<p>^^ Thanks, giterdone - I was trying to find that quote earlier!</p>
<p>While I agree that each generation thinks the next generation has it easier, I do think this generation has been coddled in a way that goes beyond what has happened before.</p>
<p>I call it the “Small Family Syndrome.” While there have always been “small families” (often for health/fertility reasons) the number of small families has markedly rose in the last generation. </p>
<p>While my dad’s dad (my grandpa) may have thought my dad’s generation had is easier (cars instead of horses & carriages), since my dad came from a family of 13 BOYS (wow!), those kids weren’t coddled in any way, shape or form. It was work, work, work…no time for any ECs besides “kick the can” in the neighborhood streets when they weren’t working in their dad’s grocery store (as soon as they were able to - stocking and doing deliveries on their bikes).</p>
<p>Think about the neighborhood households where you were growing up in the 50’s and early 60’s (those of you who are younger may not relate to this). The families (not the empty nesters) typically had 4+ kids in many/most households. There were a couple of famiies with 1-2 kids, but we often knew that was “all they could have” - because of secondary fertility issues, numerous miscarriages, or some other serious reason. Those who couldn’t have any kids often adopted.</p>
<p>If you think that having the majority of families only having one or two kids hasn’t led to more coddling/spoiling/indulging then I think that’s ignoring some indulging trends.</p>
<p>In the days when nearly every home had 4-6+ kids, food was simply and cheaply prepared and you had to eat what was put on the table (or go hungry). Now, meals are often planned with what Child 1 and 2 will eat, even if that means a pricier meal, convenience items from the fridge/freezer, or running thru the Drive-Thru on the way to this or that EC. </p>
<p>With 4-6+ kids in each home, parents didn’t have the time or energy to hover over everything in their lives. The label Helicopter Parent couldn’t really exist when households contained a bunch of kids.</p>
<p>And, wow, the pricey technology that kids have today…even lower income kids. It’s not unusual to see low-income kids with cell phones (even Smart phones), laptops, Wii systems, TVs in their rooms, etc. Again, the Small Family Syndrome allows for these luxuries and indulgences. Families with 4+ kids today are the ones that often delay giving cell phones to their kids as long as possible…often well into high school years or even until they start college. </p>
<p>Even the concept of “going away to college” has changed. When families were larger, only the well-heeled could consider such a luxury. Most kids, even TIPPY TOP students, commuted to their local state schools or to privates that weren’t so pricey. The only kids I knew who “went away to school” were the athletic scholarship kids, the children of doctors and other very highly compensated parents, and the kids (like me) who worked over the summer and during the school year to pay for my R&B. Parents weren’t co-signing or taking out big loans to send kids away to school…not when they had 4+ kids to put thru. </p>
<p>Yes, I know that the majority of students still commute to their local state school or CC, but the number of kids who now "go away’ has risen…hence the need for so many colleges to build more and more dorms. </p>
<p>My aunt and uncle had 6 kids. They were better off than most. My aunt was a RN and my uncle was an engineering Program Manager, so their combined income was twice or more what many families were living on. They did send 5 of their kids away to school, but ONLY after the kids went their first two years to a CC (one opted to complete all 4 years at the local CSU). And, the 5 kids were only allowed to transfer to an “away” CSU or UC…not a pricier private. The thought of sending all their kids away to school for all four years was just not a consideration.</p>
<p>Back then (70s/early 80s), sending your child “away” to a UC or CSU cost a family about an extra $150 a month. Doesn’t sound like much, but for most families with 4+ kids, that just wasn’t doable. </p>
<p>I do think that the fact that most families are smaller has led to more coddling.</p>
<p>Gee, how typical of the CC Parents Forum.</p>
<p>People debunking a book they haven’t even read.</p>
<p>Some things never change.</p>
<p>On the other hand. . .</p>
<p>[How</a> those spoiled millennials will make the workplace better for everyone - The Washington Post](<a href=“http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-those-spoiled-millennials-will-make-the-workplace-better-for-everyone/2012/08/16/814af692-d5d8-11e1-a0cc-8954acd5f90c_story.html]How”>http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-those-spoiled-millennials-will-make-the-workplace-better-for-everyone/2012/08/16/814af692-d5d8-11e1-a0cc-8954acd5f90c_story.html)</p>
<p>I don’t really think people are debunking the book. Just giving our opinions about the article and matter. Did you really expect us all to go and read the book before posting here?</p>
<p>Advances in technology make every generation have “neccessities”, that the previous generation look at as luxuries. The whole goal of technology is to make things “easier” and minimize energy spent, while increasing enjoyment. previous generations are always going to look at this as being “soft”.</p>
<p>If there is a problem, it’s less the kids than parents. Speaking with administrators at our high school and at more than university, I’ve heard a number of times that parents more often now try to involve themselves in their kids’ relationships with the schools.</p>
<p>Thing is, some of that is good. There is, for example, a non-profit called The Right Question Project which teaches parents in poor school districts how to work with teachers and administrators. These parents may be under-educated themselves and intimidated by the schools. They tend to take what is said or given to them. And often when they do react, they don’t know how so they act out in anger. </p>
<p>The specific complaints I hear are about privileges for kids. Special treatment. It’s sad that so many kids need parents involved but they’re nowhere to be found and just annoying that some want the schools to treat their kids with favors. </p>
