Parenthood

There's a lot of ways to be a good parent. There's lots of ways to be a bad parent. It's a given (at least in our Western culture) that you do your best to love your kids, protect them and give them every opportunity to succeed in life. Oh yeah, feed them and clothe them too! My main objectives as a parent where to guide my children toward the ultimate goal of being responsible adults. After all, for the majority of their lives they would be adults. Part of this long-range goal was to encourage them to think, to be able to figure out how to solve problems on their own and to take responsibility for their actions. One school of parenting thought is to do everything for your kids and cater to their every want and need; enroll them in every sport and activity, drop everything to drive them to parties, buy them whatever they want. There are definitely some long-range benefits to giving your children a wide variety of experiences and to allow them to enjoy their childhood, and I'd never fault a parent for sacrificing in order to provide a spectrum of opportunities for a child. But what I have observed is that in many cases a sense of entitlement develops in a child who is given everything. They see this as the natural order of things and have little or no appreciation for the lengths which their parents go through to give them this life. Parents are treated disrespectfully in private and in public. This entitlement and disrespect carries over into school and eventually into the wide world of employment.

Giving your child everything, without also teaching them to value what they have been given isn't doing them any favors. It's not the giving and the doing that is the problem, it's the failure to teach that a price is being paid  by someone for all that opportunity.