Do you remember when you were 15?

Social lives thrived and parents were still more than… Do you remember when you were 15?

Social lives thrived and parents were still more than happy to foot the bill on most expenses; life was beautiful. If you were anything like me, you probably spent the majority of your time consumed with thoughts of naked women and fast cars.

At 15 I also had a job, was on the honor roll and was preparing for the PSAT.

Until recently, I had assumed that my experience as a teen was no different than anyone else’s, and for the most part, I was correct. As with all things in life however, there’s always an exception, and my discovery of this modern-day anomaly is today’s topic of discussion. Back in my day, children spoke only when spoken to and adults knew better than to spare the rod. Imagine my surprise when I caught a glimpse of modern-day parenting on MTV’s “My Super Sweet Sixteen.”

I realized quickly that for some children in America, parents are nothing more than ATM’s with passive voices. The children on this show believe they’re entitled to all their material wants, and that it’s customary to cuss out your parents and treat all others like doo-doo when their desires aren’t met.

According to www.teendrugabuse.us, “Kids, who have been given too much, too soon, grow up to be adults who have difficulty coping with life’s disappointments.” It goes on to say that, “They have a distorted sense of entitlement that gets in the way of successful relationships at home and in the workplace.”

While I’m not trying to downplay the difficulty of good parenting or minimize the value of building strong relationships with your kids, I am asking that parents understand their role as a disciplinary figure first and foremost, and a friend second.

Lack of discipline creates problems on many levels. First, it teaches children that they are always right and that there are no repercussions for their wrong actions. Second, it lessens the amount of respect that kids have, not just for their own parents, but other authority figures as well.

This lack of discipline just makes kids plain bad. The authorities at Focused Adolescent Services agree, “Disciplining teenagers is difficult, but it is critical if teens are to learn that their behavior has consequences.”

All of this got me thinking, what’s really going on with the parents in this country? Disciplining children seems to be at an all time low, replaced with feeble attempts at buying a child’s love and appeasing them with unwarranted or unnecessary freedoms.

Ariana Sanchez, an affluent teenager from Coral Gables, Fla., was quoted in Time magazine saying, “For my parents’ generation, to even have a car when you were a teenager was a big deal,” she says. “Today, if it’s not a Mercedes, it’s not special. I think,” she observes, “We lost the anti-materialistic philosophy they had … But then, it seems, so did they.”

It seems that overindulgence has become a new trend. A Time/CNN poll finds that 80 percent of people think kids today are more spoiled than kids of 10 or 15 years ago, and two-thirds of parents admit that their kids are spoiled. While I have nothing against building friendships with your kids, I do believe that it is impossible to be a good parent, an activity that requires a sense of superiority on the behalf of the adult, if you’re overly interested in trying to appease a teenager.

A perfect example of this is in “Mean Girls,” an excellent movie by the way, when Regina’s mother, the head “plastic,” or someone overly concerned with befriending her daughter and “staying young,” offers the kids her home as a safe haven for their drinking habits.

We need to stop teaching teens that they’re special. They’re not! Go ahead and tell Johnny that he’s bad, and he’s also dumb. And furthermore, tell him that if he doesn’t get his life together and start acting right, he isn’t going to amount to- well, doo-doo.

While this may seem very harsh to many of you, someone has to let these kids know that they are literally one of millions. Let them know that hard work and perseverance are the only way to true achievement.

Teendrugabuse.us also highlighted that overindulgent parents “are training kids to be irresponsible and helpless. The truth is that overindulging your children can undermine their competence and confidence.”

Waiting for your kids to get into trouble and then reprimanding them is not parenting. Talk to your child; ask them how their day was. Be their friend, but most importantly their parent, a positive adult role model.

If you’re interested in helping Brandon in the founding of the Joe Clarke School of Parenting, E-mail him at [email protected].