I’ve written a lot about the problems and difficulties with Gen Y, but I want to make something clear.

Gen Y didn’t raise themselves to feel entitled, require constant praise or expect success for trying their hardest.

Jan left a comment a few weeks ago and I think she speaks for a large number of her generation, “There is a great amount of pressure to earn good grades and gain a GREAT career, as if somehow that is the only way to gain success in our lives. … The present often does not matter, including learning the subject. Students live under this constant pressure to make good grades, with that fear of failure programmed into the back of our minds.” (Please take a moment to read her entire comment.)

Decades ago after my sister had her first child she said, “I know that I’ll do things that mess up my kids, but they damn well won’t be the same things that messed us up,” and they weren’t.

This is normal life, with the previous generation screwing up their kids in some way and the kids eventually sorting it out—or not—and then moving on to the next generation, but it’s changed now.

Greg Jayne is the Sports Editor for my local paper and he summed it up nicely in a column about the people’s attitude towards performance enhancing drugs.

“Last year, Major League Baseball drew 78.6 million spectators to the ballpark… The sport generated about $6 billion in revenue, nearly twice what it generated in 2000 and roughly $20 for every man, woman and child in the United States. … The baseball-watching public simply doesn’t care that much about players who cheat the game. … We live in an era in which style trumps substance, and the superficial is held in such high regard that we all are diminished. Is there any reason to think that baseball should be different? Is there any reason to express moral outrage when somebody is trying to improve his performance and help his team win? That is, after all, the ethos of the time.”

Yet there are still supposed to be areas that are sacrosanct, people we assume will work for the good of our kids; people to whom we don’t give a second thought—until their actions blow up in our faces.

Priests/ministers/rabbis. Teachers. Family. Judges.

It’s terrible when people are driven by their own inner demons, but somehow it’s even worse when they ruin kids’ lives out of plain old fashioned greed.

“…two judges pleaded guilty to tax evasion and wire fraud in a scheme that involved sending thousands of juveniles to two private detention centers in exchange for $2.6 million in kickbacks. … Virtually all former colleagues and courthouse workers would not allow themselves to be identified because the federal investigation into the kickback scheme was continuing and they feared for their jobs if they alienated former allies of the judges.”

Obviously, it’s not just individuals, but the laissez faire attitude prevalent in a large percentage of all generations that’s driving the problems to levels not seen previously.

Enough is enough. We need change—but where to start?

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That’s right, guys, you are obsolescent whether you realize it or not.

At least, that’s the conclusion that seems to be offered on a post at Bizzy Women, based in part on job loss stats from Peter Coy’s 2008 Business Week article and also quotes heavily from Harvard psychologist Dan Kindlon’s Alpha Girls. (Klindon also wrote Raising Cain and Too Much of a Good Thing.)

Granted that women gained 300,000 jobs between November, 2007 and April, 2008 while men lost nearly 700,000, but the stats aren’t straight across.

“Simply put, men have the misfortune of being concentrated in the two sectors that are doing the worst: manufacturing and construction. Women are concentrated in sectors that are still growing, such as education and health care. … Manufacturing is over 70% male and construction is about 88% male. Meanwhile the growing education and health services sector is 77% female. The government sector, which has remained strong, is 57% female. The securities business, which is filled with high-paying jobs, is likely to be the next sector to get whacked—and more than 60% of its workers are men.”

Securities was more than whacked, it was decimated.

The problem I have with the idea that “The new economy is largely dominated by young women who have unique skills, not by men who have been taught to follow the rules.”

Unfortunately, the jobs being created are mostly in health and education areas—not the most lucrative positions. And as Coy points out, “the “female” economy can’t stay strong for long if the “male” economy weakens too much.”

The great majority of families need both incomes to thrive and, in many cases, it takes both to just survive.

Yes, more women than men are attending college, but perhaps that’s because more resources have been poured into developing women; that isn’t bad, but it does screw the numbers. (This is especially obvious when you look at the differences between black girls and boys.)

These predictions also assume that men can’t/won’t change, current and future generations of males will be the same and experience will play no role over the next 20 or so years, which I find ridiculous.

