The Generational Problem
Turning 18 used to be the mark of children entering into adulthood. In the past, we watched brave young men enlist in the military, young men and woman graduate high school and register for college, and yet some continued and learned about a technical craft in which they attended trade school or began their apprenticeship. However, like all things, times change, and we now face a new generation – a great majority who believe that being an adult is a selective process who view this process as a cafeteria plan rather than the seven-course dinner they have been anticipating.
From the moment our children are born, the majority of parents set forth a plan with an underlying desire to instill the values and morals of the world. We strive and yearn for them to have a better, grandeur life then we could imagine or had. Perhaps some parents began their families early, some children came by surprise, some were planned – yet despite this, we all held our children on the day they were born and fantasized and promised them that they could reach their fullest potential. Our plans started small – the first words, the first steps, and even the first tooth. These milestones we established for our children extended every year as we witnessed our little creation begin to form and take on an individualized personality.
In hindsight, we always were aware of what type of child we had – after all, it was displayed in the first few years of development. Some traits displayed were everything that we could have hoped for, and others were ones that internally we worried about. Perhaps our children displayed anxiety, some displayed depression, some were the ones that would latch on to our legs and fear all the world that surrounded them. Yet, having experience in life to some extent, we knew that people were capable of change – that with the right education and instruction, we could help them grow and mature past these qualities in order to fulfill their goal of independence. True, some parents latched on to these insecurities and fostered them to manifest as a self-serving personality in which the child takes on the role of a spouse in which encourages the child to stay and never leave the parent to be alone in the world. However, that is the minority of the parenting population – one that we may discuss later in greater detail.
Still, the child grows and begins to achieve. They attend school, they engage in the world around them, they begin a formal education. We praise these achievements and encourage them to take on a broader experience than that of school. We enroll our children in extracurricular activities such as ballet, karate, sports, clubs and essentially any activity that assists our child in developing the needed skills they will need later in life. In this sense, we instruct on teamwork, character building, respect, and accountability. Unfortunately, it is in this stage that many of us fail our children. Today, we distribute trophies for participation, for having good attendance, and for simply doing what is expected in society – the reward today is nothing more than a celebration of normality, a misconstrued construct that exists to make a child feel good about absolutely nothing. Formulated by parents who witnessed their children upset that they were unable to place in a sporting event, unable to master the art of dance or gymnastics, ultimately the inability for a parent to recognize that whatever activity that our child was enrolled – they simply were not a superstar. This is the birth of entitlement and something that will continue well on through the teenage and young adult years.
Entitlement is an interesting subject. Simply, the term and the construct is interpreted as a sense of deserving something such as a tangible item or even a non-tangible such as emotional support or respect. Entitlement robs our youth and our young adults due to its ability to misguide an individual in failing to understand how dreams and diligence pay off with incredible dividends. Further, as a child progresses closer to independence, their sense of immediate gratification, the sense that they are owed respect grows exponentially year after year. Entitlement if not corrected grows with your child, not out of your child as they enter their teenage years. We see this today by the guilt placed on parents. Guilt to provide their children with the latest and greatest cell phones, laptops, gaming equipment and other allied technological resources that serve nothing to the emotional or societal growth that a child need. Parents feel inadequate if they are unable to provide for their child – after all, if “Billy” was provided the new iPhone, should our little prince or princess command the same technology, don’t we want our child to fit in, don’t we want our child to be popular and not become a subject of bullying.
Mom and Dad increase work hours and extend their debt to afford the newest gadget, to brace our children’s mouths, and meet the demands that guilt has placed on ourselves. What teenagers and children fail to understand is that each gadget, each correction, each trophy of mediocrity comes with a price. The price however is often not something that they witness or even must pay themselves – the price tag is the stress that is placed on the relationship of mom and dad. Parents are the ones who have begun to hold one another accountable for the demands of their child – through verbal arguments, distancing, and blame, the price of keeping the little prince or princess up to par in the world is being paid by the destruction of the family unit. Accountability is a lesson that is repeated time and time again – however, this education is often misdirected and fails to illustrate the true nature of the problem – the ability to decline our children’s unnecessary whims resulting in our children feeling no remorse for their actions and having never been taught the lesson of accountability.
However, why is accountability so important? In short, accountability is more than holding yourself for the issues at hand, it is more than assigning blame – it is also the act of remedying the action that the individual has created to lessen the spiritual, sociological, and physical damage that is created by your actions. Accountability when understood to the fullest creates empathy and the ability to learn the critical thought that your actions have impacted others. Rather, they are taught that desire for the tangible and the intangible is good, it is righteous, and therefore it is acceptable to demand instant gratification without understanding the implications that it now carries. Herein lies the dilemma, who provides instant gratification and satisfaction when the parents ability or desire to no longer exists?
While we mock the young, we fail to understand that they are not lazy, they do not lack emotion, they do not fail to care – rather, the young now carry a burden at the age of 18 that was created by the very people who brought them to this stage in life. We, generation X has placed the burden of learning accountability long after their neural pathways have developed. We expect them to understand concepts and implement their own responsibility, despite having never been instructed to do so. Watching this dilemma unravel, the guilt created within the parents continues after the age of majority – parents continuing to pay cell phone bills, paying for college, purchasing new cars, providing free room and board, and further conditioning our children to always expect something that they have no personal investment in – themselves. We watch as the numbers of anxiety and depression rise in the young adults of today, we lay witness to the increased use of anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medications. We comprehend that this is occurring on a massive generational scale, yet the solution at our disposal remains with the quintessential “no”. A solution that now impacts not only the young adult, but the parents as well as we fight the pain and the remorse of not being able to give our “baby” just a little break, to absorb more of their pain – pain that we experience in minimal dosage as “no” was part of our upbringing, “no” was part of the generation X youth, however was dealt in smaller bite size pieces that were manageable and understood by our former society.
Continued in part II
- Adam Scott
Original Publish: 01/2022
