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| The River Raisin, in Monroe |
"In his prescient 2001 book, Too Much of a Good Thing, child psychologist Dan Kindlon (Harvard) argued that modern parents too often spoil their children. “Compared to earlier generations, we are emotionally closer to our kids, they confide in us more, we have more fun with them,” he wrote. “But we are too indulgent. We give our kids too much and demand too little of them. I see it in the homes I visit, at the schools where I speak, in the family counseling I’ve done, and in the parents and children I encounter in shopping malls, supermarkets, and video stores.” Kindlon concentrated on upper-middle-class children in his book, but much of the overindulgence he documents seems to be trickling down the socioeconomic ladder. When children are overindulged, Kindlon argues, it leads to outcomes resembling the seven deadly sins: pride, wrath, envy, sloth, gluttony, lust, and greed." (Twenge, The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement, p. 76)
Twenge says that America parents today...
... have become too indulgent...
... praise our children too much...
... and treat our children almost like royalty...
... and buy them t-shirts glorifying their exalted status.
American parents "have innocently made the mistake of idealizing their children instead of truly loving them... We may have veered too far toward obeying our children instead of them obeying us.”
Go to a mall, or a concert, or a movie, and you will find these kids there, in the wild. These are...
"... the kids who have never been told no, whose sense of power and entitlement leaves onlookers breathless, the sand-kicking, foot-stomping, arm-twisting, wheedling, whining despots whose parents presumably deserve the company of the monsters they, after all, created.”(Twenge, 77)
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My two books are
Praying: Reflections on 40 Years of Solitary Conversations with God.
Leading the Presence-Driven Church
