Since college, I’ve established a well-oiled morning routine full of hot coffee, dog walks and a glimpse at the national news.

A few days ago, I was listening to NPR’s morning edition as usual when a story came on about a group of young adults in Portland, Maine enrolling in an “adulting” class.

For those of you who don’t know, adulting is this concept us millennials have come up with to describe the every day activities of adult life.

Many young adults say they don’t know how to manage money, fold laundry or repair a leaky faucet. So, once a week or so this group gets together to learn how to take on adult responsibility.

In a way, this is hilarious. In another it’s tragic.

My first thought when hearing this story was not bewilderment at what they are doing, but bewilderment at the reason it was needed. 

The story said many of these young adults, some in their early 30s, didn’t learn many of these things in school, claiming home economics classes weren’t as emphasized in our generation.

While that may be true, I don’t think schools are entirely to blame.

I learned many of the skills I use every day from my parents, whether by watching what they did or asking incessant questions about what they were doing.

As a naturally curious an independent person I wanted to learn how to do these things for myself.

As I’ve grown older and met others of my generation, I’ve learned that isn’t the case for everyone. Because my parents always took the time to teach me these valuable skills, I’ve been able to pass those lessons on to my peers.

The millennial generation, myself included, grew up in an age of rapidly developing technology and the middle class bubble. A lot of problems got solved by other people, thus eliminating the need to learn how to solve them ourselves.

While “adulting” may be an annoying word that millennials use too often, they’re actually teaching themselves valuable life skills they didn’t learn in adolescence.