The Role of Parents

I had a great visit yesterday with a group of senior pastors of large churches in Dallas about the entitlement mentality of the twenty-something culture. It seems now that we're growing up and getting jobs, employers are having a difficult time with us because we think the "real world" ought to be run like kindergarten: The employer ought to cater to us. We need to be running point on every decision that's made organization-wide. Give us a bad performance review and we'll have our parents call you (it happens, seriously). They don't want to do the hard parts of a job - only the stuff they're "made to do."

We've been told our whole life that we could grow up to be anything we want to be, and we believed it was our right. And it has made us impossible to work with.

Our middle-school pastor is one of the twenty-somethings on staff at McKinney who is different. He works his tail off, and does a phenomenal job. No, your church can't have him. But one time someone asked him why he was different from the other twenty-somethings you read about, and I thought his answer was pretty profound: "If I was to ever cop that entitlement attitude, my dad would beat my butt."

That's seriously the right answer to the question. Parents who love their children well, and point them in a realistic direction for their lives make all the difference in the world for their future employers.