Yet another article has come out on the “horribly spoiled” American kids. In my honest opinion, all of this endless drama about how irreparably damaged the young generation is has nothing to do with said generation but everything to do with the older people who resent their own adulthood and don’t want the responsibilities attendant on being parents.
The article is titled “Spoiled Rotten” and shares a bunch of boring myths about those far away places where the grass is greener, the sugar is better and the kids are of better quality. Of course, as usual, these better kids are located in two places that, for an American, signify the heights of exoticism: France and some faraway tribe in an obscure place. The children in those wonderful places hunt, fish, make food and clean the house while they are still in their nappies. In the meanwhile, those horribly spoiled American kids dare to expect to be fed instead of feeding their parents. What jerks.
So how do we transform the spoiled American kids into their better version that, according to parenting gurus, can be found in other countries? The secret to rearing these amazing, ultra responsible, super sophisticated children is to pay no attention to them. Because apparently, if you pick up a crying two-year-old and try to comfort her, you are damaging her for life. She might grow up expecting people to respect her emotions and wouldn’t that be just horrible?
You know who I find immature, though? People who choose to procreate and then look for every excuse they can find to spend as little time and energy as possible on their kids. Books and articles proliferate trying to convince parents that the children in a culture where kids get stuck in front of a TV since the day they are born get too much of their parents’ attention. All I see in these articles and books is an attempt by an overindulged and spoiled generation of parents to shoulder off all responsibility for raising their children. What can be more immature than this endless “just give me a reason not to pick up my own kid when he’s crying”?
The article shares all kinds of scary stories about kids who can’t tie their shoelaces at five and then become losers and underachievers in adulthood. As a person who didn’t know how to tie her shoelaces until the age of nine, I find such anecdotes hilarious. And the following story made me roar with laughter:
In another representative encounter, an eight-year-old girl sat down at the dining table. Finding that no silverware had been laid out for her, she demanded, “How am I supposed to eat?” Although the girl clearly knew where the silverware was kept, her father got up to get it for her.
The reason why this anecdote made me laugh is that I had the same experience with my younger sister when she was eleven. I placed a plate of food in front of her and five minutes later noticed that she wasn’t eating.
“Why aren’t you eating?” I asked.
“Fork!” she commanded without lifting her eyes from a book she was reading.
In spite of this “horrifying” occurrence, my sister left her parents’ home at 16, worked all the way through college, and now has a successful business of her own. Neither she nor I were ever taught how to clean an apartment or do the dishes, so we have found male partners who do that for us. And we have both been called spoiled by resentful older women who were raised to be domestic slaves.
The young people today experience a greater freedom from silly social conventions and limiting expectations than their parents. They are more careful about choosing a career, a life partner, a way of being that will make them happy. And this is what makes their parents resent them. How dare they enjoy themselves in bars and clubs until the age of forty instead of saddling themselves with a mortgage and an unwanted child who is resented for having toys and crying from time to time, like their parents did?
Clarissa's Blog 
A child who is resented for having toys is priceless. 🙂
Though, can’t both helicopter parents and not spending enough time parents be widespread in the same culture? I think they can be both present even in the same parent.
In addition, I remember an article about a strict Chinese-American mother, which implied that forcing one’s children to play piano, etc is THE way to raise a genius. Imo, some parents overestimate how much they can influence their children after the moment of conception put their genes.
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“Though, can’t both helicopter parents and not spending enough time parents be widespread in the same culture? I think they can be both present even in the same parent.”
Agreed. It depends on the kind of attention. There are many parents who really really want their kids to turn out a certain way and to do things the parent never got a chance to do and to be better than all the other kids… so they hover and pressure and micromanage their kids’ lives – but they don’t pay attention to who the individual child is, instead just trying to twist them into something else.
Also these days their are T.V. programs that are made to look educational so that parents can feel less guilty about plonking their kids down in front of the T.V. for hours, even though many of those programs are drivel.
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I agree completely with hkatz.
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And you are absolutely right! It’s the same parent, the one who wants to take take take from the child but is absolutely not interested in giving.
