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David F. Brooks, 24 April 2015:
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| Photo by David Ake/Getty Images. |
David F. Brooks, 24 April 2015:
There are two great defining features of child-rearing today. First, children are now praised to an unprecedented degree. As Dorothy Parker once joked, American children aren’t raised; they are incited. They are given food, shelter and applause. That’s a thousand times more true today. Children are incessantly told how special they are.Then the other great defining feature in that column is his contrdictory thesis that children aren't praised unless they do something meritocratic, like their homework, or a victory in a sporting or artistic activity, so that they will grow up thinking their parents' love is conditional, which will make them resentful, risk-averse, and "driven by internalized pressures more than by real freedom of choice," which is a bad thing, unless of course, as is so often the case in the thinking of David Brooks, it isn't, as last November, when real freedom of choice was the bothsides curse of modern society:
