Compass, a handbook on parents leadership by James Stenson. Quotes VII

-Negative lessons are valuable.
-Clearly, something is wrong in today's society. We look around in our workplaces and neighborhoods and see young people who are immature and irresolute, soft and irresponsible, uneasy about themselves and their futures.
-What is striking today is the huge percentage of seriously troubled youths from normal families. Some sort of subtle dysfunction is corroding large numbers of typical, middle-class homes.
-The suicide rate among young people in the United States is directly proportional to family income.
-Normal American families seem to fall into to broad categories:
1. Self-absorbed consumerist family.
2. Other-centered sporting adventure family.
-Consumerist parents are unconcerned with growth in virtue, whether for themselves or their children whom are steadily apprenticed through childhood as consumers, not producers.
-The life of grown-up work is solely for piling up spending money. We work in order to spend, we produce in order to consume.
-Staring in their middle-school years, very many self-absorbed kids grow bored with juvenile amusements and avidly turn to novel kinds of powerfully pleasurable sensations: alcohol, drugs, the erotic and increasingly violent rock culture, vandalism, reckless driving, recreational sex. Because their life has centered on things, they are disposed to put things ahead of people, to treat people as objects.
-In consumerist families, both parents give in readily to children's wishes and feelings, even when they judge that this might be a mistake. So the children fail to distinguish between wants and needs. To the children, wants are needs. As a result, feelings not conscience become a guide for action.
-In the consumerist family, children have a low tolerance for discomfort or even inconvenience. Their outlook on life remains unchanged from infancy: me first. These children complain and whine about situations that can't be helped: bad weather, reasonable delays, physical discomfort, moderately heavy workloads, personality differences and the like.
-Materialism really means seeing and treating other people as things.
-Respect for people nearly always derives from some perception of strength.
-Many well-off middle class, even wealthy, families are not materialistic.