<p>As to the absence of parents, I have tutored at a charter school which works with kids coming out of 8th grade. They prepare them for entry into high school, meaning they take poor kids from bad schools, work with them for a year and a half and mostly get them into very good schools, including top private schools. They have to turn down many kids because they don’t have a responsible adult in their lives. Think about that. Think about how hard it is to grow up and then add to that you have no responsible adult involved in your life. How are you going to make it? They can’t take those kids because the risk of failure is much higher and they have limited resources for a large need. </p>
<p>The other main disqualifier, btw, is the kid is too far behind real grade level, meaning grade level at a good school. These kids are all reasonably smart and some are very smart but they can’t take a risk with a kid too far behind. Not all kids make it through the program but all the ones that do have so far made it through high school and into college. It’s a tiny bandaid on a tremendous problem.</p>
<p>So when people say kids are “coddled” and “entitled”, I think they need to spend a day or two with kids from lower on the economic scale. They’ll find these kids are often raising themselves in an environment with no books and no appreciation for learning, often surrounded by the worst role models, violence and drug dealing. I remember back in the 70’s when I had the “opportunity” to learn about life for kids growing up in a major, poor city. The boys were confined to small neighborhoods, often a few blocks, because they might be attacked if they crossed over. They could only travel on the main roads when buses ran - sort of passage ways - which is one reason why fights sometimes seem to break out on city buses; that is where kids from different neighborhoods run into each other. Dog eat dog. And young kids quick to anger with access to guns means very bad things happen. It was a little better for girls then; they could move around more but their physical safety was at a level we’d call physical abuse in a more normal setting.</p>
<p>Well said, romani. There is nothing wrong with posting opinions about the topic (not the book), as after all, isnt that what this forum is about? That said, how typical for someone to post a purposely confrontational post topic and then berate/insult the posters responding. Yes, some things never change. Wonder if anyone posting here has yet read the book, though again, it really matters not.</p>
<p>Back to the discussion of “coddling”, one has to wonder with the smaller families, larger household incomes and more women in the workplace used to being able to take initiative and problem-solve, that parents have more time and opportunity to be more actively involved in assiting their kids. I don’t see this as “coddling”. I see this as a sociological shift.</p>
<p>My kids were over coddled and spoiled. I stand guilty as charged by such books and articles and it is a very sore subject for us. I truly worry about my children who don’t seem to be stepping up into adulthood as they should have by now.</p>
<p>Part of the issue is that some of our kids are not going to be enjoying the standard of livings that we parents set up for them. Despite all of the advantages, they are not going to be earning upper incomes and are likely going to be struggling financially after a lifetime of getting what ever they wanted and more. My kids are part of this crowd, sadly. We had the money and they were our focus. They were great children; we could not have asked for a more wonderful group of children. They are good people. But things did not work out in the transition to adulthood as we hoped. It’s difficult for DH and for me, since we came from down and out, lower income families and have surpassed our family’s standards without the advantages we gave our children. Our children, some of them anyways, will be struggling to make it. I’ll be reading the book and I have the feeling that it will hit a lot of my chords.</p>
<p>mom2collegekids, no offense, but your entire post #22 simply reflects your personal experience augmented by largely unwarranted assumptions you make about people you don’t really know. It is a very limited dataset. Virtually everything from MY personal experience directly refutes what you say.</p>
<p>I was born in 1953. It was the norm for people where I grew up to “go away” to college. Four to six kids was considered a large family. two or three kids was more typical. (I came from one of those 2-kid families that would have been larger except for a medical issue, but we were not considered unusual and I never heard people speculate about why the 2-kid families, of whom there were many, didn’t have more children.)</p>
<p>I have one child. (I would have liked to have more, but it wasn’t in the cards and we could not afford to adopt by the time that became clear.) He didn’t have a cell phone until he went away to college. He never had an Xbox, a Wii, or any other gaming system, although he did have access to the shared computer in the shared computer room. We had one small portable TV on a cart. No one, least of all him, had a tv in their bedroom.</p>
<p>When he was little, I vowed that we were not going to spend his entire childhood negotiating what he would eat. We worked on the “one bite” rule: you have to take one bite, and if you don’t like it you don’t have to eat it. Applied judiciously–you obviously don’t present highly challenging foods every day–a kid will eat almost everything. He was eating Thai food, caviar, and rillettes of duck at an age when many peers would refuse to eat pasta if it had anything on it other than butter and cheese.</p>
<p>Clearly, this was just us. But your cited examples were just people you knew in your kind of neighborhood, which was obviously very different from my town.</p>
<p>I think this is more of the “kids these days” talk that has been going on since we lived in caves. And a lot of it, like claiming that people are in closer communication, simply springs from lack of historical perspective. 200 years ago, people were in close communication with their family members for life, because they worked and lived together.</p>
<p>The fertility rate in America has been lowish for quite a long time. In the 30s, the average was right around replacement rate. 2.2 or something. It went up to 3.x in the 50s and dropped off in the 60s. Smaller families have generally been the norm for the last 100+ years.</p>
<p>I feel like the parents in my generation are much more personally invested in the success of their children than our own parents were. I can’t imagine my parents being as involved in my college application process. They went to relatively prestigious schools, but I got the feeling it never occurred to them that this was a big deal and that my stock would rise or fall based on my choice of a college. They mainly just wanted to get me out of the house! 
