The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids

When their child challenges their authority, the fragile sense of self that they did manage to cobble together starts to come apart.

By protecting our children from adversity, have we made them deathly afraid of it? By bolstering their self-esteem with false praise and a lack of real-world consequences, have we made them less tolerant, more entitled, and ignorant of their own character defects? By giving in to their every desire, have we encouraged a new age of hedonism?

No parent should tolerate what has become a culturally normalized form of child abuse—sleep deprivation, repetitive stress injuries from early and excessive athletics, overwhelming academic stress, and a complete disregard for the known protective factors of child development.

Because even the most attuned parents see their children through biased lenses. They pass on their own definitions of success and spirituality, love and creativity, which are inevitably out of sync with their child’s unique needs.

Entitled children are the inevitable outcome of time and resources that are wildly and disproportionately assigned to the children and not the adults in the family.