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The nature of ideological articles, like the one quoted, is that they always recommend the flip side of whatever anyone is doing, or agreeing to do, without any actual investigation — consequently, without nuance. Sure, in Africa, the children are taught to take on domestic chores from a very early age. Here’s a very short video of Dylan and Michelle. When I stayed at their home, to help their father with his self-defence work, Michelle made my bed for me every day, before I arrived home. She also collected water from another block of houses, as this house didn’t have any running water.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM-5xzUDplc
There was never any question as to whether or not she would do these chores. They were part of her identity. She simply did them. This wasn’t about preparing to be an adult, but about fulfilling one’s female role in an African family. Adulthood versus childhood is mapped out differently in African cultures.
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I think the article gives a perfect demonstration of why some kids don’t do anything around the house. It’s the same reason why some women’s husbands do no housework. The child tries, doesn’t do it perfectly the very first time, the mother happily declares that it wasn’t done perfectly, feels herself indispensable and fully in control of the domestic sphere. She NEEDS the child (and the husband) to fail in order to prove that the domestic sphere will collapse without her.
Gosh, I know this game very very well. 😦
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Yeah, I’ve seen that behavior in an elderly German woman, once. I have the opposite attitude. I can’t seem to get any housework done, especially when ideas are cluttering my head.
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I think that a discussion that compares a child with 200+ dolls VS kids in a tribe being rubbed with itch-inducing plants for ‘laziness’, is superficial and bounds on hysteria. The issue of over-indulgence and helicopter parenting are very interesting, but hardly require a dramatic analysis.
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Besides, note the petulant tone of the article. “Mommy-ie-ie, she has more dolls than I do-o-ooo!” So who’s the immature one here?
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I think I was six or seven by the time I got a handle on the whole shoe-tying thing. Hey, knots are hard. And you know what? Why are we still using 16th-century shoe styles? We have velcro sneakers and many comfortable, stylish slip-on-type shoes. Tying shoelaces should be an obscure skill that is no longer needed for everyday life, like cursive writing or knowing how to use a manual typewriter. (Note: I can do both, but I’m old.)
Re the girl who didn’t have any silverware and the horror of her father having to get up and get it for her–what kind of idiot doesn’t have the table laid out beforehand? (That’s what we called it: “laying out” the table. It was one of my chores as a child.) Also, I don’t know about other people’s households, but we kids were not allowed to jump up from the dinner table every five seconds to fetch something. Dinner was supposed to proceed in an orderly, relaxed manner, not one that was a free-for-all of running about and grabbing things people forgot.
By the way, re chores: we kids had them, and it was expected we learn to do them once and then do them right. There was no perfectionist “no, this is the way to dry plates” or whatever it was. (Except for my grandmother’s uncharacteristically neurotic fear of a glass breaking while you were drying the inside of it, which meant we put the glasses away undried on the inside. That made me crazy.)
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That’s what we called it: “laying out” the table. It was one of my chores as a child.
Correct, if it is my turn to lay out the table (as an adult or as a child) and I forget to lay out some utensil, I consider it my responsibility to get up and finish the job. When it is somebody else’s turn then they get up and bring the missing utensil(s). There is no spoiled-kid component there.
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I was one of those kids who weren’t allowed to do anything under the pretext that I would mess it up anyways and then blamed for being lazy and spoiled.
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Funny, I was encouraged to apply myself and read books, only to have my parents be surprised that I couldn’t kick a ball if my life depended on it at age 15. Heck what did they expect? Later on I became a bit of a sportsnut and gym rat, so from my appearance today you wold never guess I was once bad at physical activities.
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Cursive writing, and reading cursive writing, are not obsolete skills. The fact that they are often neglected is one of the profound failings of our education system. I lecture and write on the blackboard using cursive writing, since it takes three times longer to print and this leads to not covering the material satisfactorially. And it is impossible to give improvisational lectures without writing this way; PowerPoint and other computer assisted presentation software seem designed to:
a) Require many more hours of preparation to the point that spontaneioty is destroyed, and
b) prevent any actual thought by either the students or the professor.
I have interrupted a colloquium speaker with a question on numerous occasions. Speakers using PowerPoint seem totally unable to respond in real time; those who use a blackboard (or whiteboard) are actually engaged in what they are saying and welcome the exchange.
Improvisational lectures are the only kind worth giving, most of the time. A professor should be able, at a moment’s notice, to give an hour lecture on any subject with which she or he is familiar, without notes, to any group ranging from freshmen to research colleagues. Someone who cannot do this probably needs to be in another profession. It does require that students be able to read cursive handwriting, however.