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<p>I’m not sure what has caused all the helicoptoring and excessive involvement- probably a combination of enhanced communication, ease of comparison, too many datapoints etc. Most of us are guilty to some extent. I’ve certainly done some rescuing of my kids over the years and I don’t particularly regret it. My experiences with struggling teens and emotional growth programs has led me to conclude that a lot of it is luck of the draw. I’ve seen families with a couple of model children and one heart-breaker. Over and over again.</p>
<p>We are like the 5 blind men examining an elephant as our individual experiences differ. </p>
<p>Statistically, I don’t know how this generation is going to fare as compared to their parents. What I have read, overall, it doesn’t look good. In my particular case, it is not looking good. I live in an affluent area, and though there a good number of successful kids, and most of them are kids who had a lot of parental resources and help to get where they are right down to the jobs they hold and the homes and cars they own, there are also many who are not close where DH and I were at that age (late 20s, early 30s) on our own. Too many of them are still being subsidized by their parents and would be outright down and out without such subsidies, many working for nothing or little. Self sufficiency is one measure I do eye carefully when I make these assessments.</p>
<p>Momofwildchild, my father worked in higher education, his title was Education Advisor, for goodness sakes, and he was barely involved in our college apps. As far as he was concerned, we all could go for free at the programs he administered, so what’s the big deal? My half brother was raised by a superintendent of schools and school principal with a PHD in children’s education, and went to State U with his GC telling him his best bet. Both of us have and are hovering around our kids regarding college, in great contrast. My half brother’s kids went/go to his same high school, well regarded with most kids going on to 4 year colleges these days, and the school was well regarded in his day too, but only about 30% went off to college. He was on of the privileged ones going away to college back then, and where he went is now a tough to get in state school that his kids may not even gain admittance due to the higher standards that many flagships now have with so many kids applying. Even with the spectre of Viet Nam, my brother’s classmates went directly to the military. Now virtually none do, other than those who take ROTC in college. Zero, he told me. It just isn’t something done in his neck of the woods anymore, gotta find a less affluent neighborhood. Absolutely zero from my kids’ schools went directly into the military too. Also none got married. And few are married even in the 30 year old range.</p>
<p>How is the coddling of a child a critcism of the child? We may not like the outcome, but the fault belongs to the coddlers not the coddlees. My generation grew up without play dates, we just went outside and hung out with the neighborhood kids. But then we lived in a small town with small houses and few fences, and Polly Klass had not been kidnapped and murdered to national media coverage yet. I rode my bike to school in kindergarten, over a mile away from home, in good weather. No way would I have let either of my kids do the same at the same age because the either the dangers are very different, or we perceive the dangers differently.</p>
<p>My son has made it very clear that he wants diminished parental contact not that he is in college. While not what I wanted to hear, I felt the same way at his age and was happy that long distance phone calls were expensive and therefore rare in college. I suspect that my daughter will operate in a similar fashion once she starts her college experience (on a red-eye flight to Tennessee tonight!). </p>
<p>While I am sure that I could have been admitted to a good school and received an excellent education, I could not have been admitted to my alma mater in these hyper competitive times. It was not that important to me to compete that hard for what appears to be nearly a lottery among excellent students. Job prospects were not great when I graduated from law school in the early 80’s, but they were way better than they are now. </p>
<p>Global warming was not on the radar when I was in my twenties. My generation, and that of my parents, have ignored that issue to the peril of this coddled generation. All in all, the coddlees look to have it much rougher than the coddlers who bequeathed massive economic and ecoological problems to them.</p>
<p>If anything, the current generation has been too passive in accepting the statuts quo. Maybe that is where the coddling has truly warped them. They are mostly interested in their own personal success and achievement, measured by their income, rather than in the abysmal deterioration of any sense of civic virtue, and any care for the state of the society at large. There has not been a sustained sense of youthful outrage at the current injusticies as there was in the 60’s.</p>
