Self-Entitlement Without Responsibility
Barbara Kay: “The first generation for whom divorce is the social norm, kidults make friends their family, preferring group camaraderie to committed love. They have brains, but choose to watch TV and play video games, when not obsessing over their appearance and social trivia. Oblivious to the outside world, theirs is a demographic "with no history and no social purpose."”
Kay thinks that social conservatives were right about the sexual revolution being the cause of adults inability to act like adults. “Marriage and motherhood-scorning feminism is the ideology behind decades of education that validates self-entitlement without responsibility, while actively encouraging sexual awareness in children. Feminism encourages early autonomy from parents, and in the process lends exaggerated importance to destructive peer pressure. Early ripe, early rot. Childhood has been banished: by 18, kids are sexually surfeited and jaded, ironically programmed to disengage sex from intimacy and the trust that leads to commitment.” Kay then claims Bill Clinton as the second-most famous kidult (the most famous kidult is a no-brainer: go ahead, surely you can figure out who everybody thinks hasn't grown up yet without reading the article). The suggestion that George W. Bush is a mature adult might strike his political opponents as risible, but there's no denying that evidence—that he quit drinking, that he married a teacher and librarian who seems uninterested in stealing the limelight—exists for such a claim.