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Just because you do it, doesn’t mean it’s not going out of fashion. According to people in their twenties that I’ve corresponded with, they never or hardly ever use cursive, finding print easier to write when they write something by hand. You (and I) may find it easier to write in cursive because we are used to writing that way. But that doesn’t change facts. Just as fewer people know how to operate a manual typewriter (I read a description of one someone was selling on Ebay or someplace that they weren’t sure if it worked because they couldn’t figure out how to “turn it on”), fewer and fewer people know how to write legibly in cursive. It will become an art form, like calligraphy and film photography.
I didn’t say anything about Powerpoint. I don’t really have an opinion about lectures that use such aids, as I don’t teach.
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It’s hilarious about “turning the typewriter on.” 🙂 🙂 I think parents would do their kids a huge favor if they buy them a typewriter a few years before they give them a computer. I had a typewriter since age 5 and it taught me to concentrate on writing without getting distracted.
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I wonder how much longer it will be possible to buy ribbons for manual typewriters. I have used them, of course, and still can if I need to; but I always had to make too many corrections. ( I just had to make three corrections in this post.)
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I think there will always be specialized shops for it. Like the shops for real ink and ink pens. I so wish I knew how to use a real inkwell and an ink pen!
Maybe I should take that up as a hobby.
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Clarissa, I buy wonderful inks for my fountain pens at levenger.com or their printed catalog. I have never bothered with dip pens since fountain pens are satisfactory. I always use one when wiritng up mathematical work, since using a computer for subscripts, superscripts, and sketches, as well as mutiple fonts takes too much time until I am preparing the final draft.
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I actually consider learning cursive as a child to be a blessing I’m glad to have had, because as an adult, I’m learning how to read and write in languages which use different alphabets from my native tongue (Cyrillic for Russian, Hiragana/Katakana/Kanji for Japanese) and I find that my ability to write in these alphabets is superior to that of my peers, precisely because I learned how to write in cursive as a wee one. We get graded on the understandability and elegance of our writing in these languages (And in Japanese, stroke order is essential for writing) and my professors have always praised my penmanship as exemplary for the class. Not every English-speaking child will go on to learn a language that doesn’t use the Latin alphabet, but why not make it that much easier for them?
As for the article: Call me spoiled all the way. At least I’m comfortable enough in my own skin to live my own life on my own terms, rather than letting others set the terms for me. When you look at it that way, I don’t think I’m the lazy one. 🙂
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“Call me spoiled all the way. At least I’m comfortable enough in my own skin to live my own life on my own terms, rather than letting others set the terms for me. ”
– I think you’d totally be called spoiled by the author of this article because your life goal is not to service the expectations of older people and you are not sacrificing your needs for theirs. I welcome such laziness in people. 🙂
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I spent quite a bit of time learning to read and write cursive Russian only to find that all the sources of writing I’ve ever encountered were in print. Now with the advent of email this equation has slanted even more in favor of print. Given the limited time in the curriculum it seems not quite optimal to spend so much time learning a different way of writing that forms an extremely small percentage of all the material once ever reads.
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“I spent quite a bit of time learning to read and write cursive Russian only to find that all the sources of writing I’ve ever encountered were in print.”
– Maybe I should start publishing posts in cursive Russian, just for you. 🙂 🙂
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Thanks, but I have since forgotten nearly everything I learned due to lack of practice. I still surprise my friends every so often by reading and interpreting some sign or simple announcement in written Russian cyrillic, which they don’t expect me to know.
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David, I have actually changed my opinion about the need to teach students to read and write cursive. I now admit that you were right and I was wrong. The reason why I reconsidered my position is the following: Last semester, I students were giving oral presentations in the Advanced Spanish class and I was writing down comments on evaluation sheet while they spoke. Then I handed the sheets to the students. I hoped it would be helpful for them to see a detailed account of what their problems were when speaking.
In the end, however, what I thought would be a helpful exercise backfired completely. The majority of students declared that they couldn’t read my handwritten notes. It was not my handwriting that was the problem, though. I saw many students simply refuse to try to read my cursive writing without even giving it a chance!! That was shocking to me. Then the students complained about this on the evaluations.
When it has come to the point where people can’t even READ handwriting, there is something seriously wrong here. So I take back what I said about the cursive before. I was completely mistaken!!
I also agree that a person who can’t offer a lecture in their discipline without any notes or computer aides is no specialist at all.
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//When it has come to the point where people can’t even READ handwriting, there is something seriously wrong here.
