> Because I am wont to break things down to their basest and most singular: My take on this is that, for some reason, the generation of parents beginning with those raising Generation X (my own generation) has decided, nearly en masse, that it is more important that they make their children comfortable than it is that they try to raise their children to be responsible, considerate, (forgive the phrase) productive members of society.
>
> They seem to want to erase all stress, trauma, and discomfort from their children's lives, forgetting that those very stresses, traumas, and discomforts are what help a person grow and mature. Examples range from wanting to change grading standards so that children aren't traumatized by getting bad grades to having no expectation that children take responsibility for themselves at age 18, that parents owe it to children to pay for a college education.
>
> The resultant generation of "children" who expect to go from living at home or college to living in a home that closely resembles the one they grew up in, instead of having to start out in a one room walk-up with hand-me-down furniture disgusts me, but I can't often relate that, since I don't have children of my own.
>
> Mou"but that's probably just me"sie

>
>
In this modern world, the underpriviledged child is the one that doesn't have a room of his own, his own personal TV, or video games.

When I was a child, we lived in a two bedroom house. My parents got one, my sisters got the other, and I slept on a cot in the dining room. I don't remember thinking there was anything wrong with that. Some kids didn't even have a dining room. We even had a radio and, after the war, a telephone. Could life get any better than that?
Howard