Helicopter Parenting Has Given Birth to a Generation of Entitled Victims

Or here's an alternative theory: New parenting styles have led to a generation that refuses to put up with any injustices and unfairness, no matter how small, and the confidence to stand up to the people who inflict those injustices. The older generations, who have implicitly accepted those injustices the same way our grandfathers implicitly accepted racism, can't understand why anyone else would refuse to accept it, and see all these legitimate complaints and attempts to address them, as being "entitled whining." Most likely, our grandfathers would have characterized the entire civil rights movement in an identical manner as well.

I'm not saying I believe in the above theory. But given that every "anti micro-aggressions" complaint that I've read defaults to the same extreme anecdotal evidence, and vague claims of entitlement, I've yet to see the above alternative theory being disproven in any way.

Every generation complains about how the next one is useless[1], and yet, every generation turns out to be smarter than the previous one[2], and historically, has succeeded in making the world slightly more egalitarian, fair, and less discriminatory. Chances are, 30 years from now, people on internet forums will be talking about how their own generation was perfect, how we were Neanderthals on the wrong side of history, and how their kids are ruining the world.

[1]: http://mentalfloss.com/article/52209/15-historical-complaint...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

Yeah, it's really different these days. At age 7, I had free reign of the neighborhood. Played in the woods, damming the creek and catching crayfish. Playing in the attic of an abandoned barn. Flying a kite on a November day, and most of these activities alone.

As for school and grades, we were told that if we got all As and Bs on a high school report card, we'd get to go out to dinner to a restaurant of our choice.

My mom literally told her four teenage sons: "You can do whatever you want, just don't get anyone pregnant or land in jail."

So my grades sucked and I went to a 3rd-rate college. But what I learned was that if I wanted something, whether it was new Marantz stereo or an career in engineering, I could make a plan, work through it on my own and achieve it. I don't bother waiting for someone else to fix my problems or provide me with what I want. I washed dishes in a restaurant to earn money for the stereo, and worked my way though college.

In spite of this self-reliant upbringing, I'd say I am more guilty than not of helicopter parenting my own kids. My thought process was that today's employment environment is different from the one I grew up in. Grads today face a much more global pool of competition for work, both from immigration and displacement of work. I'd watched a generation of manufacturing, call center, and engineering jobs go off shore, and read about how the families that had depended on them suffered. So we worked closely with our kids, helping them to get their assignments done and turned in on time, running forgotten assignments to school, attending every back to school night and teacher conference, checking on their progress online, all so they could get good grades and attend a respected school in a discipline that can not be off-shored. I used to tell them they should be dentists...

I'd say that the balance in parenting needs to land somewhere in between my style and my parents', and regrettably, I won't get another shot at it.

Maybe if I can live to be a bit older, I can start to remember what rugged individualist stoics we baby boomers all were.

> College students across America are holding sit-ins and hunger strikes in the name of feeling unsafe and discriminated against [...] We’re witnessing the development of a “victimhood culture”: an environment in which people are encouraged to think of themselves as weak, marginalized, and oppressed...

I don't think we can just blame parents for this. The blame falls on he whole community that serves as a powerful shaming and encouraging mechanism to certain behavior.

Curious that you don't hear many such stories from European college campuses. I attended two liberal colleges in two different countries and I can't imagine either give in to obviously unreasonable student demands. Then again, higher education in Europe is mostly free (or at least much cheaper than in the US), so maybe that plays a part.

In the local Kingdom (a stick fighting club organization layer) when having events, people call time-out and start complaining and rule-lawyering, the refs make them do jumping jacks to knock the sand out. Then back to fighting. SO, some places they're resisting the trend.

excellent article . Instead of these people being coddled by delusional affirmations, as the author suggests, we need to make them aware of their limitations, and then devise strategies for these individuals to live to their full potential,

Wow that's a really misleading stock photo.

How ironic that this appears on the huff-po.

I wonder who coddled Sen. Dianne Feinstein and her husband: https://theintercept.com/2015/09/25/dianne-feinstein-husband...