Getting Real With Shadra Bruce

Our 21-year old daughter is moving to Long Island for the summer. On the one hand, we think she’s crazy to spend every drop of her money to live in the most expensive place in New York for a three months. On the other hand, we’re incredibly envious of the opportunity she has to stretch her wings and have such a wonderful adventure.

Ostensibly, her decision to move to Long Island rather than coming home for the summer is to conduct a thorough search for the right grad school, but the fact that her boyfriend lives there certainly doesn’t hurt.

She’s been searching long and hard for the perfect place to live, and finally settled on a furnished room in a house overlooking the beach. The home is in a very safe area and is owned by a wonderful woman who makes us feel that Kira will be in good hands.

They agreed on the rent and the terms and the length of the stay and the rules about company (no overnights, woot! but her best friend from high school can come visit).

And then, the woman had the audacity to ask Kira to drop a check in the mail for the deposit.

A check.

In the mail.

Kira became rather irrationally insane about the idea.

Dave and I were pretty well dumbfounded. Of course you would send a check. In the mail. The cashed check would serve as proof of payment, a form of protection for the housing.

What we discovered was that Kira does not write checks. Neither do any of her friends. They send money through Paypal. They don’t trust the post office. They don’t use it.

Mailing a check seemed like the riskiest choice in the world, to the girl who is moving to a city she’s never lived in to live with a person she’s never met.

Times are changing – electronic payments, electronic media, and electronic conversations are replacing paper money, checkbooks, and mail.

The post office is already struggling, and if this youngest generation of adults has anything to say about it, it will likely cease to exist.

Have you seen this trend with your older teens or young adult children?