Are Baby Boomers and GenXers Breeding Monsters?

Seventy-one percent of American adults think of
18 to 29 year-olds—millennials, basically—as “selfish,” and 65% of
us think of them as “entitled.” That’s according to the
latest Reason-Rupe
Poll, a quarterly survey of 1,000 representative adult
Americans.

If millennials are self-absorbed little monsters who expect the
world to come to them and for their parents to clean up their rooms
well into their twenties, we’ve got no one to blame but
ourselves—especially the moms and dads among us.

Indeed, the same poll documents the ridiculous level of
kid-coddling that has now become the new normal. More than
two-thirds of us think there ought to be a law that kids as old as
9 should supervised while playing at a public park,
which helps
explain (though not justify) the arrest of a South
Carolina mother who let her phone-enabled daughter play in a busy
park while she worked at a nearby McDonald’s. We think on average
that kids should be 10 years old before they “are allowed to play
in the front yard unsupervised.” Unless you live on a traffic
island or a war zone, that’s just nuts.

That’s from my
latest piece at Time. After noting various ways in
which kid-coddling has become the new normal, I end on this
cautionary note:

Whatever the reasons for our insistence that we
childproof the world around us, this way madness lies.
From King Lear to Mildred Pierce,
classic literature (and basic common sense) suggests that coddling
kids is no way to raise thriving, much less grateful, offspring.
Indeed, quite the opposite. And with 58%
of
millennials calling themselves “entitled”
and more than 70% saying they are “selfish,” older Americans may
soon be learning that lesson the hard way.

Whole thing here.