Bad Parents

Uh, pardon me, but isn’t this the exact opposite of what a parent’s role ought to be? Isn’t our job not to stoop to our children’s level, but to gradually raise them to ours? To show them what an adult looks like? Listen to me, kid, and one day you’ll be tall and able to use personal pronouns just like I do.

I’m exaggerating, but it somehow strikes me as the perfect image of modern parenthood: a generation of grown-ups bending over to accommodate our children’s every want, while simultaneously requiring nothing from them in return. On one level, we may have decided that childhood is too important to be left to children, but on another, more important level, the kids are very much in charge.

Last fall, my colleague Amy Donohue Korman wrote a piece, “The Death of the Chore,” that chronicled how so few of today’s kids are expected to help around the house. It was a wonderful essay, and it was only one example of our instinct to indulge kids, to make them see us not as “The Man” but “da man!” Five-­figure Sweet 16 parties and six-figure bar mitzvahs, kids with platinum cards and more borrowing power than many major American cities, frequent massages (the kind of pampering once reserved for women in Beverly Hills), boob jobs for graduation, Senior Weeks spent not in Wildwood but in the ­Caribbean or Europe … And don’t even think about ­chiding someone else’s child for being rude or irresponsible; today’s parents always side with their offspring.

The result of all this is a group of kids with a depressingly skewed sense of values and a shocking sense of entitlement. I heard a story the other day that reminded me how much times have changed. My friend Platt — yeah, the guy who edits this ­magazine — told me that when he was a student at Lower Merion High School in the early ’80s, he was suspended for [EDITOR’S NOTE: REDACTED]. His father was called in to see the principal, who told him that Platt’s punishment was three days of in-school detention. “That’s it?” Mr. Platt scoffed. “Why don’t you make him clean the cafeteria in front of the whole school?”

Contrast that with last March’s highly publicized Haddonfield party case. You may be familiar with the details: A group of high-school kids at a party ransacked a house, urinating on the furniture, ejaculating on some stuffed animals, and, my personal favorite, defecating in the family’s grand piano — a move that, I must say, is so creative and over-the-top in its depravity that the defecator is clearly headed either for prison or the corner office at Exxon­Mobil. Anyway, as vile as the kids’ behavior was, what was truly shocking was their parents’ response. Ground the kids for life? Doesn’t look that way. Instead, they lawyered up, and thus far, most of the juvenile offenders have gotten off with slaps on the wrist — probation and paying about $75 each to cover the damages. (The insurance company picked up the rest of the $18,000 in reparation.)

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