October 20, 2017

14 Ways American Parents Created The Children They Complain About

By wise sloth

It’s no secret that elderly Americans are disappointed at the way the younger generations turned out. Ironically, they should be disappointed in themselves, because they groomed their children to become exactly like them. If parents can’t accept responsibility for their actions, it’s no wonder their kids can’t either.

1: Parents promised their children the American Dream.

Apparently, adults forgot they crammed the idea of the American Dream down their kids’ throats so thoroughly they effectively brainwashed it into them. American history classes, political speeches, holidays, pop music and television all repeat the mantra of American exceptionalism and entitlement to the point of nausea. Adults shouldn’t be mad when children expect to collect on the promise their parents made them.

"If you didn't want your children to believe in the American Dream, you shouldn't have promised them the American Dream."

2: Parents spoiled their children.

Adults like to rant about the good old days when students were punished instead of coddled. Adults also like to rant about how nobody can tell them how to raise their children or lay a finger on their precious snowflake. Who ranted at school PTA meetings and took away principle’s ability to discipline students? Who lavished children with birthday and Christmas presents every year? Who gave children everything they wanted every time they threw a temper tantrum? Who let children sit on the couch all summer? Who left their kids unsupervised? Who failed to teach children right from wrong? It was the same people who told their children they’re special and all their dreams will come true simply because God blessed them by creating them in the land of the free.

3: Parents let television raise their children.

Many adults may cross their arms and stamp their feet and insist they didn’t put these ideas in their kids head, but those same adults sat their offspring in front of the television for 3-7 hours per day for years. When you let your daughters watch 10,000 hours of Disney princess movies and dress them in princess dresses and tiaras, you shouldn’t be surprised when they act like princesses.

4: Parents let commercials raise their children.

Television commercials are designed to do two things: make you insecure and convince your buying a product will solve all your problems.  Adults made those commercials. Adults bought the televisions children watched 100,000 hours of commercials on, and adults sat their children in front of those televisions to get them out of their way. If you didn’t want your kids to be petty, materialistic consumer whores, you shouldn’t have let corporations brainwash them.

"If you didn't want your kids to be consumer whores, you shouldn't have let corporations brainwash them."

5: Parents discouraged their children from thinking. 

Children might have been able to think their way to sanity, but when they asked their parents hard questions, they got answers like, “Because I said so.” “Because the Bible says so.” “Because I’m the adult.” “Because that’s the way life is.” “Because you’ll get a spanking if you don’t.” “The rules are the rules.” “You’ll understand when you’re older.” “Don’t question my authority.” “Don’t talk back.”

If you punish your child when they try to understand things, they’ll stop trying. If they can’t teach themselves, they won’t grow. They’ll stagnate in the same puerile stage of moral development they were in when you trained them not to think for themselves.

6: Parents let clergymen raise their children.

70% of Americans claim to be Christian, but no American acts anything like Christ. Americans don’t follow 90% of the rules in the Bible because those rules were designed by a primitive tribal theocracy that wrote its culture into law. Half the rules in the Bible couldn’t be made into law today because they violate the Declaration of Human Rights.  Some of its laws are useful, but many more are irrelevant and useless.

But the Baby Boomers took their children to church to instill morals into them anyway. The first thing the church taught them was not to think for themselves or believe evidence when it contradicts doctrine. Since they never learned a relevant, useful moral code at church, they went out into the world half-conscious, basing their decisions on a half-formed, volatile combination of modern and archaic values. This is a recipe for insane and immoral behavior. If adults don’t like the taste of that cake, they shouldn’t have baked it in Hellfire.

7: Parents abused their children.

One Bible quote every American has heard is, “Spare the rod, spoil the child.” Before politicians invented child protection laws that contradict the Bible, it was culturally and legally acceptable for a father/husband to beat the women and children living under his roof. The Baby Boomers grew up expecting to become the lords of their house like their parents were. They weren’t allowed to, but they still had a lifetime of bottled-up pain that needed an outlet. It should come as no surprise they took it out on their children.

Not every parent beat their children, but seriously, most of them did at least a little. This didn’t create hardened warriors out of Generation X though, because beating children into obedience only works if you have total control over their lives. Even if total annihilation teaches children to control themselves, it still breaks them inside. Since child protection laws limited how much control Baby Boomers had over their kids, they just beat their kids as far as the law allowed and then kicked them out of the house broken and undisciplined.

