Dr Jean Twenge argues in her book Generation Me that those born in the 1980s and 1990s are “tolerant, confident, open-minded, and ambitious but also disengaged, narcissistic, distrustful, and anxious.”
There’s the best-selling book How to Raise an Adult by Julie Lythcott-Haims, which tracks this trend and chastises parents for how poorly they are preparing kids for adulthood. As she said in a recent Washington Post interview, “We want so badly to help them by shepherding them from milestone to milestone and by shielding them from failure and pain. But overhelping causes harm,” she writes. “It can leave young adults without the strengths of skill, will and character that are needed to know themselves and to craft a life.”