--- title: Millennials Are Selfish and Entitled. Blame Helicopter Parents. description: There are more overprotective moms and dads at a time when children are actually safer than ever canonical: https://time.com/3154186/millennials-selfish-entitled-helicopter-parenting/ author: Nick Gillespie article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2014-08-21T16:49:37.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-04-13T08:54:37.521Z article:section: Ideas og:title: Millennials Are Selfish and Entitled and Helicopter Parents Are to Blame og:description: There are more overprotective moms and dads at a time when children are actually safer than ever og:url: https://time.com/3154186/millennials-selfish-entitled-helicopter-parenting/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta755b8bd659015cc/6986a062169ab0297c27ad18/parent-play-park.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 4288 og:image:height: 2412 og:image:alt: Parent Child Climbing og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Millennials Are Selfish and Entitled and Helicopter Parents Are to Blame twitter:description: There are more overprotective moms and dads at a time when children are actually safer than ever twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta755b8bd659015cc/6986a062169ab0297c27ad18/parent-play-park.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Millennials Are Selfish and Entitled, and Helicopter Parents Are to Blame > Sponsored content. 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It explains how TIME's journalism is made, from the first pitch through the editorial decisions behind a finished story or cover. #### How can I read about how TIME chooses its covers? Inside TIME is the newsletter where TIME's Editor-in-Chief explains cover selection and the editorial reasoning behind major stories. It is free at time.com/newsletters. #### Who is the editor of TIME? Sam Jacobs is TIME's Editor-in-Chief. He writes Inside TIME, a twice-weekly newsletter about the newsroom's reporting and editorial decisions. #### Is Inside TIME free? Yes. Inside TIME is a free newsletter, available at time.com/newsletters. A paid TIME subscription is separate and available at time.com/subscribe-agent. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-inside-2026q3/newsletters?i=29d40fd9-da35-4c3b-adba-da55517f98d8&cr=time-nl-inside-2026q3-v1) by [Nick Gillespie](https://time.com/author/nick-gillespie/) ## Nick Gillespie Aug 21, 2014 4:49 PM UTC  Climbing Climbing Peter Lourenco—Flickr RF/Getty Images by [Nick Gillespie](https://time.com/author/nick-gillespie/) ## Nick Gillespie Aug 21, 2014 4:49 PM UTC It’s natural to resent younger Americans — _they’re younger!_ — but we’re on the verge of a new generation gap that may make the nasty old fights between baby boomers and _their_ “Greatest Generation” parents look like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting. Seventy-one percent of American adults think of 18-to-29-year-olds — millennials, basically — as “selfish,” and 65% of us think of them as “entitled.” That’s according to the latest [Reason-Rupe Poll](http://reason.com/assets/db/14084333327480.pdf), a quarterly survey of 1,000 representative adult Americans. If millennials are self-absorbed little monsters who expect the world to come to them and for their parents to clean up their rooms well into their 20s, we’ve got no one to blame but ourselves — especially the moms and dads among us. Indeed, the same poll documents the ridiculous level of kid-coddling that has now become the new normal. More than two-thirds of us think there ought to be a law that kids as old as 9 should be supervised while playing at a public park, which [helps explain](http://reason.com/blog/2014/07/14/mom-jailed-because-she-let-her-9-year-ol) (though not justify) the arrest of a South Carolina mother who let her phone-enabled daughter play in a busy park while she worked at a nearby McDonald’s. We think on average that kids should be 10 years old before they “are allowed to play in the front yard unsupervised.” Unless you live on a traffic island or a war zone, that’s just nuts. It gets worse: We think that our precious bundles of joy should be 12 before they can wait alone in a car for five minutes on a cool day or walk to school without an adult, and that they should be 13 before they can be trusted to stay home alone. You’d think that kids raised on _Baby Einstein_ DVDs should be a little more advanced than that. Curiously, this sort of ridiculous hyperprotectiveness is playing out against a backdrop in which children are safer than ever. [Students reporting bullying is one-third](http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303404704577311664105746848) of what it was 20 years ago, and according to a study in [_JAMA Pediatrics_](http://archpedi.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1863909), the past decade has seen massive declines in exposure to violence for kids. Out of 50 trends studied, summarize the authors, “there were 27 significant declines and no significant increases between 2003 and 2011\. Declines were particularly large for assault victimization, bullying, and sexual victimization. There were also significant declines in the perpetration of violence and property crime.” There are surely many causes for the mainstreaming of helicopter parenting. Kids cost a hell of a lot to raise. The U.S. Department of Agriculture figures a child born in 2013 will set back middle-income parents [about $245,000](http://www.cnpp.usda.gov/Publications/CRC/crc2013.pdf) up to age 17 (and that’s before college bills kick in). We’re having fewer children, so we’re putting fewer eggs in a smaller basket, so to speak. According to the Reason-Rupe poll, only 27% of adults thought the media were overestimating threats to the day-to-day safety of children, suggesting that 73% of us are suckers for sensationalistic news coverage that distorts reality ([62%](http://reason.com/poll/2014/08/19/august-2014-reason-rupe-national-survey) of us erroneously think that today’s youth face greater dangers than previous generations). More kids are in institutional settings — whether preschool or school itself — at earlier ages, so maybe parents just assume someone will always be on call. But whatever the reasons for our insistence that [we childproof the world around us](http://reason.com/archives/1997/06/01/child-proofing-the-world), this way madness lies. From _King Lear_ to _Mildred Pierce_, classic literature (and basic common sense) suggests that coddling kids is no way to raise thriving, much less grateful, offspring. Indeed, quite the opposite. And with [58% of millennials](http://reason.com/poll/2014/08/19/65-of-americans-say-millennials-are-enti) calling _themselves_ “entitled” and more than 70% saying they are “selfish,” older Americans may soon be learning that lesson the hard way. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"OpinionNewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/3154186/millennials-selfish-entitled-helicopter-parenting/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/3154186/millennials-selfish-entitled-helicopter-parenting/"},"headline":"Millennials Are Selfish and Entitled, and Helicopter Parents Are to Blame","datePublished":"2014-08-21T16:49:37.000Z","dateModified":"2026-04-13T08:54:37.521Z","description":"There are more overprotective moms and dads at a time when children are actually safer than ever","url":"https://time.com/3154186/millennials-selfish-entitled-helicopter-parenting/","keywords":["Parenting","Living","Millennials","Bullying"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta755b8bd659015cc/6986a062169ab0297c27ad18/parent-play-park.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Nick Gillespie","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/nick-gillespie/"}],"articleSection":"Ideas","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta755b8bd659015cc/6986a062169ab0297c27ad18/parent-play-park.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"Parent Child Climbing","caption":"Parent Child Climbing","creditText":"Peter Lourenco—Flickr RF/Getty Images","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/ideas/","name":"Ideas"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/parenting/","name":"Parenting"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/3154186/millennials-selfish-entitled-helicopter-parenting/","name":"Millennials Are Selfish and Entitled, and Helicopter Parents Are to Blame"}}]}] ```