In a piece for The New Yorker, titled “Spoiled Rotten,” Elizabeth Kolbert argues that America is breeding a whole new generation of assholes… and they’re our children. Kolbert writes about anthropological field work done by Carolina Izquierdo and Elinor Ochs

“American kids may represent the most indulged young people in the history of the world. It’s not just that they’ve been given unprecedented amounts of stuff–clothes, toys, cameras, skis, computers, televisions, cell phones, PlayStations, iPods. (The market for Burberry Baby and other forms of kiddie “couture” has reportedly been growing by ten per cent a year.) They’ve also been granted unprecedented authority.”

She continues: “In the L.A. families observed, no child routinely performed household chores without being instructed to. Often, the kids had to be begged to attempt the simplest tasks; often, they still refused. In one fairly typical encounter, a father asked his eight-year-old son five times to please go take a bath or shower. After the fifth plea went unheeded, the father picked the boy up and carried him into the bathroom. A few minutes later, the kid, still unwashed, wandered into another room to play a video game.”

This state of extreme indulgence and privilege has spawned a whole new generation of ‘parenting’ books: “Their titles tend to be either dolorous (“The Price of Privilege”) or downright hostile (“The Narcissism Epidemic,” “Mean Moms Rule,” “A Nation of Wimps”). The books are less how-to guides than how-not-to’s: how not to give in to your toddler, how not to intervene whenever your teen-ager looks bored, how not to spend two hundred thousand dollars on tuition only to find your twenty-something graduate back at home, drinking all your beer.

Read the entire article at The New Yorker.

____