Just this morning, I read an article posted on the CBC news website (For non-Canadians, that’s “Canadian Broadcasting Corporation”). It talked about how teachers are becoming more and more frustrated by the coddling that their students continue to get.
Steffie Hawrylak-Young, a teacher who has taught in Nova Scotia for almost 30 years, has noticed a shift in how her students deal with schooling, and prepare themselves for college.
“A lot of our young students are very entitled,” Hawrylak-Young told CBC News. “They have probably been used to getting a badge for every single little thing that they do, and they’re very disappointed when they’re being critiqued. In many of our businesses and industries, performance evaluation is very real, and they seem to have a hard time accepting that their performance is not there yet.”
Not being a teacher, but having seen nieces and nephews grow up, and listening to parents talk, this isn’t something new. Kids these days can be quite spoiled and entitled. Sadly, this begins at home.
Many parents around my age (30’s and 40’s) grew up in quite a different environment than kids today. I remember a lot of stuff we did as kids would never be done today because it would be considered dangerous, or wrong. Climbing around on old cars, in old barns and abandoned buildings, going by ourselves anywhere, and so on. These were things we did because our parents didn’t micro-manage our lives. Sure there may have been some actual danger or threat to our lives, doing the things we did. But we learned a lot about ourselves and our world by doing such things. Plus, we had a lot of fun doing it! It gave us a sense of self-reliance to play without constant supervision.
Today, I’ve heard stories about parents being told they are bad for letting their kids go to the park alone. That is, if they can actually go anywhere without their lives being constantly controlled and managed. If they aren’t in some group activity, then they are doing extra work from school that should have been done there if they were given the time there to do it.
When kids don’t have any of these things keeping them busy, they shut out the world to play on their pods, phones, tablets, or whatever. Parents try to control that too, but it was them that gave in to peer pressure and constant whining by the kids themselves to get them these electronic life suckers. Even if they don’t have their own phones to play with, they just pester the parents until they get to use their parent’s phone.
Why do parents seemingly cave in so easily? Peer pressure from other parents who give their kids whatever they want because when the parents were kids, they had nothing, and they want their kids to have whatever it was that they didn’t.
One of the parents I knew stood fast on their kids not having their own TVs and computers in their room. I thought this was good, despite the fact that I had the opposite up-bringing. In my case though, I was always an introvert. The kids in this case weren’t. But, in time, the parent relented and eventually, all the kids had TVs and computers in their room and you never saw them.
I don’t know if its parents today not having the stubbornness that my generation of parents did, or if its society judging them on how they raise kids today affecting what and how they do things. But what this article, and many others have observed, is that many kids today are not prepared for life beyond high school.
Luckily, I have seen one batch of nieces and nephews enter adulthood with decent heads on their shoulders. Definitely not perfect (but who is?), but they are at least somewhat ready for adult life. The other batch are still young, and hopefully will be taught what is needed. Although spoiled and hounded, if they turn out like their father, they’ll do well.
That cliché, about “children being our future” has never been more true than it is today. But if we don’t give them the correct education and skills to get by, there may be a generation of self-centered, spoiled brats who think they should be awarded for everything they do and expect everything to just be given to them.
To read the entire CBC News article for yourself, click… Nova Scotia Entitled Students
