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“Why should I clean up the dishes?”

“My friends parents bought it for them, so you should buy it for me”?

Sound familiar?

Do your children ever expect you to buy something for them that they really didn’t need? Or do they assume they don’t need to help around the house?  Welcome to what is known as the Silver platter generation. Some people call it the ‘entitled’ generation. They are both excellent expressions for what is really going on.

We want our children to have it better than us. We don’t want them to have to go through as many struggles. We want a better life for them. But if those struggles were what made us become reliable, responsible adults then why wouldn’t we want our children going through those same struggles. If we learned by hard work, why are we expecting anything less from them? If we had to learn that if you only have $100 and your bill came to $120, you had to put $20 worth back, then why can’t our children learn the same way?

We have become a generation of buy now, pay later, and we have taught our children that it is not important to save up money before they buy. So when our children are so deep in debt, it is no one else’s fault but ours if we have not taught our children they cannot have it all.

If you want your children to learn how to be responsible adults you need to teach them.

There are many ways to do this, household chores, getting jobs and showing them how to save half/spend half of any money they get, talk to them about bills, budgeting, getting and/or showing them how bank accounts work, getting them involved in volunteer work. The point is to make sure you are doing all you can to make your child capable of taking care of themselves when they move out. Not only in money matters, but in household issues as well.

My children had chores. By the time they were teens they were all doing their own laundry, cleaning their own rooms and making their own lunches for school. In addition, they all had weekly chores and we would change those up so that they all learned how to clean bathrooms, do garbage, dust, vacuum/sweep, cut grass, shovel driveway and so on.

Your children are not cheap maids and they should not be doing the jobs for you because you don’t want to do them. However, I say to my children: “if you live in this house and are making part of the mess then you need to also be part of the solution (meaning cleaning it up)”. To make it fair I switch up the chores so as not to burden just one person with the worse jobs. I make sure they know that we the adults have chores to do well.

Let’s not complain our children “don’t do anything” and continue to make a generation of entitled adults. Let’s do something about it and train our children to be the best adults they can be in everything in life. Not just by being kind and loving, but also by being productive adults in our society.

If you children constantly want things and can’t see your reasons for not buying them more click here.

If your adult children are not moving out. click here.

*http://www.dietsinreview.com/slideshows/celebrities-wed-like-to-see-lose-weight/celebrities-wed-like-to-see-lose-weight/