
Spoiled Rotten (2012) - Rolpa
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/07/02/spoiled-rotten
======
kweks
A year or so ago I was in Wadi Rum, the desert in the south of Jordan, near
the Saudi border.

I spent a few days with a young bedouin, who in the absence of his parents,
maintained the extended family, had mounted a successful business, spoke
several languages fluently, hunted, played the jordanian mandolin, was humble
yet strong. He was one of the most stable, centered, culutured, balanced and
smart people I've ever met.

All of this at the ripe age of 19.

It made me consider his peers of my EU hometown Paris, and the only thing that
came to mind was: Where has it gone so wrong. Western culture is raising
generations of weak-minded, watery examples of sloth.

Travel really opens your eyes to the fact that determination, culture and
independance are muscles that can be trained, apparently like their physical
analogues: through reps.

~~~
s_q_b
These arguments that primitive cultures produce stronger more capable
individuals ignores the inherent massive trade offs.

Modern healthcare, farming, family planning, improved access to education, and
the liberation of women cause an extended adolescence.

In exchange, you get to live like a king, enjoy unprecedented personal
security, have a constant supply of goods from the world over, and very
decreased likliehood of dying.

 _Of course_ primitive cultures produce more rugged individuals. It's not that
their methods of living are superior.

It's that everyone else is already dead.

~~~
kiba
Doesn't really jive with the article.

Being self independent in a modern society means being able to find a job, tie
one's shoes, take out the trash, do homework and so on all without active
management by the parental units.

It doesn't mean surviving out in the wilderness.

~~~
s_q_b
"Able to find a job" sounds very easy from our vantage point. For the majority
of people, it most assuredly is not.

And that is the root of the problem.

~~~
antisthenes
Finding a job is easy.

Finding a job that pays the bills and affords the worker a certain lifestyle
is the difficult part.

------
tsunamifury
The article never considers that the network effect of humanity may add up to
a more productive whole, even if it appears to be made up of less productive
individuals. This is the very nature of teamwork, and it's a good thing. Young
people have to take longer to figure out what they should do, they can play
and explore more, and make mistakes that don't starve their family.

I've observed the exact opposite of the folksyism of this article. Young
people with increased play time were able to find more meaningful and more
lucrative long term positions due to the luxury of explorations. Those forced
to "grow up" early ended up in dead end positions due to suboptimization for
short term needs.

But the New Yorker is hung up on the trope of individual success, as is the
cultural center they arise from.

------
jimhefferon
I have the sense I am a lot older than many readers here. So here are two old
man's observations for those with young kids, or those looking forward to that
who read this article. I don't claim these are the most important things, just
that they are things I have seen that others don't seem to comment on.

1) In the US at least so many people are living away from family and often
even friends. My wife and I were essentially on our own. We did not have the
wisdom of people who had done it and learned (hence this post and I expect the
article ..). We had the general idea of helping, but I certainly think we
helped too much (our kids are OK, not living at home for one thing).

2) At least some of American parenting ratcheting-up is a contest among
mothers. "I'm a better mother because my daughter takes both piano and horse-
riding." It is not a pretty truth, but it is nonetheless a truth.

------
lisa_henderson
Anyone who has been China can tell you this is wrong:

"With the exception of the imperial offspring of the Ming dynasty and the
dauphins of pre-Revolutionary France, contemporary American kids may represent
the most indulged young people in the history of the world."

Affluent kids in China are also very much indulged, mostly by grandparents.

The main factor at work here is not a mystery: the demographic transition that
began in the West around 1850. When families have 20 children, the children
are under pressure to prove their worth to the family, relative to all the
other children. They compete with each other to show their worth. But when a
family only has one child, the parents and grandparents compete to win the
favor of the child.

There are nuances, that vary from country to country, but the primary force at
work here is the demographic transition.

~~~
Kristine1975
_> the children are under pressure to prove their worth to the family_

This sounds like a really dysfunctional family to me.

