Are Your Kids Entitled?

Are we raising a generation of entitled children? One recent blog post, “Seven Emotions That Follow a Sense of Entitlement,” talks about what emotions entitled youth feel—and how these sinister attitudes have crept into our homes and beyond.

The blog’s author, Tim Elmore, posited that anger, impatience, cynicism, resentment, criticism, ingratitude and disappointment are all byproducts of feeling entitled. Here are some questions to ask to see if you’re raising entitled children—and what to do to change the course.

• Are your children (not toddlers!) angry most of the time?
• Are your children impatient most of the time?
• Are your children cynical most of the time?
• Are your children resentful most of the time?
• Are your children cynical most of the time?
• Are your children ungrateful most of the time?
• Are your children disappointment most of the time?

Image courtesy of Clare Bloomfield/
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If you answered yes to one or more of those questions, then you have entitled children. To change that, you must help them change their attitude. Here are some tips on how to accomplish that.

Delay gratification. Whenever possible, make your child wait for whatever it is he is dying to have or do. For example, don’t give your child a snack 30 minutes before dinner just because he’s starving. Waiting a half hour to eat isn’t going to kill him, but it can strengthen his patience.

Ban complaining. No one likes to be around someone who constantly complains, yet we allow our children to whine about things all day long without correcting them. Start with something small, like no complaining at the dinner table, then add other topics. When you stop the grumbling in one zone, you’ll be surprised at how much it will decrease in other areas.

Highlight blessings. Most of us have more to be thankful for than we act like, so taking time as a family to list those blessings is a great antidote to ungratefulness. One idea is the Blessings Jar, where family members are encouraged to jot down ways for which they are grateful and drop it in the jar. Once a week or so, the family gathers to read the blessings.

Acknowledge, but don’t wallow in, disappointments. We all suffer disappointments from time to time, and so do our children. However, while we should commiserate with them, we shouldn’t allow them to obsess about a disappointment. For example, giving a hug and telling your teen that it is, indeed, a terrible thing that she didn’t get the part in the play is a good thing for a parent to do. But continually rehashing the disappointment and reliving that moment isn’t healthy, so we need to help our kids deal with the hurt and move on with their lives in a positive way.

These are just some of the ways to curb that sense of entitlement in our kids that can creep up on all of us.

Until next time,

Sarah

Where Did All the Commonsense Go?

Some days, I really wonder what happened to all the commonsense that used to permeate parenting in the United States. The things parents do and think today can be rather mind-boggling, and, I think, would sound strange to our grandparents and great-grandparents.

Let me give two examples of what I mean.

First, parents used to think that raising children is no big deal, but it is a big responsibility.

Today, you often hear mothers say that raising children is the hardest thing they’ve ever done. What that statement misses is that raising kids is not hard—we’ve made it much more difficult than it needs to be by flipping the equation. Now we think raising children is a big deal and if we don’t do it right, they won’t get into college and have a good job and a career, and other apocalyptic thinking.

Second, parents used to take child rearing seriously but not children seriously.

Children do the strangest, silliest things. Haven’t you found some of the things they do plain old hilarious? If not, then you’re not alone. Collectively, we’ve lost our sense of humor and delight in what children do and say.

Instead, we view children very seriously, and often over-react to the things that are typical weird kid things. For example, when one of my daughters was around five, I saw her licking the wall down the hallway.

Now, some parents would have played detective and asked her why she was licking the wall. Maybe she wasn’t getting enough salt? Maybe she’s upset about something? However, I knew that kids just do the darnest things and simply told her to stop licking the wall—and shared a chuckle with my husband about it later.

Getting back to commonsense on this type of thinking means you view child rearing as a big—and serious—responsibility, but that you don’t view it as particularly hard, nor do you take what your kids do too seriously. Above all, remember to enjoy your kids and all the strange, weird, head-scratching things they do.

Until next time,

Sarah