[tareqak]

Isn't some of this responsibility upon the shoulders of parents too? It wasn't children who decided that "keeping up with the Joneses" was the way to live [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeping_up_with_the_Joneses

I apologize if my line of questioning comes across as hostile, but I do take issue with the even the whiff of the concept that parents can do no wrong, both personally and conceptually. In contrast, I do think that children shouldn't be held responsible for the mistakes and misdeeds of their parents.

[leroy_masochist]

I think on the aggregate, parents bear a lot of responsibility for my generation being this way, but there are other factors at play as well, the following two being the most significant in my opinion:

- People (somewhat accurately) seeing elite college as the most surefire way to ensure membership in the high end of the earnings spectrum, and therefore organizing their kids' preteen/teenage lives around getting into college, molding kids' psyches into a process-driven, check-the-box orientation (i.e., do the following list of things to a specified standard and you will get into a great school and then everything will be OK)

- The role of social media / constantly sharing details of one's life with one's entire network, which, as the Wait but Why comic posted in this thread eloquently describes, is generally more unhealthy than healthy

[cicero]

Even if the parents are the cause of the problem, it is still better for the children to recognize the problem and change their lives accordingly.

[tareqak]

I agree with what you are saying, but I think that incorrectly attributing the problem to one actor instead of another has chances of:

1) making it more difficult to identify the problem 2) affecting the path taken towards resolving the problem for the worse 3) making the person whose problem it now is to resolve the problem that they grew into less willing to do so.

I think that everyone should honestly own their successes and failures because, quite frankly, there is enough blame to go around, and not enough people willing to take ownership of the failures that they were responsible for.