Unpopular opinion on parenting

ENTITLED turds don’t exist in a vacuum. They don’t come from a parallel universe. They are birthed into the world, molded by experiences in the household and in communities. As what I have learned in my first sem in criminology, how we navigate relationships and circumstances in our lives are formed due to both the gene lottery and learned behavior.

The fight or flight instinct may be in our genes. But, whether you’re in the deep end of the gene pool or in the shallow part of it, doesn’t fully dictate whether you’ll punch or run from an irritant.

It just dictates your baseline. The amygdala fires up and cortisol spikes — that’s the DNA lottery at work. But what happens next? That’s where the parents are supposed to step in.

Biology might load the gun, but learned behavior pulls the trigger.

Let’s look at basic behavioral psychology — specifically, operant conditioning. It’s a concept so straightforward we use it to train lab rats, yet modern parents continually bungle it.

When a child throws a violent tantrum and is immediately pacified with a screen or a panicked apology for “invalidating their feelings,” that isn’t enlightened parenting. That is the positive reinforcement of tyranny.

This brings us to the bizarre modern cult of “child worship.”

This isn’t about genuinely loving your kids or ensuring they have a secure attachment style — that’s just basic developmental biology. Child worship is the phenomenon where parents operate not as authority figures, but as PR managers and HR departments for their offspring. It is the total eradication of friction in the name of “gentle parenting” gone utterly rogue.

I used to have a Facebook friend — a former journalist turned teacher whom I met, ironically enough, at a Peace and Conflict Journalism Network training. In one of his posts preaching the gospel of “never discipline a child under any circumstances,” I simply pointed out that this brand of child worship does kids absolutely zero favors. Naturally, he applied his conflict-resolution training perfectly: he threw a virtual tantrum and blocked me.

Biologically speaking, psychological resilience requires resistance. When a parent neurotically swoops in to neutralize every minor inconvenience, they are actively stunting the child’s neurological development. The prefrontal cortex — the brain’s notoriously squishy impulse-control center — needs to experience frustration to learn self-regulation.

By bubble-wrapping their existence, child-worshipping parents create a relentless dopamine loop where any discomfort is immediately outsourced to a frantic adult for a quick fix. You aren’t raising an emotionally intelligent prodigy; you’re cultivating a dopamine addict whose drug of choice is getting their own way.

Through the lens of criminology, particularly Rational Choice Theory, human behavior boils down to a simple cost-benefit analysis. In a functioning household, terrorizing a sibling carries a high cost: discipline. In a child-worshipping household, the cost is absolutely zero, and the benefit is a groveling adult asking, “Are you having big feelings right now?”

Couple that with Social Control Theory — which argues people refrain from deviance because of their bonds and accountability to society — and you see the disaster forming. When a child is treated as the reigning deity of the living room, they don’t form bonds to society; they expect society to bow to “them.”

We look at tragedies like the school shooting in Tacloban and collectively gasp.

We rush to blame violent video games, mass media or some unpredictable psychological snap. But let’s be brutally honest: monsters are rarely spontaneous. They are meticulously curated.

When these miniature deities step out of their living room temples and into a society that doesn’t worship them, and a peer or a teacher finally denies them what they want, the system crashes.

They literally do not possess the neurological hardware to process the word “no.” 

The resulting violence isn’t a tragic, unpredictable mystery. It is simply the lethal temper tantrum of a false god who has finally been told to sit down and shut up.

Children in conflict with the law don’t simply fall out of the sky. They are the terrifying, flesh-and-blood products of child worship.

But the truly chilling part is that these entitled terrors don’t just vanish when they age out of the juvenile system.

They grow up.

And worse, if you want to see the fully matured, adult forms of children who were never told “no,” you don’t need to look at a crime scene.

Just look at the behavioral manifestations we’ve recently witnessed throwing televised and live streamed tantrums in the Senate and the highest halls of government. Pfft.