The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert writes “…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. It’s not just that they’ve
been given unprecedented amounts of stuff—clothes, toys, cameras, skis,
computers, televisions, cell phones, PlayStations, iPods. (The market for
Burberry Baby and other forms of kiddie “couture” has reportedly been growing
by ten per cent a year.) They’ve also been granted unprecedented authority.
“Parents want their kids’ approval, a reversal of the past ideal of children
striving for their parents’ approval,” Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell, both
professors of psychology, have written. In many middle-class families, children
have one, two, sometimes three adults at their beck and call. This is a social
experiment on a grand scale, and a growing number of adults fear that it isn’t
working out so well: according to one poll, commissioned by Time and CNN,
two-thirds of American parents think that their children are spoiled.
“The notion that we may be raising a generation of kids who
can’t, or at least won’t, tie their own shoes has given rise to a new genre of
parenting books. Their titles tend to be either dolorous (“The Price of
Privilege”) or downright hostile (“The Narcissism Epidemic,” “Mean Moms Rule,”
“A Nation of Wimps”). The books are less how-to guides than how-not-to’s: how
not to give in to your toddler, how not to intervene whenever your teen-ager
looks bored, how not to spend two hundred thousand dollars on tuition only to
find your twenty-something graduate back at home, drinking all your beer…..”
