My parents had a defined benefit (final salary) pension organized by their employer, of the kind that no longer exists. They didn't have to choose how much to save. My father knows how to fix 1980s era cars, but 2020s cars have software that makes them impossible for anyone except a dealer to fix (or even for the dealer in some cases).

The world changes so parental advice may need some adaptation, but the general idea is that they show their child when they make decisions. This may have been more about what job they took for what pension it came with and what car they bought for which labor price and now it is which car to never buy.

This kind of thread bothers me with it's hand wringing. Parents and teachers often spoke of their lives in casual conversation when I was growing up and it was pretty clear to me that, aside from it being a response to having no adult around to make a more useful conversation with for them, there was an element of educational intent.

I find experience to be a bad explanation here, because a course can absolutely teach you all these things that are discussed in the article.

Sewing? The course will explain and show you, after which you gain experience by practice. Making financial decisions? This rests a lot on knowing facts about how financials work, and a course is absolutely one correct way of learning those.

For experience, I'd rather think of things like - how do you cope with the death of a loved one? How do you decide who to be or what to do? How do you manage your emotions, streghts and weaknesses?

Some experiments are not replaceable. People need somebody to promise that "it will be ok".

It doesn't matter whether that person is right or has a clue themselves?

Unfortunately not. Perhaps because the result is too important, someone want to trust people they are familiar with only.

It's also because making some of these decisions (choosing health insurance, deciding how much to save, etc.) involve two considerations---the first being purely analytic (mundane cost vs. probability of contracting major disease vs. cost of catastrophe) and the other being necessarily extra-analytic (how risk averse the individual is).

One can objectively reason through the first set of considerations, while the second involves a subjective element and is likely heavily influenced by their upbringing and life experiences.

Nobody knows how much to save or how much to spend on insurance. It's completely reasonable to seek advice, and one's parents might be a great starting point.

Not to mention the (now experienced) graduates of really elite schools on the other side of the adversarial relationship, working for those financial institutions.

It's a matter of trust, not experience.

Your parents have had one shot at deciding how to save for retirement, at one time. They've had an extremely limited number of shots at choosing health plans. Maybe they have a couple of friends with weird, memorable stories about those things... probably memorable because they're outliers.

Their experience is approximately useless.

... whereas there's a huge amount of well-supported expert advice out there. You don't even need to take a course. Search the damned Internet.

... and don't give me any "cocky youth" bullshit. I'm old enough to be the parent of a large fraction of people on Hacker News.