How do parents avoid raising entitled, self-absorbed adults?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I was reading the Jobs and Careers forum when this question popped up:

https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/1194239.page

TLDR: A 22 year-old girl from a wealthy family is bemoaning how "everyone in her life has abandoned her" because... She has the privilege of ending up with a Computer Science degree from an excellent college. But still, she can only focus on the negatives in her life and not the wonderful blessings she has!

My sister is like this; my mom calls her an "injustice collector" as she regularly comes to family gatherings and blathers on about how "abusive" my mom and dad were to her as a child (spoiler alert: there was no abuse at all). Because of her extreme sensitivity, inflexibility, selfishness, and lack of empathy, my sister has had a middling career and a divorce (with no kids).

How do I avoid raising such selfish, entitled kids? My parents mostly raised my sister and I the same way, and we ended up totally different. My biggest fear would be for my kids to end up as "injustice collectors" like my sister or the post in the Jobs Forum that I linked above.

i have read zero responses to your initial q but I feel bad for your kids.
This person clearly states she has been dx with borderline personality disorder. So she is not just 'entitled' she has mental health issues that may be lifelong. Despite that, she is clearly trying to sort her life out despite battling depression and probably anxiety. She needs to do some intensive therapy and to have parents who take a long hard look with her at who she is and what she can achieve and help her find something more suited to her. Despite all her issues she sucked it up and kept going.
you sound like you belong in the boomer generation.

Agreed, I don't really get the negative response to that OP. I mean, it's a long post and there is a lot of navel gazing but that's not unusual for that specific age and it's not like anyone is required to read it. I have a lot of empathy for her and actually think she displayed a decent amount of empathy for her parents and self awareness in her post.

Also, externally, the people in this thread and the other one would probably not find her entitled or self-absorbed if they met her in person. They'd be wowed by her academic accomplishments and assume she had everything all together and had life figured out. They'd dismiss anything negative she said as just nerves or youth and assume she didn't have any *real* problems. Just like her parents have already told her.

Which brings me to another observation -- I think sometimes parents get angry when their kids graduate from college and flounder because they view it as ingratitude for the "gift" of the college education. But while college is of course a great opportunity, parents can very easily turn it from a gift to an obligation, and then expectation that your child will be grateful for this obligation is weird -- no one is grateful for obligation. In this case, the parents essentially forced this girl to pursue a highly competitive and academically demanding area of study that she had zero interest in, for no other reason than because they believe it will be lucrative. They want her to be grateful to them for forcing her to work very hard at something she hates in the hopes of then getting to continue working hard at something she hates so that she can make a lot of money. And now if she doesn't make a lot of money, they will blame it entirely on her even though she's the one who has been working at THEIR dream for all these years. Of course she's ungrateful! It wasn't a gift! It was a weighty obligation that robbed her of an opportunity to actually find a career that made sense for her. I'd be ungrateful too.

This is psychotic. You're extremely entitled if you genuinely believe this.

1. Most people are not going to find fulfillment in their careers. For 95% of people, a job is just that -- a job. Nothing more, nothing less. It's reasonable for parents to push their kids into CS for good pay and work-life balance. Being ungrateful and resentful of your parents for that shows a lack of maturity and real-world smarts.

2. It's rare to have parents who can pay for 4 years of college. Of course, the poster's parents are doctors, so they could afford to. But most Americans don't have doctor parents. The poster needs to show gratitude to her parents for paying her tuition, even for a semester abroad! Most people would kill to be in her position.

[Anonymous]

Don’t give empty threats when they are kids