Are We Raising a Generation of Entitled South Asian Kids?
Parents want children to have every advantage they didn’t. But giving them more can come with unexpected costs.
When Sima Mehta was 5, she glanced out from her balcony only to see a child about her own age playing with a broken tire in the slums below her apartment. “That kid looked at me, and I picked up one of the toys, which was lying next to me, and I threw it to that child,” Mehta, now 57, recalled. Then, more children started to appear. So Mehta reached into her toy bucket, and began hurling down a cricket bat, toy trains, and even umbrellas and notebooks.
But her mother was less than enthused, rewarding this display with a “hard slap,” she said. “I grew up to be an aggressive person myself,” Mehta reflected. “That was the only way I could survive.”
For as long as we can remember, we’ve debated the role of parenting in a child’s development: is it nature, and thus unchangeable, or nurture? But as many South Asian families become more successful, they’re grappling with a new frontier. They worked hard so they could make their kids’ lives easier. But in doing so, are we removing necessary friction and raising a new class of, well, entitled kids? We delved into the research and spoke to experts to find out.