The kids are not all right.
Now more than ever, adults are looking to Google for help with their day-to-day life skills, Axios reported.
As millennials and Gen Z are moving into adulthood, they’re not asking mom or dad for help on basic skills that their elders may have learned in home economics classes or from their parents and grandparents — they’re asking Google instead.
According to data from the search engine, queries for things such as “how to use a mop,” “how to set up autopay,” “how to do oil change” and “how to clean bathroom vent” have reached an all-time high this year.
Previous studies and surveys have shown that adults often don’t know basic home maintenance or car care — perhaps because classes like home ec that train students in practical life skills, such as sewing or managing finances, are decreasing across the country.
According to the American Association of Family & Consumer Sciences, less than a third of American high-school students take a class similar to home economics.
“NYC high schools are failing their students — not academically, but practically,” New York City 10th-grader Zack Leitner wrote in The Post last month.
“Until the 1960s, NYC high schoolers learned to cook, clean and sew as part of their standard curriculum. In 2025, they’d be lucky if they knew how to do their laundry.”
But it’s not just Google that people are turning to — YouTube, TikTok and AI chatbots are getting lots of questions as well.
Pew Research data found that by 2018, more than half of YouTube users in the U.S. admitted to using the platform for “figuring out how to do things they haven’t done before,” which one Reddit user dubbed “The University of YouTube.”
Especially when it comes to how to clean a home, adults are turning to TikTok, where cleaning trends remain one of the most popular content categories on the platform.
“Sometimes we take for granted that kids know how to wash dishes,” educator Susan Turgeson told NPR in 2018. “I never thought I was going to have to explain, step by step, how to put the drain plug in, the amount of soap to be used.”
And while adults are increasingly relying on Google to figure life out, they don’t necessarily want to.
Gen Z is now flocking to “Adulting 101” crash courses in a desperate attempt to learn skills that previous generations might call common sense, such as how to do laundry, budgeting for rent or navigating a grocery store — without Google.
Canadian colleges like the University of Waterloo are stepping in to teach the basics with online toolkits like “Adulting 101,” which covers everything from healthy relationships to how not to set your kitchen on fire.