But the biggest problem I have with the idea that women will rule is the same problem I’ve had for decades as minority groups, whether designated by gender, race, sexual orientation or whatever, have improved their situation.

Not the improvement, I’m all for that, but the desire to dominate.

When I was living in San Francisco I knew from personal experience that the most disenfranchised group in terms of political power, social services, educational help or general assistance were middle age, white, single, straight females.

Sadly, I find that equality isn’t the driving force—”do unto others as they did unto us” is.

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Today is National Honesty Day. Look it up and you’ll find lot of talk about being honest today.

You’d think people could manage one honest day a year, but it’s doubtful they actually will.

These days honesty seems to be more a matter of convenience, i.e., telling the truth when it doesn’t get in the way to whatever the agenda is, or bending the truth to further whatever—and it gets more acceptable every day.

In schools, honesty is considered quaint.

And it’s a global problem, “A 2006 study of cheating among US graduates, published in the journal Academy of Management Learning & Education, found that 56% of all MBA students cheated regularly – more than in any other discipline.”

Carolyn Y. Woo, Dean of Notre Dame Mendoza College of Business says, “I believe that our current crisis is caused by a failure of values fuelled by perverse incentives, which trumped sound judgment and overwhelmed regulatory enforcements.”

At all ages and all levels it seems to boil down to ‘dishonesty pays’.

Of course, I could be out of touch and cheating has been exempted from dishonesty and moved to a category all its own, but I think I would have read about that. But even if it has there’s plenty of other dishonesty going around these days.

Back to today’s holiday.

Even if every person on the planet was totally honest today it wouldn’t solve anything.

We don’t need one day of honesty and 364 days of the other stuff, so here’s my idea.

Let’s cancel National Honesty Day and starting in 2010 celebrate National Dishonesty Day instead.

That way, we can all be honest 364 days of the year and lie, cheat and steal to our hearts content every April 30.

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It’s great when VSI (vested self-interest) drives positive happenings anywhere, but when it happens in kid-focused media it’s definitely cause for cheering.

And so it has to the MTV—channel folks love to hate.

“After years of celebrating wealth, celebrity and the vapid excesses of youth, MTV is trying to gloss its escapist entertainment with a veneer of positive social messages.”

According to Stephen Friedman, MTV’s general manager, for Gen X “the humor was more cynical, the idea of community seemed earnest and not cool. It’s the opposite now.”

I don’t care that it’s driven by the bottom line, it’s also a recognition that the youth market is changing. And if MTV thinks that the Millennials have a different attitude they probably do—hopefully one strong enough to outweigh its entitled mindset and need for constant praise.

Viacom, MTV’s corporate parent, even has a new deal with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to make shows more supportive of education, which is truly amazing.

Jumping to the older part of that generation, the current economic downturn is taking many newly minted MBAs in new directions.

Historically, graduates from the top business schools headed for Wall Street. Now it seems that many didn’t really want that path.

“There was a real herd mentality to get into investment banking, noting that prestige, peer pressure and parents often channeled students to Wall Street. But because of the crisis, “there was suddenly permission to pursue something you were interested in that your parents three years ago would have said absolutely no to.” –Jessica Levy, Wharton senior.

“Some students now acknowledge that they were pursuing investment banking jobs largely to placate parents who, having invested nearly $200,000 in their children’s educations, were eager for them to earn top dollar — and some prestige too.”

I find it interesting that the supposed cream of the talent pool, highly (and expensively) educated, our future leaders with supposedly outstanding independent/critical thinking skills succumbed not out of personal desire, but from outside pressures. Nope, they didn’t really want to work on Wall Street with its gargantuan salaries and over-the-top, masters of the universe mentality. Who woulda thunk it.

All sarcasm aside, I do hope that this is a bit more of the silver lining the banking meltdown. It’s not that Wall Street is always bad, but that there are many ways and places to contribute.

“It’s always been about the brass ring and it’s always been about the brand recognition, and for a lot of students that meant jobs at Goldman Sachs,” Emanuel Sturman, director of career services at Dartmouth College. “It’s premature to say the bloom is off the rose totally, but I think students are starting to look at a wider array of brass rings.”

And who knows, maybe working in other industries will enable them to contribute to the common good in ways more meaningful than just writing a check.

