Parental Lethargy

Pivoting from the Tiger Mom conversation, Jeffrey Tucker points "to something that seems to be lost in this debate: the institutional context that has led to the American tendency to let the kids grow like weeds."

As a culture, we’ve come to trust someone else to take on the essential responsibility of molding the next generation.

The central plan has instilled a kind of parental lethargy. We let the state take over the core responsibilities from the age of 5 through 22, and then we are shocked to discover that kids leave college without a sense of work ethic, without marketable skills, and even without the ambition to succeed in the real world. So we let them become boarders in our homes, "reverts" who specialize in Wii and Facebook updates. Growing up takes longer and longer because the machinery we have in place saps individual initiative and punishes any outlying behavior.

 Greg Forster touched on some of these same ideas here.