I don’t even see it as being the one crushing their spirit. What makes that crush more painful is what most parents do, play pretend that the society their child will enter is just, fair, mutually beneficial, and responsive to good faith effort.

The reality lf course couldn’t be further from the truth. Teaching them such things is feeding them to the jackals and setting them up both for disappointment and failure. Children need to know that the moment they’re an adult, society will prey on their good will, punish empathy, and attempt to exploit them for maximum labor with minimum reward.

Instead some parents have their kids sell lemonade/scout cookies/etc to smiling neighbors, about as reflective of the reality of our rigged economy as Santa Clause is to the reality of how those presents got under the tree last christmas.

Then society condemns such children for taking out student loans and working dead end jobs with no promotion or pay raise for making “bad choices,” despite insisting we spend 18 years deluding them into doe eyed naivety to preserve their innocence. If anyone actually wanted that, our society and the global economy wouldn’t be as sociopathic as it is.