cool yet disturbing article

[permetaform]

via tochira

A Nation of Wimps

By: Hara Estroff Marano
Summary: Parents are going to ludicrous lengths to take the bumps out of life for their children. However, parental hyperconcern has the net effect of making kids more fragile; that may be why they're breaking down in record numbers.


...Causes me to both bless and curse my parents on the same breath. They're not as bad as some of those mentioned, but, god. (ask lierdumoa sometime for the story sometime when my mother called her to hunt me down. she found her number via my phone bill. ::headdesk::)

On the one hand, I wonder how I survived. On the other, I take an honest look at myself, and wonder if I truly did.

Also:
"In an era of rampant grade inflation, some college students find it shocking to discover there are 26 letters in the alphabet"

le sigh.

Comments

[ficangel.livejournal.com]

Damn. When I was an adolescent, I was told, "Come home under you own power and don't call me from jail." As soon as I got a job, most of my financial decisions were left over to me. Blow my paychecks and be unable to afford insurance? Lose the keys. I knocked myself into a lot of walls and pouted a lot, but I think maybe I have a tougher overall callus because of it.

The second article certainly makes me wonder, though, as I took a communications course this past semester in which I honestly did not care. I wrote my speeches but didn't rehearse, had blurry conclusions, all of the basic signs of not particularly giving a damn. I did the math, figured that I would have a B but it still would not affect my GPA enough to put my scholarship in jeapordy, and decided that I'd done it to myself. When I got an A, I was ecstatic and figured that there was some kind of classroom participation angle that I hadn't figured into my formula. Now I wonder, and it honestly makes me a little sad. I knew I hadn't done the work to merit anything higher than a B, and I was okay with it.