But, why, if you’re the last generation of profs to write in cursive? For this generation handwriting = printed, not cursive. For ancient Egyptians handwriting = hieroglyphes.
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Am I supposed to carry a computer and a printer with me as I walk around the classroom? 🙂
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I used to support teaching and learning cursive, but I changed my mind. First, I learned that contrary to what one would think writing cursive is no faster than handwritten print. Old studies were not valid since in the past pretty much everyone had more experience with cursive than print. However once we a generation of writers who had used print their entire life, print is as fast as cursive.
Indeed, from the historical record cursive came into place whenever quills became the dominant writing implement and its main advantage is that the quill is not lift from the paper.
Secondly, cursive has proven in study after study harder and slower to read, even to people very familiar with it. So essentially cursive a doubtful advantage in speed of writing with a proven disadvantage in speed of reading and legibility.
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I think that anyone that I know who prints faster than I can write cursive does not do so legibly at all. But, of course, when I print, I letter much the way I was taught in high school mechanical drawing, so that it looks as legible as this font I am typing in now. It is also much more slow.
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I think that anyone that I know who prints faster than I can write cursive does not do so legibly at all.
As I said, studies show the opposite.
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Culture club, I have spent many thousands of hours grading handwritten papers. I trust my own experience here. Students’ cursive writing is just as easy to read as their printing, maybe moreso. The fact that people in a study could not read so readily, I do not take seriously.
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David, you are saying that your own personal, annecdotal experience has more validity that several studies with proper controls?
For example, since cursive writing is now rarely taught, couldn’t it be the case that the few students who choose to use it attended better schools where more emphasis is placed in quality of handwriting?
Or that many students tried handwriting and only the ones who were good at it stuck too it, while the ones with bad handwriting went back to printing.
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Printed handwriting is much slower and more cumbersome. It is like insisting that everyone use a horse instead of a car to have to print.
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“Printed handwriting is much slower and more cumbersome.”
– That’s definitely true for me. It would take me forever to print a letter.
I miss letter writing, people. It was so great to receive envelopes with foreign stamps from all over the world.
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Well, why not write letters then? My kids and I write letters to friends and family every Tuesday while sipping tea (we call it Tea Tuesday and we even pack tea with our letters for the receiver.) I don’t ask them to write in cursive, although I do, most of our replies are in print (older relatives write in cursive.) Sometimes it is harder to read the cursive, but it looks nicer.
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Is it possible to be coddled and neglected at the same time? I think that’s what’s happening with these children this article writer is whining about.
The article writer doesn’t bother explaining the chore properly the first time, or supervising, which does take time, and if it seems annoying, just consider you are talking to someone who has never done it before, per her own admission. If taking out the garbage “means taking out the old bag, lining the can with a new one, tying the bag, and firmly shutting the outside bin,” that must be explained. And she made the mistake of not making him clean up the mistake(s). That’s self-enforcing. I thought this was an autism thing (not understanding things unless they are super concrete).
Plus, she’s all self-congratulatory that she’s making them do “chores” and then failing the first time. What does that mean that I don’t even think of either of those as “chores”? For the record when I was 13, I did not do chores. Chores take more than two minutes. I was “spoiled”. I did not 1)wash my own clothes (I wasn’t allowed to pick out my clothing either), 2)do the grocery shopping, 3)clean the bathroom, or 4)make dinner. I was expected to 1)put away the groceries, 2)go with my mother to several grocery stores, 3)clean up before the cleaning ladies came, 4)shovel the driveway and the sidewalk, 5)help her shop for clothing, presents, for various friends, family, associates, 6)sort the recycling, 7)take the garbage and recycling to the curb, 8)pull out weeds as asked, 8)shovel the driveway and sidewalk in winter.
A five year old among hunter gatherers learns how to clean fish and such because 1)she doesn’t go to school and 2)has time to watch her parents/other people do this all day and 3)if she doesn’t, there’s a good chance she’ll go hungry. A suburban middle-to-upper class five-year-old does not do that because even if the kid were so inclined, the stove and microwave are above their heads.
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The bias in the studies described in the article are horrendous. Children are more likely to act up when they know they’re being taped, and adults will be much more willing to call them out. How do we know they didn’t all put on an act for the camera? That possibility completely invalidates the entire article.
