Generation Ech

Judith Warner's NYT�blog post�on my generation's parenting strategies leave me wanting to move to the country. Like, another country.

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Thanks to our skills in helicopter parenting,the swankier summer camps now have parent liaisons, whose sole job is to answer the hectoring, pestering, worried, and kid-sick (as opposed to homesick) parents demanding the very best for their very own.

This is the mantle of entitlement that we have laid upon our kids -- my own, I sometimes fear, included. Warner's portrait of the�"affluenza" virus�embedded in such parenting is immediately recognizable to me:

"For affluenza is not just a constellation of symptoms. It is an ethic, a play-the-system, lie-and-cheat-your-way-to-what-you-want, don’t-let-the-peons-stand-in-your-way ethic of amorality. You rock, kid, parents teach. And you — alone — rule."

I remember a few years ago I stupidly volunteered to monitor a particular hallway after graduation and before a large post-graduation party at my daughters' high school, where the famous hazing incident took place (for the record, neither daughter was involved). My job was to keep people from walking down this hallway, which was being festooned with top-secret decorations for this party. Not using this hallway would mean that people would have to walk about 300 extra yards, taking the long way to the area where their cars were parked.

The adults were uniformly polite about this, but the graduates' reactions ranged from petulant to defiant to downright condescending. Two leggy 17-year olds with almost invisible eyebrows and rigorously straightened hair defied me to stop them. They didn't even slow down.

Rather than assure you (and myself) that I am not a victim of this epidemic, I'm just wondering aloud how a generation raised with unprecedented wealth and expectation is going to live through the very hard times that are coming. And I find myself reminded of the words of a late, great author on the prevailing ethic of the West, which sound virtually prophetic, delivered, in a way, from beyond the Iron Curtain,�at Harvard's commencement 30 years ago:

Western society has given itself the organization best suited to its purposes, based, I would say, on the letter of the law. The limits of human rights and righteousness are determined by a system of laws; such limits are very broad. People in the West have acquired considerable skill in using, interpreting and manipulating law, even though laws tend to be too complicated for an average person to understand without the help of an expert. Any conflict is solved according to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the supreme solution. If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required, nobody may mention that one could still not be entirely right, and urge self-restraint, a willingness to renounce such legal rights, sacrifice and selfless risk: it would sound simply absurd. One almost never sees voluntary self-restraint. Everybody operates at the extreme limit of those legal frames. An oil company is legally blameless when it purchases an invention of a new type of energy in order to prevent its use. A food product manufacturer is legally blameless when he poisons his produce to make it last longer: after all, people are free not to buy it.

I have spent all my life under a communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either. A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relations, there is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man's noblest impulses.

And it will be simply impossible to stand through the trials of this threatening century with only the support of a legalistic structure.

Which I hear to mean: we've built a great system, but we're not great enough to live up to it.

All three children will be home this weekend: Gabe from being a camper, Middle Daughter from being a counselor, Oldest Daughter from a high-flying consulting internship. Gabe's bar mitzvah is in about 6 weeks. At that point, as far as Jewish law is concerned, all three children will be responsible for their own actions.

And I'll be left to wonder whether we really made sure they understand what that means.

--T.A.

Comments

[Danny]

Don't leave the country just yet--I don't think those insane camps are all that prevalent. Not that the camp Gabe is at with my nephew isn't full of affluent kids, but they clearly aren't catering to that horrific rich-kid ethos. But I DO worry about those entitlement issues and I'm working hard to ensure that my daughter doesn't expect the world to grind to a halt whenever she snaps her fingers. From what I've seen of your kids, you don't have anything to worry about!

[david]

Danny: I guess if other people think your kids are OK, that's about the best you can hope for.

Which means Leah and Spencer are AOK.