There have been a lot of things going on in our country and community lately that make me reaffirm my suspicions that society is becoming increasingly ‘soft’ and/or spoiled. As I received an assignment for English this week where I had to find examples of bullying I came across so many examples of kids coming home and telling their parents they got bullied and their parents immediately calling the school or the police. I also came across a quote from Mary Mitchell who wrote an article for the Chicago Sun-Times that read, “Back in the day, my parents had their own way of handling bullies. When we came running home, my mother would open the door and push us back out to confront our tormentors.”

I hate how nowadays whenever anyone has a problem they run to their parents or the police or whomever else to help them instead of doing something about it themselves first. Now I am not an advocate for bullying whatsoever. What I’m trying to portray is that I think we’re making some things that used to just be the norm, a huge deal.

In the article that Mitchell wrote, she outlines a situation where a kid came home to his dad and said that he chipped his tooth when he was running away from bullies who had tripped him. However, the school told a different side of the story, where two students were running down the hallway and the one fell and chipped his tooth. So what I’m trying to say is that sometimes kids mistake their own mistakes or ‘horseplay’ for bullying from other kids.

Also, I think that parents are babying their children more  than they used to. According to a July 2012 National Consumers League survey, nearly 60 percent of adults with kids aged from 10 to 13 (tweens) had bought their child a cell phone. I didn’t get my first cell phone until I was 14-years-old and I don’t think that the world has changed so much as to justify the need for a 10-year-old, a fifth or sixth grader, to have a cell phone. I didn’t need one when I got mine and honestly could have gone without it until I started driving myself; before that the phone was purely just for entertainment purposes.

Maybe it’s just me, or maybe it’s just Midland, but I think as a society that we need to be a little tougher on our kids socially if we don’t want a generation of kids who are going to run to someone else to solve their problems.