For some reason our culture has taken to naming its generations, much like it does with hurricanes; the Greatest Generation, the Me Generation, the Baby Boomers, the Millennials, etc.
It would seem that a good name for the up and coming generation is Generation Sociopath which can very well be aka Generation Monosyllabic Mouth Breather.
A generalized sketch of a typical modern day kid is something to the likes of the description which follows.
If mom and dad were ever even married, they are now divorced and exhibit the feuds that come therewith.
The kid is made to live out of a suitcase as they are shuffled around town if not from city to city or state to state. Some “parents” think that parenting is “seeing” their kid for a few hours, once per week. Others think that parenting is signing a child support check.
Meanwhile, mom and dad are “dating” which means having unmarried sex with the tentative partner de jour. These people, who come and go, are experimented with to see “how he/she does with kids.”
The result of this is that the kid is drawn, torn, confused and frustrated due to love for mom and dad but having to deal with their bickering and being used as a pawn. As for the sex partners de jour; the kid learns to not build deep emotional relationships because they, very quickly, learn that just as soon as they get close to someone, they are gone and replaced with someone else; keep people at bay and replace them at will is the lesson—a lesson, by the way, that is not learned by being taught with speech but by experience, painful experience. This results in shallow emotions which are the seeds of sociopath.
Moreover, the parents justify all that they do and ensure that kid that divorce, breaking up a family, having a latchkey kid who lives out of a suitcase, having unmarried sex with as many temporary sexual partners de jour, etc. are all perfectly acceptable. This results in an ethically bankrupt kid.
Well, what single parent wants to “deal with” a naturally energy filled kid? Thus, the slightest hint at lack of attention span or hyperactivity (as in not having to sit on a couch all night) the kid will be forced to take drugs. This often leads to a cascade of pharmaceuticals as one leads to lack of sleep, the one that helps with sleep makes them drowsy whist awake, the one to deal with drowsiness has other side effects and on it goes.
Many kids are on such hardcore drugs at such early ages that they literally never develop an appropriately functioning central nervous system as the drugs literally take aim at their very core of whom they are or could otherwise be.
This results in a view of life whereby all problems can be dealt with via a drug; a drug to fall asleep, a drug to wake up, a drug to calm down, a drug to get energy, a drug to lose weight, etc.
Emotions are cloudy at best and are spiked with the artificial high, as it were.
The kid attends a public school which sees them as accidents of haphazard evolution to be corralled, controlled and indoctrinated. They are said to socialize which does not result from being taught manners, ethics, etc. but being let out to run wild and hope to survive as the fittest in a “Lord of the Flies” style. References to God are virtually illegal and so those ethics which have founded and maintained nations have been broken down to “that’s not okay.”
The kid lives in an artificial world, much of their own making, which flickers between TV and social networking with all that comes with. Online personalities are just characters in a great play and if the kid tires of the juggler, they can simply be un-liked, un-followed, un-friended, reported as spam, etc. all at the click of a mouse. The manner whereby they learned to deal with real life human beings standing right in front of them is carried over with high speed efficiency to the online world; what a tangled world wide web we weave.
All of this, and much, much more, results in a generation who have shallow emotions. Yet, it is upon these emotions that they rely as their cognitive faculties are even less developed. Thus, they rely on shallow emotions in order to make decisions which results in faulty views and actions; failed worldviews.
Worst of all; it is not entirely their fault as they have been groomed to be as such and the effort to correct their little worlds may be too much for them.
Let us conclude with an example, hopefully a very extreme one, from an episode of Cops.
Cops were called to an apartment due to a fight. The occupants of the apartment are a mom with two kids, her current boyfriend and her ex-boyfriend. So, dad or the dads are out of the picture and the kids live with the ex-boyfriend (who has them call him “Dad”) and the new boyfriend.
So, real dad or dads are nowhere to be found, current “Dad” is no longer intimate with mom, but a new guy is.
This may be an extreme example but it is a true, actual, real life example; real life kids are dealing with this situation.
All of this, and so much more, lead to Generation Sociopath.