Preface

Why am I writing this book? Look around. Our kids are a mess! They are overmedicated, overindulged, overweight, overentertained, undereducated, underachieving, underdisciplined, disrespectful, illiterate brats with a sense of entitlement that is crippling our society. And it has to change!

Don’t agree? Then you aren’t paying attention.

“Not my kid,” you say? Then you aren’t paying attention.

If you were paying attention, then you would know that our society is full of kids who can’t read, can’t write (except with their thumbs when texting on their cell phones), and think that their teachers, their employers, their government and their parents owe them a living.

Yeah, yeah, there are exceptions. If you know of one, count your lucky stars. If you have actually raised one of those exceptions, then bless you. And thank you. We all owe you a debt of gratitude for raising a productive, contributing, responsible member of society. I’d hug your neck if I could.

For the rest of you, wake up. Your kids are a disaster.

How do I know that young people are such a mess? Take a quick trip to the mall. You’ll see insolent teens smoking cigarettes outside the front doors, skateboarding punks that dominate the sidewalks, and you will see the young, professional “$30,000 millionaires” buying crap they can’t afford to feel good about themselves and impress people who don’t give a crap about them.

While you are there, I want you to buy a cup of coffee. You will be lucky to get a young person working in the coffee shop to look you in the eye, say “thank you” or do much more than grunt at you. Yet they are ticked off if you don’t drop money in the tip jar.

Then walk into any retail store. You will be lucky if you can get the employees to stop talking to one another long enough to notice you are in the store, or put down their cell phones long enough to speak to you.

When you leave the mall, go home and turn on your television and watch the news for a while. You will see that it’s full of stories of people who bought houses they can’t afford and want to blame the predatory lenders for giving them the money, even though they lied on their credit application to get it. You might also hear stories about how on average American students are ranked below two-thirds of other countries.

Then I want you to flip the channel to any of the entertainment news shows. Check out Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood, or TMZ. Look at how the young Hollywood elite behave. See them drunk, without their underwear, crashing their cars, filming their sex lives. Then know that these are the role models for your kids.

Then turn the channel to ESPN or any of the other sports news shows and see how our athletes are being busted for drug abuse, rape, dogfighting and any other number of felonies and know again that these are the role models for today’s youth.

“Hold it, Larry; I thought this was a parenting book.” It is. And all of these issues are parenting problems.

Pay attention here.

Got it? Have I been clear or should I keep adding to the list because, believe me, I could. Here is what it comes down to: All societal problems could pretty much be prevented through better parenting. Are there exceptions? Of course there are. There are always exceptions, so don’t bother raising any with me. I know about them already. My point is that for the most part, the problems in our society exist because of lousy training from Mama and Daddy.

And don’t bring up the whole “a lot of people don’t have a mama and daddy to teach them, Larry.” I am aware. For now, I’ll give all of those people a pass. Not for long. No one gets a pass for long. Even the people who didn’t have parents, had lousy parents or were raised by wolves, sooner or later have to learn and demonstrate personal responsibility. But it still goes back to the fact that kids learn or don’t learn their values and what is and isn’t acceptable behavior from their parents. Those kids grow into adults and practice that behavior in their personal and professional lives, creating a society that reflects the cumulative result of parental training.

Meaning: Messed-up society? Messed-up parenting.

Want to fix the world? Fix the parents.

The only reason we have stupid kids is because we have such stupid parents. The goal of this book is to fix stupid kids by fixing their stupid parents!

And that means: Don’t expect to change your kid’s behavior, unless you are willing to change your own.

“Children might or might not be a blessing,
but to create them and then fail them
was surely damnation.”

—Lois McMaster Bujold, Barrayar


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