A Helping Hand Vs. A Handout

I keep hearing complaints about people feeling entitled to living the good life but unwilling to work for it but, from where I’m sitting, I see these same people contributing to that sense of entitlement that’s permeating our society.

On the one hand, it’s understandable that you want to give your children more than you had, but on the other hand, if you do that, you will probably be contributing to their sense of entitlement.

I was just talking to a woman who is barely scraping by and she is putting her nineteen-year-old through college. I asked, what I thought was a logical question, “Why don’t you send him to a community college since it costs so much less than the college he’s attending?” Her response was that he loves the school and if she made him go to a community college, he would stop talking to her.

Whoa!! Her nineteen-year-old son would stop talking to her if she transferred him to a community college? Talk about entitlement issues. Then I asked her if he could get a part-time job and contribute some money toward his tuition and her response was that when she was young, all she had time for was studying and working; she had no time for a social life and she doesn’t want that for her son.

So then I asked her why he couldn’t have a little bit of a social life if he works fifteen hours a week, and her answer was the same. It was a catch 22. She wants a different life for herself because she’s feeling like a prisoner. She’s depressed at the thought of having no money and doesn’t see a way out of this situation but she’s not willing to make any changes.

She wasn’t even receptive to my suggestion that he go to the public library and look up the thousands of scholarships that go unclaimed every year and start making applications. She didn’t even want him to investigate the possibility of getting some grants.

This woman probably thinks I’m hard-hearted but I told her that if she’s not willing to change anything, she shouldn’t expect a different outcome. And I also told her that she’s not doing her son any favors because he’s not being given any responsibilities and he’s having everything handed to him on a silver platter. How can you become a man if you’re still being treated like a child?

If this is how we’re raising our children, can we really complain about how our society is rife with people expecting handouts? If we do nothing to remedy this travesty, can we really expect anything to change?

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