Saddle fungus.
There are more overprotective moms and dads
at a time when children are actually safer than ever
It’s natural to resent younger Americans — they’re younger!—
but we’re on the verge of
a new generation gap that may make the nasty old fights
between baby boomers
and their “Greatest Generation” parents look
like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting.
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 20s,
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 be 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.
It gets worse: We think that our precious bundles of joy
should be 12 before they can wait alone in a car for five minutes on a cool day
or walk to school without an adult,
and that they should be 13 before they can be trusted to
stay home alone.
You’d think that kids raised on Baby Einstein DVDs should be a little more advanced
than that.
Curiously, this sort of ridiculous hyperprotectiveness is
playing out against a backdrop
in which children are safer than ever. Students reporting bullying is
one-third of what it was
20 years ago, and according to a study in JAMA Pediatrics,
the past decade has seen massive declines in exposure to violence for kids. Out
of 50 trends studied, summarize the authors,
“there were 27 significant declines and no significant
increases between 2003 and 2011.
Declines were particularly large for assault victimization,
bullying, and sexual victimization.
There were also significant declines in the perpetration
of violence and property crime.”
There are surely many causes for the mainstreaming of
helicopter parenting.
Kids cost a hell of a lot to raise. The U.S. Department
of Agriculture figures a child born in 2013 will set back middle-income parents about $245,000 up to age 17 (and that’s before
college bills kick in). We’re having fewer children, so we’re putting fewer
eggs in a smaller basket, so to speak. According to the Reason-Rupe poll, only
27% of adults thought the media were overestimating threats to the day-to-day
safety of children, suggesting that 73% of us are suckers
for sensationalistic news coverage that distorts reality
(62% of us erroneously think that
today’s youth face greater dangers than previous
generations).
More kids are in institutional settings — whether
preschool or school itself — at earlier ages,
so maybe parents just assume someone will always be on
call.
But 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.
http://time.com/3154186/millennials-selfish-entitled-helicopter-parenting/
You can TCR software and engineering manuals for spontaneous recall – or pass that exam.
I can Turbo Charge Read a novel 6-7 times
faster and remember what I’ve read.
I
can TCR an
instructional/academic book around 20 times faster and remember what I’ve
read.
Perhaps
you’d like to check out my sister blogs:
All aspects of
regular, each-word reading and education.
Turbo Charged
Reading uses these skills significantly faster
www.ourinnerminds.blogspot.com
Personal business
development.
www.happyartaccidents.blogspot.com
just for fun.
To quote the
Dr Seuss himself, “The more that you read, the more things you will know.
The more
that you learn; the more places you'll go.”
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