> a) a generation that was conceived after a period of widespread crime and social uncertainty, leading parents to coddle them and try to protect them from the

> a) a generation that was conceived after a period of widespread crime and social uncertainty, leading parents to coddle them and try to protect them from the world [see 'helicopter' parenting'], I think that's making the phenomenon a bit more rational than it is. Growing up in american middle-class suburbs in the 90s is easily the safest childhood any child every had. I think a big factor is that the baby-boomers in the west was the first generation that were able to focus on individualism and self realisation in a first-class way, and in passing that excitement on to their children, they created a generation of parents who perhaps over-indexed on those values. When everybody is a unique snowflake, the "everybody else is doing it, it's probably going to be fine" approach to decision making get tempered in favour of "oh, maybe that's how my parents approached things and I almost fell out of a tree that one time, and they could have done more to make me practise the violin, but luckily I'm very smart and I have read a lot of books and I took a lot of classes and my child is very special and unique and so I need to work out, from first principles and with great care, exactly under which circumstances going bicycling in the street will aid the specific, carefully laid out plan I have for my child" -- and that's where you end up over-indexing on the dangers and rationalising over-protection, and you remove the mechanisms by which kids learn to make decisions and mistakes for themselves.