Privileged, Not Entitled

Prince George's County kids are entitled, privileged, selfish, and ungrateful.

Privilege, at its simplest, just means having access to things most people don't. Resources. Opportunity. A softer landing when something goes wrong. That's not a moral failing. It's a fact about circumstance. And selfish — if we're using it to mean taking care of yourself, knowing your worth, not shrinking to make other people comfortable — I don't think that's a flaw either. I want my kids to have access. I want them to value themselves without needing permission.

Entitled is the trickier one, because it’s not the same thing as privileged, even though people use them interchangeably. Privilege is a fact about what you have access to. Entitlement is a belief about what you’re owed — the assumption that access is a right rather than a gift, that it was earned simply by existing rather than given. You can be privileged and not entitled. You can also be entitled with very little privilege at all. They’re not the same axis.

To me, privilege isn’t the problem and self-regard isn’t the problem. Entitlement and lack of gratitude is.

A kid who has access and doesn't know it was given to them, doesn't notice it, doesn't feel anything about it — that's the kid who becomes insufferable. Access without gratitude curdles into entitlement. Self-regard without gratitude curdles into selfishness in the ugly sense. The privilege was never the risk. The absence of gratitude is what turns privilege into the thing people resent. The quiet erosion of not noticing.

If gratitude is the actual variable, then it's the thing I have to build deliberately, because it doesn't show up on its own just because a kid has a comfortable life. If anything, comfort makes it easier for gratitude not to develop.

Before bed, when we pray, my kids each say what they're grateful for. Not a rushed line to get through the ritual — an actual answer, out loud, every single night. Some nights it's small: a good dinner or I got to watch TV. Some nights it surprises me, something I didn't know they'd noticed. The repetition is the point. I'm not trying to manufacture one profound moment of gratitude. I'm trying to make noticing a habit so consistent it becomes part of how they see, not something they perform once and forget.

This is one practice, not a finished system. I don't have gratitude fully solved — I have one thing I do every day, on purpose, because I decided the alternative was raising kids who have everything and feel nothing about it.

That's the actual work. Not saying yes more. Not manufacturing scarcity to prove a point. Making sure that whatever they're given, they know it was given.