23 Feb 2023 8:50 am
I am not sure I agree with your basic premise. I know that I certainly had to get my knees scraped and my eyes blackened as a child, Anything less than maximum effort was not tolerated. My father was not afraid to have corporal punishment as one of his go-to parenting tools. If I said I didn't LIKE broccoli, by dad would simply say, "You don't have to like it, just eat it". I was taught to be polite to all adults and to be respectful of all females, even if they kicked me in the shins. I was taught that B's were not acceptable. I used to get dropped off at the Y by my mom in the afternoon for swim practice and would walk from the Y to my dad's law office and wait for him to drive me home. There used to be a guy that had a little fold up suitcase opened on a little table on the sidewalk outside that office building and he was selling neckties. When we'd come outside, after we walked by the guy to a point where we were out of earshot, my dad would say, "If you don't finish in the top ten in your class and get into a good college, you're gonna end up selling ties on the street corner". I was "allowed" to fail, but failure was never an acceptable outcome. But above all, it was constantly drilled into my head that my parents could forgive many things, but lying was not one of them. Telling the truth was THE rule above all others.RedheadedStranger » 23 Feb 2023, 9:11 am » wrote: ↑ Stop raising self entitled brats with an over inflated sense of "self above all" would be a good start.
Kids need to understand at an early age that you lose a hell of a lot more than you win, instead of the opposite. Let the kids scrape their knees instead of throwing a pillow under their asses all the time. Life isn't "fair", and they need to know this right out of the gate.
What we are seeing today in society is a direct reflection of how we, as a society, have been raising our kids for the last couple of decades. We are effectively raising a generation of narcissists, and it shows.
This problem has been YEARS in the making, and can't be corrected overnight, if it can be corrected at all. Even if it can't be righted, saying "**** it" isn't a solution
Minus the corporal punishment and minus the mealtime trauma, I have raised my three children pretty much the same way, All three are successful. All three are good citizens, good spouses, good friends, and good employees. They all obey the law and they all have great relationships with their parents. I fully expect them all to be great parents as they move into that phase of their lives.
So I, personally, haven't seen a lot of overly entitled kids in MY life, but all of my kids are grown adults and if any of their childhood friends DID have a sense of entitlement and narcissism back then, either I didn't see it, or I have long since let it slip my mind.
The overriding question is, however.... If you ARE right, and if society has raised self-entitled, weak willed, narcissists for decades, how in the world can we ever fix it?
If we really are as bad as you say, then I wasn't far from wrong yesterday when I posted, "Après nous, le déluge", was I?