Tim Johnson:

I have to issue an apology. Not on my behalf, but on behalf of my generation. You see, we are the reason the world has to deal with a couple of self righteous, selfish, and entitled generations. It is because of us that things have taken such a turn for the worse.

When I was growing up, it was the beginning of the “self esteem” movement. We were taught that our self esteem was not only important, it was paramount. How we felt about ourselves was the most important part of our lives. It didn’t matter how it affected others, as long as we felt good about ourselves, we could do anything. As you can imagine, this particular attitude is not completely healthy.

So, naturally, we took that attitude and applied it to our children. Only we took it to a laughable extreme. We not only shielded our kids from negative feelings, we took steps to insure that nothing bad ever happened to them. We created the “bubble wrapped” generation. No hardships at all. Not even losing at sports. We gave them everything they wanted. We taught them that they were special and they didn’t have to worry about feeling bad and they deserve everything they want.

As you can suspect, that is not a wholly healthy attitude either. We sent out waves of young adults into the world who had no idea how to handle negative stimuli. They never were given the opportunity to experience hardships and learn how to deal with it. So now, being thrust into a world where they aren’t the center of attention, we have at least one entire generation who lack the basic skills to handle day to day life and they respond with the only mechanism that they know…primal rage.

As Razorfist described in his great rant, “Of School Shooters and Fabergé Eggs: A Rant” we created an entire generation (I think two, but that’s semantics) of Fabergé Eggs…ornate on the outside, perfectly hollow on the inside. The slightest bump or shake and the entire egg collapses in on itself…often with violent results.

We caused this. We caused the screaming. We caused the screeching. We caused the entitlement. We caused the shootings. We caused all of it. We created the most narcissistic, self obsessive, entitled generation the country has ever seen. We are now reaping what we sowed. The only question left is, can we reverse it?

So for that, I, on behalf of my generation, apologize. We didn’t mean it, but we did cause it.

Well, I don’t, because we didn’t raise our kids this way. We were not helicopter parents. I don’t believe we shielded our kids from the consequences of their actions, or from hurt feelings. Their schools may have overloaded on self-esteem, but their parents did not.

I would say our two sons have turned out quite well. They’re both fully (or more) employed responsible citizens living on their own, not in their parents’ basement, in their early 20s. Our daughter just graduated from high school, and is attending college this fall, so she doesn’t get a grade yet.

This is far from the first attempt to blame a generation for the faults of that generation’s children. Facebook Friend Greg Apologia writes the Christian Living and Influence blog in which he believes the current state of today’s permissive society is because of excessively permissive Baby Boomers, themselves the children of World War II veterans who wanted to provide for their kids and shield them from the horrors of what they witnessed. Of course, the world has the habit of creating new horrors in every generation.

I’m not entirely convinced in this theory because people of the same age who grow up during the same time might have similar shared experiences — for those of us in Gen X the space shuttle Challenger explosion, 9/11, the Great Recession and COVID-19 — but those experiences are shaped by where we are. Those of us celebrating (if that’s what you want to call it) Madison La Follette High School’s Class of 1983 40-year reunion grew up in a largely suburban, more white-collar than blue-collar part of Madison. That is a significantly different upbringing than growing up in an inner-city single-parent household, or growing up in a rural area.

I have concluded from observation that how children turn out depends a lot on the state of their parents’ marriage. My wife’s parents were married for 54 years. My parents have been married for 62 years. My generation is reputed for being the first “latch-key kids,” in which they would go home to an empty house after school because either both parents or the single parent was working. I don’t know about the importance of that (my mother was also working while we were in middle school), but I do believe that if your parents were divorced, divorce appears to you to be the natural state instead of parents staying married. Similarly those people who had absent fathers would see that as normal as well (and then act accordingly), to the great detriment of our society today.