No, Parents Aren’t The Problem (Usually)

World Trade Center Bombing, Oklahoma City Bombing, Columbine High School Massacre, 9/11, 2008 Financial Crisis and Covid are just some of the events that parents today experienced growing up.

Parents today are largely of the millennial generation and these events collectively made this set of parents fear in a very real way that previously unfathomable thought that their children actually might not be just as well off as they were. Maybe the American Dream isn’t indomitable like we all thought it was growing up in the 1980s, 90s and 00s. Maybe those jobs won’t be there for kids after college like they were promised.

This has led parents to over parent: taking on the brunt of difficult conversations with teachers, scheduling tours of prestigious colleges for their kids and the transient high school student-athlete who seems to transfer every time coach doesn’t start them. In trying to ensure a happy life for their children, over parenting usually ensures a more miserable one. The net impact of the rise of concierge parenting is that young people are largely shepherded and protected from more of life’s unpleasantness than they should be allowed to experience.

While it isn’t enjoyable to watch you son or daughter struggle, it is developmentally appropriate to feel frustration, to feel depressed, to get your heart broken and to figure out how to deal with the anger of being told no once in a while. It is developmentally appropriate for a young person to be totally nervous before they have a sit down meeting with their head coach who controls their playing time. It is developmentally appropriate for young people (unfortunately) to be jerks to each other and engage in bully-like behavior and need to figure out how to deal with it.

I don’t think parents are “the problem” with kids these days. If you understand the world that they grew up in in the late 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, most people would raise their kids the same way.

As coaches or teachers it is really easy to pit yourself in opposition to parents, but very few parents wake up every morning asking themselves how they can plot to make your life miserable. They, like you, just want the best for their kid.

They might just have a weird way of going about it once in a while.