Modern parents are really no better. I really try to find humour in it but these are human lives being messed up because of the way children are raised. The circus we went to was one example.
 
One thing that really gets to me is the way parents baby their kids these days. Now this IS a Millennial thing and I can't for the life of me figure it out.
 
When I was younger, we had two bus stops on my street. One in front of my house and one down the road a bit. We would all gather at a bus stop on occasion with no issues in the middle of winter. It wasn't exactly walking 2 miles up hill both ways in 4 feet of snow, but it could get damn cold outside. We would simply put on another layer and go.
 
Now days when I travel up the mountain in the morning, no joke... the bus stops about every 30 feet to pick up the kids! Also, those kids are sitting in SUVs and not even waiting at the road for the bus so it takes them another minute in a half to wait for the bus to stop, get out of the car and get on the bus. There is nothing that makes me more road ragey at 8am that having to follow those buses. I don't get why the kids don't all gather in one or two spots like we use to and wait. It backs up traffic for sometimes a mile because it's a two lane road with no passing.

Yeah when people have a go at Millennials I don't think they're blaming them for who they are. It's not as if Millennials as a generation got together and hatched a plot to be like they are. There are many reasons they are like they are, and many reasons why they're different from previous generations.

One of those reasons is social media. Millennials (the younger ones anyway) are the first generation who went through the important adolescent development of their minds in an environment saturated with Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and the like. I don't think it's a stretch to speculate that the extremely inflated narcissism we see in kids today is a consequence of the attention seeking culture of social media. It's also given them ridiculously deluded expectations of life, because of the proximity to the daily lives of their favorite celebrities that social media has allowed. Complicated issues are debated by way of shallow slogans and memes and opinions are influenced by a mass, self reinforcing kind of common stupidity.

That's before you get into the culture of bullying, harassment and mockery which was always part of adolescent life to some degree but which has been amplified 1000 fold by social media. When social interaction happens through screens in partial or complete anonymity, the gloves are off. Kids are becoming more cruel and less empathatic than ever because they don't have to deal with the real world consequences of being nasty to someone online. Not only that but because of the whole meme and slogan driven culture of "social justice" which is pumped out by trendy sites like Buzzfeed, these same kids feel like they're on some higher plane of morality. Funny isn't it, despite bullying each other to the point of suicide online they see themselves as being morally superior to previous generations because they retweet fashionable slogans and take fashionable stances on popular social issues.

I know one thing for certain. I am ever thankful that there was no internet and no cellphones before I was well into my 30s. I remember being a teen. I remember being a 20something and I KNOW how much better life was because I/we could go out and party or go camping in the country with no chance at all of someone calling when I was in no condition to talk, or when I was. There was little chance of my parents being more involved in my personal life past what I allowed them to know (unless I came home smelling like a Marlboro).
I am thankful for that solitude... for that personal space, and no Walkman or any other personal music device. When you walked somewhere you heard the sounds around you and you thought about things.
It seems like there is always two sides to progress.
J

Collage,excellent metaphor.  Mine was more trump l'oeil (sic(k))

I still have my Sting Ray. My parents let my nephew ride it after I moved out and before I thought of getting it, or had a place for it. He left if out in the weather and now it's still in pretty good shape but needs a bit of restoration. I had a drag slick on the back, still do! It's a good bike, the original modern bike. My dad bought mine though.
 
Good memories.
J