In my own personal life, I know enough about two men to know exactly how it happened:
The first one was a firstborn son in an Asian family. The entire family doted on him and gave him everything and anything he ever asked. This instilled in him a strong sense of narcissism and selfishness. When he grew up and realized the world wouldn’t treat him this way at all, he fell back into a severe depression and has never really recovered.
In the other one’s case, there was a divorce and mom got custody. Mom was a drunk and an alcoholic. The child started drinking at around age 11. When the dad finally got custody (age 13 I think) he went overboard in giving the child everything he could ever want, and still to this day hesitates to stand up to him, because of the horrible life he had in his first few years.
Both instances were occasioned by love. Both instances severely messed up the children.
Damn good question! Hard to say, exactly. To me it seems to have happened in lockstep with the increase in the number of parents who want to be friends with their kids instead of parenting them (and the resultant decline in discipline), as in your examples above. “Discipline” means not only the parent correcting the child, but also the parent holding firm in their duties and responsibilities.
It’s been going on to some extent forever, but seems to have gotten progressively worse over the last 2 generations.
I actually worked with someone, a social worker with a master’s no less, who was like this. I recall we had to take a bus and I got out my bus card and he said something along the lines like, “Oh I left it back at the office.” I replied “OK, let’s go back and get it.” He calmly stated, “Too much trouble I’ll just ask someone for the money.” And sure enough when we got to the subway, he just asked a stranger who gave him the fare.
To him it was absolutely nothing to do this. He stated he not only does this a lot, but he always helps others who ask him.
So I am thinking that perhaps it is just a change in “style of thinking” over the years. I’m sure I do things my parents generation find rude or unacceptable are fine to me.
Possibly another factor in the “entitlement culture” is the amount of aid given to people who just won’t get a job. Not the ones that want to work and can’t for various reasons, I mean the ones that take advantage of the system.
Tonight a man came through my line with his four children, one of which was a little girl about 6 or 7 years old. He was pretty much covered with tattoos. I’d bet a good amount of my hard earned money that they were jailhouse tats. (He had “Fuck the police” on his right cheek. He also had a badly done set of “devil’s horns.”) Problems with authority? :dubious:
As he paid for the food portion of his order (with foodstamps,) the little girl is begging him for a temporary tattoo. He looked at me challengingly, and stated “She loves tattoos.” I just nodded and said, “I’ll bet,” which seemed to anger him slightly. :rolleyes:
I’m not saying I want his kids to starve, but this just pisses me off. He has purposely done something to himself that makes him unemployable. We have to support him.
As he is buying her a temporary tattoo, he asks her, “What’s the rule?” Immediately she responds, “I have to wait 'til I’m sixteen.”
elbows, I think it is a bit of entitlement. His mother is one of the ones that has told me she spoiled him as best as she could, since “he was raised without a father.” He does no chores. She does his laundry, she washes his dishes. When he comes to our house to visit, whatever he doesn’t eat of his dinner, he just leaves on the plate. He won’t even scrape it into the trash can, because that job belongs to someone else. :mad:
His senior year of high school, he was very politely dumped by his girlfriend of 6 months, because she was working a part-time job, and making plans to go to college. He was smoking weed, playing video games on his mother’s couch.
His last job, he was fired, basically for being a slacker. He made several comments afterwards to the effect that “if he couldn’t say whatever he wanted (cussing) and text his friends whenever he wanted, then he wasn’t going to have a job!!”
I’ve tried explaining to him that she can only take care of him while she’s alive and working. That by the time he’s 40+ and finds himself walking into McD’s with the explanation that his mother can’t take care of him anymore, so he’s decided to get a job… he’s not going to get the job. I’ve tried talking him into going to school, anything, learn a trade if you don’t want to go to college. Nothing.
