Entitlement Mentality

Entitlement mentality is ruining our country. You can't really start there though, because that is the result. You can go back a few steps and see it is ruining our states, our city budgets, our companies. Back further though and we can see it all starts with the individual. How did we end up here? Where did this entitlement mentality come from??

My feeling is we all believe self-esteem is important. I believe it, and I bet most Americans do too. We want our kids to be confident and sure of themselves. As our country has gotten wealthier over the generations, we lost sight of how people get self-esteem, and as parents we have tried to give self-esteem to our kids. We started doing some crazy things like giving our kids trophies for participating, giving 12th place ribbons, turning the score off in games if one team is losing badly and so forth. All to protect our kids' fragile self-esteems. The thinking is, "if they don't feel failure, they will feel like winners". The problem with that though, is it's not really winning. And worse, the child doesn't know the joy of accomplishment.

There has to be a chance of failure in order for the joy of accomplishment to feel earned. The reality is you can't give self-esteem to someone - they have to earn it. And when people live with an earning mentality, that have effectively eradicated entitlement.