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An article in the NY Times gives a first look at new directions for education,

“…the Obama administration will use a Congressional rewriting of the federal law later this year to toughen requirements on topics like teacher quality and academic standards and to intensify its focus on helping failing schools. … The stimulus requires governors to raise standards to a new benchmark: the point at which high school graduates can succeed — without remedial classes — in college, the workplace or the military.”

Sounds great, but all I can say is good luck.

Not because of teacher quality; not because of money, since they actually plan to fund education (unlike the original N. C. L. B.) and not because the state governors won’t get behind it, but because there is no way to mandate parental support.

Previously, “the No Child Left Behind law allowed each state to set its own academic standards, with the result that many have dumbed down curriculums and tests. Colorado even opted to use its “partially proficient” level of academic performance as “proficient” for reporting purposes.”

And even with the dumbed down standards the kids complain and parents rush to their defense.

“…an unpopular math teacher was dismissed from a suburban high school where I live because parents complained that she was far too tough on her students.  She gave them way too much homework, and her tests were much tougher than the other math teachers’ tests, forcing her students to study for hours each week outside of class.  Interestingly, her students also scored the highest on state mandated standardized achievement tests as well as higher than other teachers’ students on the quantitative portion of the SAT and on the math AP exams.  Still, she was tough, so they fired her.”

Parents as a group are vocal about wanting better education and are quick to blame teachers, schools and government for its sorry state.

They never consider their own complicity in the downward spiral of US education. It just couldn’t have anything to do with their parenting.

After all, it’s only fair that they talk to the principal/school board about Ms. Randell’s/Mr. Johnson’s totally unfair treatment of their precious children; all that time the kids are expected to spend on homework when they would rather be socializing with their friends. And the papers they’re expected to write, not just copy off the internet, using good grammar and being down-graded for using texting terms; not to mention the tests—they’re just too difficult.

Nor should they be expected to tell their kids that they need to work really hard if they want to get into college—let alone at a job—that’s not supportive and may damage their fragile egos.

Whoever thought that it would be American Idol that would teach kids that the world isn’t theirs for the taking?

“”The show counteracts the stance that the world owes you whatever you want, even a living as a rock star, just because you happen to want it,” said Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University.”

I’ve never watched Idol, but if it’s teaching that lesson I’ll be a lot more tolerant when it pre-empts something I do watch.

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Not long ago a friend was at a high school basketball game; the home team, from a wealthy community, was losing to the visiting inner city team. My friend was horrified to hear the home team students start chanting “We don’t care, we won’t fuss, someday you will work for us!”

He was even more aghast when he realized that many of the parents were joining in.

That’s why some schools are working to change kids’ MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) by finding ways to teach empathy; programs such as Second Step and Roots of Empathy seem to be working in the schools using them.

Empathy is especially important for those kids from wealthy areas whose parents often have (hopefully) unconscious, elitist MAP.

But it’s hard to empathize with things you’ve never experienced.

Neither adults nor kids can understand hunger if they’ve always been able to eat when they feel like it.

It’s not just feeling hungry, cold, wet, etc. that creates empathy; it’s enduring them beyond where it’s comfortable that allows people to get some idea of what millions face every day.

Few adults like venturing outside their comfort zone and kids like it even less, but learning empathy requires discomfort. Go ahead, you’ll survive—I promise.

Please take a few minutes to read the article and think about your own level of empathy and the levels of those around you—at home, at work and elsewhere.

Then think about what you can do to increase empathy in your little corner of the world. Perhaps then we can replace one e-word, entitlement with another, empathy.

If everybody does that the whole world really will change.

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According to Donald McCabe, a professor of management and global business at Rutgers University, “95 percent of high school students say they’ve cheated during the course of their education, ranging from letting somebody copy their homework to test-cheating. There’s a fair amount of cheating going on, and students aren’t all that concerned about it.”

“The professor has been surveying cheating practices among college kids for 18 years and high school students for six years. He says he’s surveyed 24,000 high school students in 70,000 high schools, grades 9 to 12. His findings? Sixty-four percent of students report one or more instances of serious testing-cheating, which include copying from someone else, helping someone else cheat on a test, or using crib notes or cheat notes.

