The problem with millennials, their parents

If you’re on Facebook, you’ve seen the comments about all the things we used to do when we were kids that kids aren’t allowed to do anymore and most of us seemed to grow up okay. This is a slap at over-regulation and the government trying to become parents of children. Although some of the laws make sense, others don’t and many people simply want their freedom back to do as they please.

Then we have what are called “helicopter” parents who hover around their kids wherever they are, trying to ensure that their kids never make a mistake or do anything that could put them in harm’s way. So in many cases, these kinds of parents have taken on the role of an overly-concerned government about the safety and welfare of our kids.

But there’s also a third group of people who have control over the kids of this generation and they haven’t been given a name because they’ve been around forever. These are the parents who see their children as nuisances and have as little to do with them as possible. They don’t act as role models, they don’t spend time with their kids, there is little or no expression of love and caring, and they don’t really care what their kids do as long as it doesn’t bother them.

These are the kids that become troublemakers and lawbreakers. These are the kids who are thrust out into the world to make decisions for themselves before they’re ready and, consequently, they tend to always make bad decisions. These are the kids who find it much easier to cheat and steal than to get an education or a job and work for a living. On top of this, it’s a generational thing too because these kids tend to become the same kind of parents their parents were and so this miscreant behavior is passed from one generation to the next; generation after generation. That’s why crime rates in certain areas of larger cities have been high for decades. Obviously, the kids grow up, but if they continue to live in the neighborhood, have their own kids and raise them the way they were raised, the results will be the same.

Everyone from social scientists to Presidents have been trying to discover an answer to this problem with little or no success because parents who don’t want to be good parents can’t be trained to be. It’s a lot like traffic violators being required to attend defensive driving classes. There are certainly things to be learned in a class like that that would make them better drivers but if they don’t care about the class and consequently don’t listen or pay attention to what’s going on, the information will go in one ear and out the other and the traffic violators won’t learn anything.

One of the contributing problems to high delinquency rates is the fact that in many cases, children are giving birth to children. Teen-age girls are sexually active just like teenage boys are and if they aren’t instructed on how to avoid pregnancies, then they won’t. And when they don’t, we have kids having kids and because they still ARE kids, they typically turn their children over to their parents because although they enjoyed the process of getting pregnant, they don’t enjoy the responsibilities of motherhood.

So nothing ever changes and the beat goes on. Every generation complains about a portion of our youth who are lost without ever being given the chance to succeed. But when parents don’t pay attention or show love or care about their kids doing well and succeeding in life, then chances are the kids won’t care either and this problem will continue for as long as these circumstances exist.