How parents fail their kids today

Parenting is failing these days. A lot of the kids you meet these days are inconsiderate, arrogant, rude, self-righteous and entitled. There's a saying "Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times." Compared to most of modern history we have been in a period of relatively good times for a very long time, so much so that now we have a lot of immature adults breeding even weaker minded and emotional children. Here are some of the ways parents today are failing their kids.

Number 1, not teaching kids how to protect themselves physically, mentally and emotionally. The greatest threat to kids these days aren't from physical threats, but from online threats. The use of social media has proliferated and children interactions with other people through them is ever increasing. The increasing use of social media has been linked to increase in mental health issues and emotional manipulation. Most parents are not talking to their kids about social media use let alone shielding or teaching their kids how to handle social media. Kids are not being taught to be aware of their mental and emotional state when using social media and how to react when what they see start affecting their mood or emotions negatively. Leading to where we are today with so many kids and young people having mental health and emotional issues.

Number 2, parents are failing to model and teach good character to their kids. Whether any parent like it or not, kids are watching and learning from parents. Most modern parent have grown up in much better living situations than past generations and are more self centered to care how they behave in front of their children versus past generations. Most kids today are growing up in even better living conditions than their parents and along with picking up poor behaviors from their parents. Kids are not being taught to take responsibility for their own choices and the situations they are placed in. Instead they learn to to be victims and deflect blame. This leads to a dangerous precedence for the future of a nation as the kids today become the leaders of tomorrow.

The third way parents are failing their kids is not sharing with them important life skills. Skills like personal finance and investing, which schools usually don't teach and most parents aren't talking to their kids about. Also how to set goals and develop systems for ones life. A lot of times kids aren't taught these skills because parents themselves never learned it. Important life skills like investing and setting goals are usually talked about in high middle income class and high net worth households as parents are more sophisticated and possess a growth mindset. However most households are middle to low income and the parents in these households are usually less sophisticated with a fixed mindset leading to a lack of conversation with their children on important life skills to learn.

Over the last several decades there's been a tremendous push of delegating responsibility for the protection of children away from parents to public authorities whether that be the schools or the government. You can point to the agenda that social justice groups push as a cause for this, but a big reason is also because a lot of parents today are handing a lot of their parenting responsibilities consciously to others outside their own family. Why is this happening? Are many of todays parents just lazy or just too busy? Possibly, but the root cause reason is because good parenting and raising children is no longer considered important in todays society. Instead in the culture today, parents are portrayed by mainstream media as incompetent and foolish, while kids are portrayed as ever wise and knowledgeable to the point where their feelings and views should be taken more seriously than adults. This is a problem and until we see a major cultural shift in what values we deem important in society we will fail our children and future generations.