Do you remember being a kid but wishing you were a grownup?
We’d dig out Mom and Dad’s old clothes and parade around in our high heels and party dresses or wingtips and suitcoats. We played teachers or doctors, cowboys or movie stars — grownups.
We pretended to be adults, “smoking” our candy cigarettes and “drinking” our Grapettes in fancy glasses, thinking that made us look older.
Kids used to want to grow up and get on their own. We were excited by our first jobs and first paychecks. We all assumed we’d marry and start families and most of us did.
But I’m realizing that many of today’s kids don’t want to grow up. Even after they graduate from college, they seem to have no desire to move on, to work, to start homes and families or do what my granddaddy called “amounting to something.”
They’ve been fed the liberal lie that work and striving will cramp their style, that they are important just because they are alive, that they have a right to lie around in their pajamas focused on social media, checking out what the “influencers” are recommending that they do or wear or believe that day. And living off Mom and Dad.
Though they may be educated, they often have only a vague idea of what working entails. It’s common for this type of young person to be content with a minimum wage position in which they have little responsibility and to which they have no commitment. After all, Mom and Dad owe us a living.
How did we get to this point? I don’t know all the sources of the problem, but I see part of the cause as parents who came up through harder times now having the misdirected idea that they should protect their children from any hardship and shelter them from any form of stress.
Because so many kids have been petted and swaddled through life by adults who told them they were the greatest things since sliced bread, these kids are totally unprepared to enter the adult world to which older generations once aspired.
Thanks to schools that lowered grading standards for them and refused to fail them for substandard effort and a society that values self-esteem above all things, they can’t stand the criticism that’s often required to get better at something. They can’t deal with the challenge of high expectations.
We first began to hear of college students like these when Donald Trump was elected to his first term as president. Colleges had to set up “comfort rooms” where kids were cry and be comforted by soft music and little kitties to pet because they hadn’t gotten their way politically. All their liberal professors had told them that life would be over if Trump won, and the kids, unequipped to think for themselves, believed it.
“Snowflakes” was the term coined for these students because a snowflake melts when the least heat is applied to it.
Where are these snowflakes a few years later? I was discussing this with a friend, who sent me two articles about what’s going on with the Snowflake Generation now.
Here’s one situation researchers discovered.
A young college graduate whose parents had paid every penny of the cost of her college education so that she would not be faced with any debt, and who had never worked at a job a day in her life, took her first job. At the end of her first day of work, she came home to her parents’ house where she was living with them again, and announced that she had given her two-week notice and was quitting that job. Her reason? They expected her to work from 8:00 until 5:00 Monday through Friday with only one hour off for lunch! And they expected her to work this unreasonable schedule every week! She knew her rights and she wasn’t going to be taken advantage of!
The second article was about another young college student who had her heart set on a specific job with a specific company. She managed to get an interview with the company. But they didn’t hire her.
The young woman’s mother called the person who had interviewed her daughter and informed him that she expected the company to pay her daughter $1000 for “wasting her time,” and to compensate her for the permanent damage to her self-esteem that resulted when they offered the job to someone else. Mama promised legal action if they didn’t pay!
I read another article recently in which a business owner said he would have to close his business within 10 years. Why? Because he already couldn’t find one young worker with a good attitude
Maybe we grownups haven’t made adulthood look very attractive, with our divorces and workaholic lifestyles and stress-related diseases. Maybe changing from candy cigarettes and Grapettes to the real things to zone out of the lives we’re living has made our kids think twice about becoming us.
There are solutions to this problem, but are we adults grown up enough to apply them to our kids— and to ourselves?
