User blog comment:Creeper50/Why is this a trend?/@comment-4849011-20151214143008

~gets soapbox into position~ I think a lot of the people who do that had parents who screamed bloody murder every time someone gave criticism instead of heaps of praise. For instance, if the child writes a piece of dreck essay full of mistakes and the teacher gives a low grade and a comment that they could do better (something that's actually encouragement), the parents scream at the school personnel and threaten to sue unless the grade is changed to an A+. As a result, the children get the expectation that they're to be rewarded and praised for everything, no matter how poorly done, and that vitriol and threats will cause people to abandon all sense of reality and bow to their every whim. That's not how the real world works. These parents are setting their own children up for delusions of grandeur, failure, and shattered expectations.

Both my mother and one of her sisters/my aunts taught seventh and eighth grade Language Arts (grammar, spelling, writing, reading comprehension, etc.) for nearly thirty years. [Here I have to disclose that my mother was my 7th grade Language Arts teacher and my aunt was my eighth grade teacher. Before you go making jokes and casting aspersions, no, they weren't easy on me. In fact, they were probably harder on me since they knew how capable I was.] Mom could write a book about the good, bad, and strange moments with students, parents, and co-workers. They retired in the mid-late '90s (My aunt two years after my mom), so while things probably weren't as bad as they are now, there are still plenty of stories of bad behavior. Mom told a story about an angry parent coming in and demanding to know why his daughter had received zeroes on a number of assignments. We don't know what the student had told her parents, but I'm guessing it was claims about how unfair my mom was for not giving her credit for the assignments. Mom turned to the student and requested, "Go get your folder." The student did and when Mom went through it she found the assignments. That's why the student hadn't received credit for the assignments- she had never turned them in! The father came in angry at my mom and left angry with his child. The speed and correctness with which my mom guessed what had happened indicates that this was not the first time this had happened.