chores as kids.

If young adults are not even up to the job of cleaning a cereal bowl, is it any wonder they want Bernie Sanders as President? Many are used to doing no work at home and now even live with their parents into their thirties who do their laundry. As Jake Novak at CNBC points out, the lack of laundry done by grown kids is indicative of the larger political and societal problems we have in this country:

And while these parents often swear up and down that their college grad children have no choice but to move back in with them because of economic realities that have nothing to do with coddling, I can usually end the conversation simply by asking: “OK, but are you still doing their laundry?” You don’t have to be the wisest parent to know that if we tell children and young adults that their failures are generally someone else’s fault, and we’re always going to be there to do their laundry, we’re going to raise a generation of failures.

While I do think some parents don’t expect these things, I think it is also the larger society that tells kids that they don’t have to do anything and if they do, it’s a failure of the parents so it is a vicious circle. Society undermines the parents and parents undermine the kids. But even so, teaching our kids to clean a cereal bowl and how to do laundry might lead the way to a better society, or at least a more productive one.