You say that but the big coal areas of america giddily voted for the guy promising to bring coal and coal mining back

Did we really expect "big coal areas" to vote for the other candidate?

As the parent said: >even families in coal country don’t want their kids becoming miners.

But that doesn't seem to be the case, as those same families voted heavily for the politicians who claimed they could bring back coal jobs and the industry. So they obviously want someone to be digging coal, and who else but the next generation?

That's not obvious at all. People in coal-producing areas voted for Trump for the same reasons that people in wheat-producing areas did: they're rural Republicans who watch a lot of TV and the Democrat candidate never even visited their congressional district. Most of the people in those areas don't actually mine coal, and they knew they would get poorer on average under Trump just as they had gotten poorer on average under Obama, Bush, and Clinton before him. They just appreciated a moment of lip service. We can't vote in USA without pretending at some level that voting matters, so why wouldn't they also pretend that one of the candidates cared about their interests?

They should probably do what everyone else did. Move away and find something else to do. Coal mines employ a fraction of the miners they employed 100 years ago and produce more coal. Maybe have them look up what they did.

We could’ve just put federal gov satellite offices there. Train these folks for white collar jobs the federal gov will always need (IRS, SSA, VA, etc). It’s not that many people, there are more people who work at Arbys than in the coal industry.