~~~
lisa_henderson
When there is no food, the parents need to decide which children will die.
This is true in all species. This is what leads to the emergence of specific
neotenic traits that in the context of humans we regard as "cute" or
"adorable" or, in a more sinister context, "superior". Consider skin color as
an influence on parental investment:

[https://books.google.com/books?id=LSCf0j5lNeYC&pg=PA142&lpg=...](https://books.google.com/books?id=LSCf0j5lNeYC&pg=PA142&lpg=PA142&dq=neotenic+parental+investment&source=bl&ots=qIxYHkKojG&sig=xRGTJqjkSq0vccSozQW52A0LAnw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiSpaHWq8bNAhXIWT4KHbWBDeUQ6AEIQDAD#v=onepage&q=neotenic%20parental%20investment&f=false)

Also, fitness and kinship:

[https://books.google.com/books?id=2XH0CwAAQBAJ&pg=PA113&lpg=...](https://books.google.com/books?id=2XH0CwAAQBAJ&pg=PA113&lpg=PA113&dq=neotenic+parental+investment&source=bl&ots=BRIRbfmIKe&sig=g5tM2gbj_RAMw8msr7RbGYKssz0&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiSpaHWq8bNAhXIWT4KHbWBDeUQ6AEIRDAF#v=onepage&q=neotenic%20parental%20investment&f=false)

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
Let's suppose for a moment that this is true. In that case, as a human
behavior, we should be able to find such acts described in the historical
record and in particular in literature.

Can you name three such examples?

~~~
lisa_henderson
Are you joking? Every human society had ways of killing off their children,
mostly the daughters since they are regarded as less valuable than sons.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide)

"In many past societies, certain forms of infanticide were considered
permissible. In some countries, female infanticide is more common than the
killing of male offspring, due to sex-selective infanticide.[3] In China for
example, the gender gap between males and females aged 0–19 year old was
estimated to be 25 million in 2010 by the United Nations Population Fund."

Also:

"The historical Greeks considered the practice of adult and child sacrifice
barbarous,[30] however, the exposure of newborns was widely practiced in
ancient Greece, it was even advocated by Aristotle in the case of congenital
deformity "

In her Nobel winning novel, The Good Earth, Pearl Buck recounts how the
family, during a famine, allows the daughter to starve to death, but then at
the last moment the father changes his mind and gives her some food. The child
grows up brain damaged, having been deprived of food for several days, when
she was only 1 or 2 years old. This part of the novel (like everything else in
the novel) has been praised for its realism.

Around the year 610, early in his preaching, one of Muhammad's first
revelations from Allah is that parents should no longer leave their newborn
daughters to die in the desert. He would not have felt the need to make this
pronouncement unless it was a common practice. And remember that his own
sister had been set out in the desert and allowed to die as soon as she was
born.

------
Kristine1975
Socrates knew what's up:

 _The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority;
they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.
Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer
rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before
company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize
their teachers._

(I know the quote is not really by Socrates)

------
ajb
Spoiled kids and 'adultesence' are portrayed here as the same issue. But I
think in the latter case, a lot of superficially immature behaviour is just a
form of status signalling. It's showing that you (or your family) has enough
social, financial and educational capital that you can afford to play even in
your twenties, when someone with less would be working all hours in a poorly
paid job to get by.

~~~
_yosefk
I can't recommend treating immature behavior as a reliable signal of status,
having seen a lot of immature people with no social, financial or educational
capital whatsoever who were simply immature.

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trhway
well, it is kind obvious - being able to do things vs. being able to demand
and command of others to do things - skilled worker vs. manager/executive -
natural selection rules, it is just selecting for different qualities in the
post-post-industrial society than it was doing it in the pre-industrial.

~~~
kkarakk
interesting viewpoint. are we simply training our kids to be comfortable with
ordering things to do tasks for us- the computer,the internet(services), the
robot? vs trying to micromanage everything and failing miserably

------
lunchTime42
The problem is that actually its not the parents spoiling there kids, its that
a whole industry is using them as lever to sell goods and undermines parental
authority systematically. You can not win against george lucas, without
looking like you are on the dark side.

They are so much more enthusiastic consumers, it would be a real shame if
those know-it-all parents could hold them back.

