Entitlement’s Enablers: Parents and Teachers

Abstract

This chapter explores the development of entitlement in individuals. What entities surrounding the newborn, the child, and young adult facilitate the sense of deservingness that some people have relative to others? This chapter begins with the role that parents play in producing a child with a social dominance orientation or authoritarian tendencies: two ideologies that are associated with entitlement. Parents’ ideas about race and gender are also significant in how their child will think about their place in the world. Globally, boys are the preferred gender, and this preference is due to the fact that in most cultures, men have more status and power than do women. Chapter 3 explores the gendered treatment of children by caregivers, beginning with parents’ attitudes toward their newborn daughters and sons. Adult heterosexual men tend to have a sense of domestic entitlement, meaning they feel justified doing less domestic labor than their spouse. This sense of entitlement begins with the toys and then chores parents assign to their daughters and sons. Chapter 3 next examines teachers’ role in facilitating entitlement. Teachers’ expectations and treatment of students unintentionally influences entitlement in boys relative to girls, and in White students relative to students of color. If teachers’ expectations (and biases) can have a measurable impact over the course of one school year, imagine the consequences over a student’s entire academic career. Being the normative racial category allows one to be given the benefit of the doubt when it comes to school discipline. Unlike students of color, for White kids, the school experience allows them to feel entitled to impartial or even preferential treatment by law enforcement and the criminal legal system.