Glenn Beck: Bad parenting and participation trophies are ruining millennials

Conservative radio host Glenn Beck said Monday that bad parenting styles and participation-trophy mentalities are keeping millennials from succeeding in today’s society, sometimes with devastating effects.

“They were raised with bad parenting strategies that many of us have fought against for a long time, and now we realize, ‘Oh gee, everyone gets a trophy’ isn’t healthy for society,” he remarked on his national radio program. “So now how do we get out of this?”

Continuing the conversation about parenting, Beck played an audio clip from the recent viral video featuring author Simon Sinek discussing why millennials are so hard to manage in the work place.

Sinek said in the interview: “We’re taking this amazing group of young, fantastic kids who were just dealt a bad hand, it’s no fault of their own, and we put them in corporate environments that care more about the numbers than they do about the kids.”

At that, Beck’s co-host, Pat Gray, interjected, “I’m sorry, it’s not a corporation’s responsibility to raise children — when they’re 32 years old, especially!”

This led to a show discussion about what Sinek could have meant by his statement and an attempt to better understand what Beck called “progressive” speak.

“I’m learning to speak the language that is being spoken all around us,” he added.

Beck continued, asking: “Do we generally agree it is their responsibility to fit in the world? The world doesn’t shape-shift for you, you have to find your way in, right?”

Attempting to translate Sinek’s observations, he went on to say of millennials: “Their parents raised them in a certain way and they were used as guinea pigs to experiment on — something that we took all eternal principles and threw them out the window and said, ‘Hey, being first is just as good as being last,’ right?”

They went on to conclude that it becomes a millennial’s responsibility to take control of his life once it starts to fall apart. When something goes wrong, Beck and the others noted that it would be a millennial's personal responsibility to fix it. But because many young people are not equipped to deal with real-life societal pressures and can’t find happiness without a sense of accomplishment, the realization can sometimes have a devastating effect.

“That crash can lead to suicide,” Beck noted. “So that crash is a crash of no self-esteem because nothing has ever given you self-esteem because you’ve never been taught what self-esteem comes from, and that is accomplishment. Doing something.”