8: Parents molested and raped their children.

A study found that as many as one in four women surveyed at two college campuses had been molested or raped as a minor. This study isn’t representative of the entire country, but it matches what the women I know have told me about their childhoods. Other studies put the number closer to one in sixteen. Either way, I believe it’s fair to say that enough children have been sexually assaulted in America to constitute an epidemic. Not every Baby Boomer is guilty, but enough are to make history, and sadly, I don’t think Generation X is far behind. It’s too bad sex-ed classes in America never taught students about the psychological consequences of sexual assault. If they did, we wouldn’t be so surprised when our kids can’t seem to “get it together.”

If you wanted your children to keep it together, you shouldn't have molested them."

9: Parents raised their children in suburbia.

Old people brag about how they had to walk five miles to school each day, uphill in the snow both ways. They’re famous for reminiscing about the good old days, when kids worked at farms and they didn’t have fancy technological luxuries. Young people find it hard to relate to those stories since they were raised in suburbia, which is the world’s largest open-air zoo. If you stick a monkey in a room for 20 hours per day, they’re going to start pacing and losing their minds. You’ll get the same result with humans. Everyone in America has cabin fever. So you should never be surprised when someone finally snaps and goes on a shooting spree dressed in a comic book character costume.

10: Parents fed their children junk food.

Coping with sensory deprivation is difficult. Television and video games help fill the monotony so you don’t lose all mental connection to the world around you. Holding onto your sanity is nearly impossible when 15% of the food your parents give you is sugar.  In addition to being high and going through withdraw all the time, you’re going to get fat, which is going to make you lethargic and damage all the organs that are trying to build an adult brain. This isn’t setting your child up for success. This is putting a stumbling block in front of them and then acting disappointed when they fall on their face.

11: Parents doped their children up on drugs.

In the past forty years, American parents have been asking why their children are bouncing off walls and misbehaving. Instead of coming to the conclusion that they’re bad parents, they came to the conclusion their children had chemical imbalances in their brains. So they fed them Adderall and Prozac, and then shook their heads in confusion while half their kids bounced through the roof and the other half shut down into zombies.

12: Parents reduced their children to second-class citizens.

Children are literally second-class citizens because they don’t have the same rights adults do. Officially, children can’t vote, drive, have sex, buy certain products, determine where they live or enter certain buildings. Unofficially, children are dressed in cartoonish kid clothes, made to watch children’s television, censored from the realities of adulthood, pushed to the side and constantly reminded they’re too young, stupid and irresponsible to be allowed to act like an adult. You can argue subjugating children is justified, but let’s be clear that you’re arguing there should be second-class citizens, and you’re willing to accept the consequences.

Children who are raised in a second class reality, grow up into second-class adults. When you train them to identify as a child for 18 years, you shouldn’t expect them to act like adults on their 18th birthday, because that’s not who you trained them to be. That’s like sending troops to enlisted basic training and wondering why they didn’t come out officers.

13: Parents gave their children a broken economy.

The economy isn’t designed to give everyone as much security and options as possible. It’s designed to keep you broke, working long hours at a dead-end job until bills wipe out all your savings. This isn’t just pessimistic whining. The data is in. That’s how life works. The best kids can hope for in life is to upgrade their zoo cage for a while. It should come as no surprise that half the kids are obsessed with buying superficial upgrades to their life, and the other half has given up fighting a battle they can’t win.

"If you wanted your kids to be successful, you shouldn't have given them an economy that's designed to trap them in poverty."

14: Parents ground their children into a state of arrested development.

It’s astounding that adults have the nerve to criticize the children they raised, considering the epic amount of work they put into grooming them to become dysfunctional. To be fair, the Baby Boomers were set up for failure themselves. Their parents were even more abusive and old-fashioned, and the American government/economy set them up for failure by forcing them to live like cattle and work like slaves, conditioning them to condition their children to be good slaves. At the same time, the internet changed the world, rendering half of the Baby Boomer’s expertise on life obsolete.

Adults didn’t know what they were doing to begin with, and they couldn’t keep up. They were dealt a bad hand. The young are angry, but they can forgive and forget. That forgiveness would be wasted though if America’s elders don’t spend what little time they have left fixing the broken system they’re leaving as their contribution to humanity.

 

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 20th, 2017 at 6:48 pm and posted in General Pop Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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