In 2002 17-year-old Alice Newhall was quoted in a CNN article on cheating, “What’s important is getting ahead. The better grades you have, the better school you get into, the better you’re going to do in life. And if you learn to cut corners to do that, you’re going to be saving yourself time and energy. In the real world, that’s what’s going to be going on. The better you do, that’s what shows. It’s not how moral you were in getting there.“”

Colleges are no different, with MBA students leading the pack. “56 percent of MBA students admitted to cheating…  In 1997, McCabe did a survey in which 84 percent of undergraduate business students admitted cheating versus 72 percent of engineering students and 66 percent of all students. In a 1964 survey by Columbia University, 66 percent of business students surveyed at 99 campuses said they cheated at least once.”

MBAs lead another pack; see if these names sound familiar: Jeff Skilling (MBA, Harvard). Joe Nacchio, (MBA, NYU), Richard Fuld, (MBA, Stern), John Thain, (MBA, Harvard), the list goes on and on.

Do you see a pattern here?

• It’s OK to cheat in high school to get good grades to gain entrance to a good college;
• it’s OK to cheat in college to gain entrance to a top grad school; and
• it’s OK to cheat in grad school to insure access to a good job, especially on Wall Street; so
• it must be OK once you’re working to cheat to improve your company’s bottom line.

Cheating is good business in its own right directly or in the sub-strata of plagiarism.

Google offers 1,620,000 results for “how to cheat in school,” 605,000 for “how to cheat on a test” and another 562,000 for “how to cheat on tests,” not to mention the more than 3,000 “how to cheat” videos on YouTube.

Meanwhile, on the plagiarism front, “school papers” returns a whopping 22,600,000 results.

Take a good look at the numbers and you’ll see that religion, spirituality and cheating seem to happily co-exist.

“The University of California at Los Angeles’s Higher Education Research Institute reported that 80 percent of students show high degrees of religious commitment and spirituality. The new data comes from a survey conducted this past year involving 112,232 first year students attending 236 various colleges and universities.”

All the ethics courses, integrity lectures and moral preaching that go on aren’t likely to change decades of successful cheating—mainly because it works getting people where they want to go.

Cheating isn’t new, but the casual acceptance of it as a viable life strategy has radically changed.

So what do we do now?

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A few of weeks ago I wrote about how kids believe they are entitled to good grades for trying as opposed to achieving.

That post was sparked by Andrew’s comment and he also sent me an article about grade inflation in colleges showing that the trend is progressing unabated.

An article today in the NYTimes describes a new approach to grades,

“In Pelham, the second-grade report card includes 39 separate skill scores — 10 each in math and language arts, 2 each in science and social studies, and a total of 15 in art, music, physical education, technology and “learning behaviors” — engagement, respect, responsibility, organization…standards-based report cards helped students chart their own courses for improvement; as part of the process, they each develop individual goals, which are discussed with teachers and parents, and assemble portfolios of work.”

“I was never the A student, and it would constantly frustrate me,” Dr. Dennis Lauro, Pelham’s superintendent said. “Nobody ever bothered to tell me how to get that A, to get to that next level.”

I think that the approach is good since it focuses back on learning and not just on testing and it’s being adopted in various districts across the country.

The down side is that most districts don’t have the money or parental ability, not just involvement, of an upscale Westchester, NY suburb.

Currently grading in most schools, K-12 through college, is on a curve where the best gets an A. But as Dr. Thomas R. Guskey, a professor at Georgetown College in Kentucky, says “The dilemma with that system is you really don’t know whether anybody has learned anything. They could all have done miserably, just some less miserably than others.”

I agree. When people do average work they shouldn’t get an A because everyone else is below average or flunked.

If it can be made to work I think the idea of the kids working with parents and teachers to set goals to work towards and the sense of accomplishment that comes from achieving them is excellent; it’s motivating and prepares them for the real world of performance reviews—at least when they’re done correctly.

This could be a step forward, but it involves change.

“The executive director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, Gerald Tirozzi — who supports standards-based report cards — said that many educators and parents were far from ready to scrap letter grades, especially for older students, in part because they worry about the ripple effects on things like the honor roll and class rank.”

