The making of an entitled generation

Parents must carry a large share of the burden. Many wanted to give their children what they never had, but in doing so they forgot to give them what they did have: resilience, hunger, improvisation, and consequence. In the name of love, many homes replaced formation with pampering. Chores disappeared. Correction became “trauma.” Endurance became “suffering.” Every inconvenience had to be removed. Every teacher who disciplined a child became an enemy. Every failure had to be explained away. Some parents outsourced parenting to schools, mosques, churches, screens, and domestic staff, then acted shocked when their children returned emotionally flabby and morally negotiable.

A child who never hears “no” grows into an adult who hears every boundary as oppression.

Yet parents are not alone in the dock. Society itself changed its theology. We began to worship ease. We glorified consumption. We measured success by appearance rather than competence. We built cultures in which the performance of success became more important than the substance of character.

Social media did not invent entitlement, but it industrialised it. It turned comparison into oxygen. It rewarded outrage, vanity, shortcuts, and aesthetic intelligence. Now many young people know how to brand a life they have not built, how to speak in borrowed confidence, how to perform expertise without apprenticeship, and how to collapse at the first serious test of competence.

This is why one meets brilliant young people who are intellectually sharp but existentially helpless. They can code an app, edit a reel, and quote global trends, yet cannot hold a difficult conversation, keep time, manage disappointment, endure boredom, or navigate the gritty human furniture of responsibility. Others are street smart, yes, wonderfully alert to hustle, danger, and survival, but cannot transition that cunning into institutional discipline. They cannot sit in a boardroom without leaking trust. They cannot manage public office without turning governance into a feeding bottle. They can read the street but not read stewardship.

That is the tragedy. Intelligence without ballast. Exposure without depth. Swagger without structure.

But before we become too nostalgic, let us be honest about the past generations too. We like to romanticise ourselves. We say we trekked long distances, respected elders, feared consequences, worked hard, and endured hardship. True. But hardship alone does not produce wisdom; sometimes it only produces wounded adults who later overcompensate. Many of today’s entitled children were raised by yesterday’s deprived adults who quietly vowed, “My children will never suffer what I suffered.” That vow came from pain, but pain is a terrible architect when left unchecked. It can build children who are protected from struggle but also protected from growth.

Older generations also handed down a broken country. Let us not pretend otherwise. We delivered to these young people a Nigeria of failing schools, collapsing institutions, performative leadership, unemployment, corruption, insecurity, and public hypocrisy. We preached honesty and celebrated thieves. We taught patience and rewarded connection. We said education matters, then underpaid teachers and mocked intellectual labour. We said service to country is noble, yet made governance look like organised appetite. So, when the younger generation becomes cynical, transactional, and unserious, some of that is imitation. They watched the adults.

They blame us. They are not entirely wrong.

Still, being wounded by a society does not absolve one of the duty to become whole. Every generation inherits some form of damage. The question is whether it will metabolise that damage into character or turn it into entitlement. One of the moral failures of the present moment is the inflation of rights without the equal education of duties. Many young people today can tell you what they deserve, but far fewer can tell you what they owe. They speak the language of access, rarely the language of obligation. Yet no society survives on demands alone. Civilization is built by people who can do what must be done even when applause is absent.

So, have we failed them? In part, yes.

What structures did we put in place? Weak ones. Families became less intentional. Schools chased certificates more than character. Religious institutions often produced dependence rather than disciplined moral agency. The state, where it functioned at all, offered too little that was coherent, aspirational, or trustworthy. We did not create enough rites of passage into adulthood. We removed labour but did not replace it with formation. We extended adolescence deep into adulthood and then wondered why maturity did not arrive.

Is Nigeria safe in their hands? That is the frightening question. The answer is not a clean no, but it is certainly not yet a comforting yes. Not because they are uniquely doomed, but because too many have been underprepared for the moral and practical burdens of inheritance. A nation as volatile and wounded as Nigeria cannot be handed to a generation raised on permanent ease, algorithmic impatience, and outsourced responsibility.

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And yet, all is not lost. Beneath the noise, there are young Nigerians of astonishing brilliance, courage, and seriousness. They are building quietly, surviving honestly, learning hard things, and refusing both cynicism and laziness. But they are too often swimming against the current of a culture that has made entitlement fashionable.

The task, then, is not to merely insult this generation. It is to rebuild formation. To recover discipline without cruelty, responsibility without romanticising suffering, and opportunity without indulgence. The answer is not less love, but stronger love. Love that trains. Love that withholds, sometimes. Love that insists on chores, consequence, patience, service, and integrity.

 Because in the end, entitled children do not simply fall from trees. They are cultivated. Which means they can also be uncultivated.

And perhaps that is where blame must become responsibility. They blame us. We blame them. Meanwhile the country waits, tired and watching, for someone, finally, to grow up.

•Prince Dickson PhD, is team lead, The Tattaaunawa Roundtable Initiative, Jos Plateau State.