23 Feb 2023 9:33 am
You and I were raised the same way... and fortunately had the wherewithal to pass that on to our kids, and hopefully the trend continues with their kids.maineman » 23 Feb 2023, 9:50 am » wrote: ↑ 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.
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?
A good bit of that has been lost between our generation and the next unfortunately, and the snowball is rolling into the current generation.
Too many parents these days are trying to be a friend" to their young children instead of a parent... that, or they are simply absent and letting the Xbox or the smartphone (or even worse the education system) raise their kids for them.
Every parent wants their kids to have better than they did, that's only natural... but when the parents had it pretty easy to begin with, what is "better" than that? If mom and dad are constantly throwing pillows under their kids asses all the way into adulthood, then as adults, the kids have no concept of how to handle adversity in adulthood. Couple this with a society that preaches "life must be fair for all" and you end up with a generation of young adults that have a very skewed and false sense of reality, and when they fail, they can't handle it.
Then, they just give up.
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