Leadership’s Future: Parents Are Mucking Up Our Future
Thursday, July 16th, 2009What’s going on? This post is a call for your thoughts.
I simply don’t understand what today’s parents are thinking—assuming they are thinking at all.
18 years ago Wanda Holloway tried to hire a hit man to improve her 13 year old daughter’s chances of making the cheer-leading squad.
More recently Lori Drew helped her teenage daughter fake a MySpace page that drove another teen to suicide.
Parents launch efforts to destroy teachers who don’t hand out ‘As’; they scream at referees and umpires when they disagree with a call; they threaten coaches who don’t allow their kids to play enough.
On one hand they enable their kids to avoid all responsibility and on the other castigate them for not living up to whatever parental dreams they are trying to realize.
I know that it’s not all parents; and this isn’t a new rant, but it’s one to which I keep coming back.
And it came back with a vengeance, in fact you might say my outrage cup runneth over, when I read that Senator John Ensign’s parents paid off his mistress.
“The wealthy parents of Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) gave $96,000 last year to the staffer who was then his mistress and to her family, his attorney said yesterday.
The gifts to Cynthia L. Hampton and her family were given “out of concern for the well-being of longtime family friends during a difficult time,” according to the lawyer, Paul Coggins.”
Ensign’s parents aren’t Gen-Xers and probably not Boomers, so this problem isn’t new.
You read stories about helicopter parents all the time, but when does it end?
How can anyone expect a person to make good choices when their mistakes (and worse) are ‘handled’ for them by their parents?
What do you think about Ensign’s parents’ actions? Obviously, pay-offs aren’t in the same class as murder; are they better or equal with bullying?
I don’t have any answers, but we’d better find some—and fast!
An open discussion is a place to start so let’s hear your thoughts.
Your comments—priceless
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Image credit: Army.mil on flickr