News Flash! Boomers Did A Horrible Job Raising Kids

How do boomers come into this? they're the grandparents of today's teens, not their parents.

The whole definition of work has changed during these kids life. They saw a lot of people getting very rich while seemingly doing very little. That has to change the way they think about work, especially hard work.

They might be more narcissistic because they are absolutely flooded with images. Cameras are everywhere. They're encouraged to share photos of themselves. I recall some article about Facebook angst/ennui because kids were seeing so many pictures of beautiful people having fun

And kids are slammed with more marketing images than ever before -- targeted marketing. When you're bombarded with images of things you "need", sure you're going to be more materialistic.

If parents are doing a terrible job it's probably because they were slower to adapt or even recognize these changes.

but why are youth seemingly unwilling to do any work?

I am already convinced that fathers have largely abdicated their duties and stayed silent as the women raise the kids.

propaganda for capitalism and the corporate class. this used to be balanced by other messages from the school, from church, and from home.

I bet you pay these "grateful" employees less than minimum wage by making them share their tips with you.

Even if you don't like hawkeye that's kind of a shitty thing to say.

News Flash! Boomers Did A Horrible Job Raising Kids

The study makes a case for the high schoolers’ attitudes being a product of the times they grew up in. (This is where the blame gets passed to the older generations.) Growing up, the teens' values are influenced by the dominant social ideologies, family structures, economic situations, media, political and business messages, the researchers argue.

What we increasingly have in our young is lazy entitled twits.

“There’s a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Kali H. Trzesniewski, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario. Ms. Trzesniewski, along with colleagues at the University of California, Davis, and Michigan State University, will publish research in the journal Psychological Science next month showing there have been very few changes in the thoughts, feelings and behaviors of youth over the last 30 years. In other words, the minute-by-minute Twitter broadcasts of today are the navel-gazing est seminars of 1978.

Ms. Trzesniewski said her study is a response to widely publicized research by Jean Twenge, an associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University, who along with colleagues has found that narcissism is much more prevalent among people born in the 1980s than in earlier generations. Ms. Twenge’s book title summarizes the research: “Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled — and More Miserable Than Ever Before” (2006, Free Press)...

However, some scholars argue that a spike in selfishness among young people is, like the story of Narcissus, a myth.

“It’s like a cottage industry of putting them down and complaining about them and whining about why they don’t grow up,” said Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, a developmental psychologist, referring to young Americans. Mr. Arnett, the author of “Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road From the Late Teens through the Twenties” (2004, Oxford University Press), has written a critique of Ms. Twenge’s book, which is to be published in the American Journal of Psychology.

Scholars including Mr. Arnett suggest several reasons why the young may be perceived as having increased narcissistic traits. These include the personal biases of older adults, the lack of nuance in the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, changing social norms, the news media’s emphasis on celebrity, and the rise of social networking sites that encourage egocentricity.

Richard P. Eibach, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale, has found that exaggerated beliefs in social decline are widespread — largely because people tend to mistake changes in themselves for changes in the external world. “Our automatic assumption is something real has changed,” Mr. Eibach said. “It takes extra thought to realize that something about your own perspective or the information you’re receiving may have changed.”

Ms. Trzesniewski gave as an example of this bias a scene from the film “Knocked Up,” in which new parents drive their baby home from the hospital at a snail’s pace. The road, of course, is no more or less dangerous than before the couple became mother and father. But once they make that life transition, they perceive the journey as perilous.

Indeed, the transition to parenthood, increased responsibility and physical aging are examples of changes in individuals that tend to be the real sources of people’s perceptions of the moral decline of others, write Mr. Eibach and Lisa K. Libby of Ohio State University in a psychology book chapter exploring the “ideology of the Good Old Days,” to be published by Oxford University Press later this year. (They also report that perceptions of social decline tend to be associated with conservative attitudes.)

Ms. Twenge and Ms. Trzesniewski used the inventory in their studies, though they chose different data sets and had opposite conclusions. Each said their data sets were better than the other’s for a host of reasons — all good, but far too long to list here. Ms. Twenge, who has read Ms. Trzesniewski’s critique, said she stands by her own nationwide analysis and has a comprehensive response, along with another paper, forthcoming in the Journal of Personality. It reads in part, “their critique ultimately strengthens our case that narcissism has risen over the generations among college students.”

Mr. Arnett dismisses tests like the inventory. “They have very limited validity,” he said. “They don’t really get at the complexity of peoples’ personality.” Some of the test choices (“I see myself as a good leader”) “sound like pretty normal personality features,” he said...

Test or no test, Mr. Arnett worries that “youth bashing” has become so common that accomplishments tend to be forgotten, like the fact that young people today have a closer relationship with their parents than existed between children and their parents in the 1960s (“They really understand things from their parents’ perspective,” Mr. Arnett said), or that they popularized the alternative spring break in which a student opts to spend a vacation helping people in a third world country instead of chugging 40s in Cancún.

“It’s the development of a new life stage between adolescence and adulthood,” Mr. Arnett said. “It’s a temporary condition of being self-focused, not a permanent generational characteristic.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/17/fashion/17narcissism.html?pagewanted=all

When were teens not enmeshed in "a culture that breeds narcissism and entitlement"--that's almost the very definition of teen culture, the psychological world teens live in. Adolescents do tend to be narcissistic and to have a sense of entitlement, it's almost part and parcel of that stage of development, and it's not exclusively due to the culture of the times, it's part of that phase of life