Google is now the go-to teacher for adults who need help
By Brooke Steinberg
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.
A young man adding oil to his cars engine at the end of an oil change.
3
Previous studies and surveys have shown that adults often don’t know basic home maintenance or car care.
ArenaCreative – stock.adobe.com
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.
Explore More
AI model threatened to blackmail engineer over affair when told it was being replaced: safety report
girl on computer and boy holding cash and his iPhone
Gen Z found an ingenious way to cash in on their endless doomscrolling
Amazon's Zoox robotaxi unit experiencing a software recall after a collision in San Francisco
Amazon's robotaxi unit faces second software recall in one month following SF collision
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.
3
Google queries for “how to use a mop,” “how to do oil change” and more have greatly increased.
Google Trends
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.”
Man in the kitchen wearing casual clothes and slippers, wringing the mop into the bucket with excessive force. Full body.
3
Especially when it comes to how to clean a home, adults are turning to TikTok.
Iván Moreno – stock.adobe.com
But it’s not just Google that people are turning to — YouTube, TikTok and AI chatbots are getting lots of questions as well.
See Also
gen z people cooking, on the computer and learning how to change a tire
Gen Z is signing up for ‘Adulting 101’ classes — because they can’t handle basic life skills: ‘A lot of stuff involves money’
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.
Welcome to Billionaire Club Co LLC, your gateway to a brand-new social media experience! Sign up today and dive into over 10,000 fresh daily articles and videos curated just for your enjoyment. Enjoy the ad free experience, unlimited content interactions, and get that coveted blue check verification—all for just $1 a month!
Account Frozen
Your account is frozen. You can still view content but cannot interact with it.
Please go to your settings to update your account status.
Open Profile Settings