“I think the present grading system — A, B, C, D, F — is ingrained in us,” Mr. Tirozzi said. “It’s the language which college admissions officers understand; it’s the language which parents understand.”

And we certainly can’t expect adults to change or learn anything new just to improve kids’ education—can we?

This reminds me of something that happened decades ago. Women would taste baby food and if it didn’t taste good to them they wouldn’t buy it, so Gerber added salt in order to appeal to the adults. When the public finally woke up and screamed Gerber quickly changed the formulas.

Right now the public is whining, any suggestions on how to get them screaming?

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Are kids learning anything from the economic meltdown?

Parents seem to be doing everything possible to avoid exposing their little darlings to a dose of reality.

Quotes in a December post highlighted parental efforts to fill Christmas wish lists and shelter their kids from the tanking economy.

A letter to Malcolm Berko asking for financial advice is another example of the lengths to which parents are willing to go, here is the key part.

“…Our son will graduate high school this May and we don’t have the savings to send him to the University of Florida, his chosen school where his two best buddies attend. Our combined 401(k) savings plans are worth $67,000 and they too took a big hit in the market. So we are thinking either of taking a mortgage on our home (we built it without borrowing money), cosigning a note at the credit union or cashing in our 401(k) plans for his college money. Or I could take a part-time consulting job…”

Berko doesn’t suffer fools gladly and has no compunction about saying what he thinks (I highly recommend his column). I’ve shortened his response, but it’s worth reading the whole thing.

“I’d be more concerned about adding money to your retirement savings plan than helping your son pay for frat parties, beer, sex and drugs at the University of Florida…I suspect he really wants to party with his buddies, and UF is a great party school.

Here’s my advice: Tell your son to join the armed services where he’ll mature in a hurry…Or your kid can live at home, attend a community college…and take a part-time job at McDonald’s. If he does well in community college, he can easily find the financial support to earn a bachelor’s or a master’s degree.”

One reason the Great Depression made a great impression was that kids weren’t sheltered from its effects. And although this isn’t a depression the principle is the same.

Saddest of all, preventing kids from experiencing and dealing with reality now cripples them in the future. They have a

• harder time in college;
• more difficulties when they start working and
• more problems in relationships and marriage.

Succeeding in life requires knowing what to do and how to deal with things when they don’t go your way and are outside of your control.

But as long as parents keep shielding kids from the ups and downs of reality and are available to intervene and make [whatever] better then there’s no reason for kids to learn how to do it themselves, which will be a big disadvantage for them in the future.

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Perhaps ‘As you sow, so shall you reap’ should be rewritten, ‘As you parent, so shall you hire.’

The generations that parented the Millennials are reaping the results of confusing self-esteem with entitlement.

The kids who sang ‘I am special / I am special / Look at me / Look at me… (set to the tune of Frère Jacques) in nursery school are still thinking that way in as they move through college and into the workforce.

Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University, narcissism researcher and author of Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled — and More Miserable than Ever Before, thinks that parents should stop “meaningless, baseless praise,” which starts even before nursery school.

Instead of mindless compliments why not take the time to teach them that all actions have consequences (AKA cause and effect)—even doing nothing.

Praise what they accomplish and instill in them an appreciation of the real value found in the words, actions, deeds, and contributions, both large and small, that they make in the world.

If your kids are young start by not only eliminating empty praise from your home, but also teaching them how to recognize it and why they should discount it.

With older kids—teens, twenties, thirties—help them wrap their minds around the idea that life doesn’t offer entitlements to anyone and share with them the real facts of life.

They are special to

• you, because you are their parent, and to others who also love them;
• themselves because “self” is the only person they will ever truly know or actually have the ability to change.

They are not special to others, except as the result of their words, actions and deeds.

Being special to you and to themselves does not entitle them to special treatment from their teachers, friends, bosses, colleagues, the guy complaining about their loud cell phone conversation at Starbucks or the cop who tickets them for speeding.

Special isn’t related to self-esteem—self-esteem is grounded in and built from their own efforts and accomplishments.

Self-esteem entitles them to nothing, but provides the strength to not only survive, but thrive, now and in the future.

They may not appreciate your efforts now, but they will be forever grateful as they make their way though the world as adults.

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