<p>I think coddling is in the eye of the beholder. My grandmother didn’t help my father with his college application, but she did iron his boxer shorts.</p>
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<p>For the current generation, war is something that one sees on television unless you volunteered for the armed forces (and note that military service in Iraq was not dangerous for all service members – the Marines and the Army had a higher risk of death, but the Navy and Air Force had a lower risk of death than men age 20-34 in the US (the rough approximation of the comparable civilian population)).</p>
<p>For past generations, war was something that you could be drafted into, and going into a combat theater was much riskier (and non-combat deaths from accidents, disease, etc. were much more common). Imagine being in the invasion force at D-Day, or on a Pacific island held by the IJA that would fight to the death. Or on a Navy ship fearing the appearance of a single Japanese plane trying to crash into your ship.</p>
<p>In the civilian world, a major crime wave occurred from the 1960s to 1990s, but has declined considerably since then. Yes, terrorist type crimes (school shootings, bombings, etc.) may be more deadly due to greater access to weapons, but it is not like terrorist groups like [this[/url</a>] (which were arguably more effective at creating fear despite relatively low levels of actual violence) did not exist in earlier times (and terrorist type crimes are still only a tiny percentage of total crime in terms of victims). Of course, car crashes were a major killer in earlier generations (consider the lack of seat belts and other crash protection in [url=<a href=“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siT-SIfOnQw]1950s”>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siT-SIfOnQw]1950s</a> and 1960s cars](<a href=“http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/af/Klan-in-gainesville.jpg]this[/url”>http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/af/Klan-in-gainesville.jpg)).</p>
![http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/af/Klan-in-gainesville.jpg]this[/url](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/af/Klan-in-gainesville.jpg%5Dthis%5B/url){kind=link}
<p>On the other hand, perhaps fear is greater than it used to be, perhaps out of proportion to actual hazards. After all, people fear things like the bogus vaccine-autism claim, perhaps because there are not “enough” real hazards (like actual vaccine-preventable diseases like measles and pertussis) to fear.</p>
<p>I should clarify my earlier post. I don’t know whether things are worse but the constant bombardment of these events is what’s different from previous generations. Whether things are worse or not I don’t know but what I do know is that the type of fear we’re raised with is far greater than previous generations. </p>
<p>Personally I think people worry too much but I can understand why they do. There is nothing but tragedy on news stations, on phones, etc. that’s what sells.</p>
<p>There have been enormous changes in the US standard of living:
<a href=“http://stats.bls.gov/opub/uscs/reflections.pdf[/url]”>http://stats.bls.gov/opub/uscs/reflections.pdf</a></p>
<p>As for the point about college, enrollment rates have increased markedly in the past 30 years:
[Enrollment</a> rates of 18- to 24-year-olds in degree-granting institutions, by type of institution and sex and race/ethnicity of student: 1967 through 2009](<a href=“Enrollment rates of 18- to 24-year-olds in degree-granting institutions, by type of institution and sex and race/ethnicity of student: 1967 through 2009”>Enrollment rates of 18- to 24-year-olds in degree-granting institutions, by type of institution and sex and race/ethnicity of student: 1967 through 2009)</p>
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<p>The book isn’t published yet, but looking at the excerpts on Amazon, there are insightful quotes and headings like “Current Undergraduates Grew up in a World Dramatically Different Than Their Parents”. :rolleyes: Yeah, like any of us parents grew up in a world just like our parents, going from the depression era families to the baby boom era? Next newsflash heading: “The Pace and Scale of Change Will Accelerate for the Nation and Its College Students”. :rolleyes: If not for the helicopter parent hook, who’d care about this book at all?</p>
<p>Looking at articles about the book, it appears that the publishers are pursuing two different audiences. There’s the lazy kids/helicopter parent angle, which draws in an outraged and/or titillated general public. And there’s the academic approach, stressing that “An understanding of todays undergraduate college students is vital to the effectiveness of our nations colleges and universities.” Maybe the book will have something interesting to say about the latter. </p>
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<p>I read this story maybe 5-8 years back in some major newspaper. D2 (somewhere between 7-11) and one of her friends were eating breakfast. I gave the girls a test, asking them what they’d do if they were in a building and got stuck in an elevator. They passed with flying colors. :)</p>