A generation encased in bubble wrap

Aside from the thought of Mike Tyson's 100 pigeons, nothing makes me projectile vomit faster than what has come to be know as "helicopter parents."  In case this term is new to you, these are people who hover over their kids--even through college and into adulthood--making sure that every aspect of their lives goes smoothly.

Well, it seems they've had to cancel the annual Easter egg hunt in Colorado Springs this year.  According to this article, organizers cite "the behavior of aggressive parents who swarmed into the tiny park last year, determined that their kids get an egg."  Evidently last year the hunt was over in seconds because parents jumped a rope set up to allow only children into the park.

Excuse me while I wipe the vomit off the wall.

I've written about this before, but as you can tell, I'm not done with the rant.  My blogging buddy, Debbie, over at From Venting to Viggo also wrote on this topic earlier this week.  You and I both know she's a complete whack job, but she makes a lot of good points.

What the hell is wrong with these people?  Do they think they're doing these kids any favors?  Parents are writing their kids' college essays, badgering professors about grades, and mommies and daddies are even in on job negotiations these days.  We're cultivating a generation of little pussies.  Pussy Nation. 

Ron Alsop is a former Wall Street Journal reporter and author of The Trophy Kids Grow Up, which examines the "millennial children" generation.  He says, "That's the perfect metaphor for millennial children. They (parents) can't stay out of their children's lives. They don't give their children enough chances to learn from hard knocks, mistakes."

My parents didn't even know where we were half the time.  More than half.

 Here's the book's description.  Interesting.

"The first wave of the Millennial Generation—born between 1980 and 2001—is entering the work force, and employers are facing some of the biggest management challenges they’ve ever encountered. They are trying to integrate the most demanding and most coddled generation in history into a workplace shaped by the driven baby-boom generation. Like them or not, the millennials are America future work force. They are actually a larger group than the boomers—92 million vs. 78 million."

So I guess these kids never heard the words "YOU WANT SOMETHING TO CRY ABOUT? I'LL GIVE YOU SOMETHING TO CRY ABOUT!"

One of the Amazon reviewers makes a good point in that (no surprise) this phenomenon pertains to the angels of the upper and middle classes. He asks,

"What about the rest of us Millenials, though? The ones who come from lower-Middle Class and Working-Class backgrounds? We represent a majority of the Millenial population, but Alsop has precious little to say about us except in a handful of polls aimed at our general age demographic. These are the kids who have to work in the increasingly large number of low-paying service jobs, who go to junior and state colleges. The kids who don't spend 'at least a summer' studying abroad because that's several thousand dollars that we can't afford to part with. The kids who end up with increasingly large amounts of student loan debt because our parents can't afford to coddle us."

That's the kid I want to work with.  And there are plenty of them out there. 

So I've decided that the next time I need a financial adviser, dentist, physician or other professional, my determination to enlist their services will depend on their answer to this question:  "How old were you when your parents stopped paying your car insurance and cell phone bill?"