I recently bought a book with the above title by Amy McCready and I am really looking forward to reading it.  It is really to do with children today, but it is something that has been going on for about a generation or so now with the result that many of the young people entering the work force and many of those graduating from University now have been brought up, but not always, differently to previous generations.  Their parents have not hesitated to try and do whatever they can for them at every single instance and are very much more entitled than previous generations.  

In other words, they think they are entitled to everything, they should not have to work for it, but if they don’t have it, it is because mom or dad has not done well enough in life and that mom and dad should give it to them anyway.  It is a recipe for disaster in the real world and it is going to be very interesting to see what happens to the me, me, me generation when they start culminating politics in the world in 20 or 30 years’ time.  You can see part of the problem at schools – every child wins an award – at my daughter’s school where she at least won an award for English, there were awards for most improved behaviour, biggest smile, most friendly person, happiest child, sweetest person, etc, etc.  I know some people are happy that their children have received that little acknowledgement, but they are forgetting that it is meaningless in a world where every single child is given an award – and even the children feel that way themselves – the intelligent ones anyway – as with my daughter, when we praised her on her award saying, “It is nothing special – they gave everyone in the class an award”.  It does not mean that a parent should not try to give their children as many advantages as they can in life, but children also need to learn that they have to do some things they don’t want to, and that they cannot have anything that they see and would like.  Parents cannot run around, all day and all night, just trying to make their child happy while giving them more and more.  

The book quotes a Dr Seltzer who says that over-entitled people miss out on some of the best that life has to offer.  Because they are not use to persevering through multiple frustrations, they will not know the pride that you get when you achieve a hard won goal.  They expect raises and other awards simply because they want them and not because they have earned them and as a result they set themselves up for frequent disappointment.  The book says, “And when all of these combine, we have created a person who will have trouble holding down a steady job, cultivating long-term relationships and completing any task worth completing.  Because over-entitled people feel as though the world owes them the best it has to offer, they will completely miss out on just that.”  Remember that the next time you see somebody over-indulging a brat, it leads to precisely those types of adults who march out of a firm in a fit when they have to face a disciplinary enquiry which they totally brought on themselves and up and go from one job to the next.  They never had adversity as a child, they never had any challenges and they are used to getting their own way without doing anything.  They cannot understand why, now that they are in the workforce and still doing nothing special, people are not showering gifts on them, promotions and raises and they will always blame the environment – the company is poorly run, the other staff members are terrible, the weather is bad, etc, etc.  I think that this is less of a problem in South Africa than it is in many other countries, but I have still seen evidence of it being a growing trend, particularly in some of the young 20 somethings that I have employed in recent years.