My guest this week is Dr. Ramani Durvasula, a psychologist, professor and relationship expert at TONE Networks. She explains how parental entitlement is becoming an epidemic and what parents and educators,who are being bullied by other parents, should do. She wrote a wonderful article about this epidemic and explains it so much better than I ever could. So, with her permission, I am reposting it here so you can read along as you listen to my interview with her.
The New Bully In The School Yard: Mom and Dad
By Dr. Ramani Durvasula
The father who insists his son start and play in every game.
The mother who demands that a school procedure related to college applications be revised for her child.
The parent who calls the college admission’s officer or their child’s teacher and berates them for not admitting them or giving them a poor grade.
The mother who is a “room mother” who insists that her rigid rules be followed vis-à-vis cupcakes, library volunteering, and Halloween parades and shames those who do not adhere to her rules and edicts.
The parent who attempts to bribe a coach, teacher, school administrator or other official to ensure smoother passage for his child.
Parental entitlement appears to be the new world order. Parents who believe their children are entitled to special treatment, even if that results in other children receiving a lesser opportunity. It’s a bit of a blind spot, as the entitled parents are not typically cruel, they are not intentionally depriving another child, but they are generally unempathic, mindless and clueless. They don’t really care that another child would need to be deprived for their child to get his way.
There is a Darwinian vibration in the air of late, hypercompetitive parenting is becoming increasingly common, complemented by trends such as helicopter parenting and a competitive college admissions environment. Parents are buying into the “survival of the fittest” as a guide to parenting. Parents feel judged by outcomes rather than remaining focused on process. A parent may believe that only by getting Junior to the top spot in ballet troupe, the basketball team, the debate team, the elite university, or the beauty pageant are they being a “good” parent. In this way, it doesn’t matter HOW they got there, as long as they get there.
Parental entitlement can also be a gateway to parental bullying, and its close cousin – parental shaming. Parents who bully may attempt to bully teachers, school administrators, coaches, university administrators, and even other parents. It’s a safe bet that a parental bully is a bully in other arenas, as bullying is a pattern that tends to generalize across all relationships. A child just becomes an extension of the parent, and a place to exercise their entitlement. Queen bees and alpha moms and dads often buzz around with the entitled indifference they have had their entire lives, and now instead of bullying for themselves, they bully on behalf of their children.
Entitled parents tend to behave in accordance with their own pre-existing patterns of entitlement, narcissism, psychopathy, or just being a high-conflict kind of person. They tend to wear blinders to the needs or feelings of other people, in what they believe, is a well-motivated drive to “advocate” for their child. And there’s the rub – there is a difference between advocacy and entitlement. An advocate appropriately interacts with an institution or individual, communicates about a child’s needs, attempts to craft a collaborative plan, but is not blind to the needs of other children or parents.
Incivility appears to be the new black and combativeness is sadly often rewarded. Risk averse school districts, and battle-weary educators often relent to the squawks of high demand parental bullies. This serves solely to reward the bullying parents to keep steamrolling their child through the system. What starts with hustling to get a child into an “elite preschool” at any cost,
