By: Julianne Micoleta
In her New Yorker piece on American children, Elizabeth Kolbert points out that “With the exception of the imperial offspring of the Ming dynasty and the dauphins of pre-Revolutionary France, contemporary American kids may represent the most indulged young people in the history of the world.”
Whether or not Kolbert is correct, it has instigated a debate on whether or not American children are spoiled rotten.
According to Kolbert, the pressure of perfect parenting is creating a generation of lazy and entitled kids.
However, according to sociology teacher Joe Bush, parenting is not the only factor in the perception of today’s youth in America.
“I think technology has a lot to do with it as well,” Bush said. “Like for example, when I was in high school it was like if you had a phone you were awesome, and now if you have phone it’s about like how many apps you have and how many texts you can send a month. It’s sort of a status symbol.”
Furthermore, Bush thinks that technology is also changing the family unit.
“I think technology makes things more challenging because every person in a family is always connected like I get 35 or 40 emails a day and if I’m checking those at 8 at night, I’m not paying attention to my son,” Bush said. “So if I want to fill his time so he doesn’t bother me, I have to give him things.”
Bush then adds that this becomes a cycle of trying to replace time with possessions.
And children, according to “Life at Home,” are disproportionate generators of possessions: “Each new child in a household leads to a 30 percent increase in a family’s inventory of possessions during the preschool years alone.”
Bush even thinks that there is a distinct marketing ploy towards younger children.
“When I was a kid and was watching cartoon there were cereal commercials,” Bush said. “Now, there’s specific things, like my son walks around saying ‘I wanna go to abcmouse.com,’ and he doesn’t even know what that means but there’s this commercial and he sees this smiling kid on a computer on abcmouse.com”
With these factors combined, kids these days seem to be growing up to be too dependent on others, especially their parents, to do everything for them.
Junior Peyton Wolff agrees.
“So many kids take what we have for granted and just think that they are meant to have them,” Wolff said. “I just think that parents spoil their kids with things that they don’t deserve.”
Sally Koslow, author of “Slouching Toward Adulthood,” wrote that she found herself in a similar situation when her son Jed moved back home after four years of college. Unemployed, Jed liked to stay out late, sleep until noon and wander around in his pajamas.
In the book, Koslow set out to try to understand why he and so many of his peers seemed stuck in what she coined as permanent “adultescence.”
To reiterate, Bush sees this type of mentality during his consumers education unit in Sociology.
“It’s amazing to see how kids don’t realize how they’re not going to make 100 grand right out of high school, and that making 20 grand and 30 grand goes pretty quickly,” Bush said. “You can’t have your expensive car and big house and all these toys to play with without that sort of money.”
However, Bush has concluded that the current state of the economy is also to blame.
For senior Nellie Sampang, the economy, along with her parents’ lessons about hard work is enough motivation for her to work for what she wants.
“I work for the things that I have because my parents make me,” Sampang said. “They teach me these values because they have to work hard every second of their lives.”