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If you want your children to be selfless and be empathetic to the plight of others then do things that foster that. We recently made and handed out 40 lunches and 60 bottles of water on a 105 degree day to homeless people downtown. My kids asked me when we are doing it again. They know how blessed they are to have a house with A/C and cold water in the fridge.
They have packed boxes of food for the hungry, held a lemonade stand to raise money for the Red cross, had a bake sale to raise money for earthquake victims and cut their hair to help with booms that soaked up oil from an oil spill. They do things like give stuffed animals to the hospital and knit hats for ICU babies and they don’t do these things because they are ‘good’ or because I forced them to – I just give them the opportunity to see how even a little act can help those who have less than us.
Right now it seems as if our entire state is on fire and we are gathering supplies for the fire victims, again they see how much we have and how some have lost everything they have and they want to do a small part in making it better.
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What if they didn’t feel like doing any of these things? What would you do?
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You just assume that they don’t or that I would force them if they said no? If they told me they did not want to make lunches for homeless people I’d just say ok, but I’d wonder why they did not feel the need to help out. My 17 y/o gives people standing on the side of the road money from his wallet, I don’t force him to do it and sometimes I think that a meal would be better than money to the person in question, but I don’t tell him how to spend his money.
Some kids are natural givers, some need to be taught that there are people who don’t have as much and they need a hand up. The fact that my kids want to do these things might have something to do with the times that we were forced to go to the food bank due to lack of money for food or the times that food and clothes appeared on our doorstep without us asking. I worked (sorry, volunteered) 8 hour days for 3 days at the food bank, I was just trying to repay with some service the good that was done to us. It’s not much, but it helped them out when they were low on volunteers.
I’m proud of the way my kids act toward others, I hope they raise a ton of money for fire relief in the coming weeks and if we find a way to help other than money we will do that too.
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“You just assume that they don’t or that I would force them if they said no? ”
– I’m not assuming anything. I’m just asking. You have four children, right? It’s kind of surprising to me that they all want to do the same thing. My sister and I always had vastly different preferences, even as little kids.
The following, for example, felt kind of strange: “We recently made and handed out 40 lunches and 60 bottles of water on a 105 degree day to homeless people downtown. My kids asked me when we are doing it again.” What are the chances that 5 different people would unanimously decide to stand in outside in 105 degree weather and not a single one of them would be reluctant? The law of probabilities seems to disagree. 🙂 🙂
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There were 4 of us, my son was out hiking. I’m not saying they didn’t complain about the heat, they were sweaty and tired, but also happy to talk to the people and everyone was appreciative of the water and sandwiches (except for 1 guy who wanted different chips, but each bag had different things in them and we couldn’t find a chip that he liked – so he ended up with no chips in his lunch, but he was happy about the sandwich!)
It started like this: Mom, when are we going to hand out lunches again downtown?
Me: When we have enough extra money to buy the supplies and get a wagon from a friend.
Then, we had the money, bought the food stuff and started to make the lunches.
Everyone wanted to make the lunches and they even fought over who would hand out the food – even though they could just take turns, the youngest was running ahead with a lunch and water for the first person she bumped into.
Right now they are bugging me for more yarn for knitting hats, of course it’s not cold yet, but by the time it gets cold they will have a pile of hats to take to the hospital. (We also gave hats to the homeless shelter, but Grace always gets a gift from volunteers when she’s in the hospital, so we often take the hats there to hand out to other sick kids.)
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As far as them wanting to do the same things, the only thing they all do (the girls) that is the same is worship dance. B plays guitar and does art and writes songs, G finds ways to raise money for whales, sings and writes stories, H plays the drums and likes pestering her sisters and J does flying and EMS stuff. That’s not all they do (and some things are the same, like reading books, they all do that) but they each have different talents that they are good at and that they like.
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What’s worship dance?
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It’s dancing to praise and worship music, there is some ballet, but it is mostly lyrical looking in style.
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It’s like you live in a different reality, Liese. 🙂 I don’t mean that in a bad way. A multitude of different realities is better than a uniform experience for everybody.
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Thank you….well, we do live in a different reality than most, the kids are homeschooled so they have plenty of time to find pursuits that delight them.
Today we had a fused glass workshop at the library, the girls did anyway. It was very cool and I’m not just saying that because I got to make a necklace too (although that was nice.) That is another thing that the younger ones do together, library classes (magic shows, acting workshops, crafting classes, science classes, etc.)
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