Nightline is doing a show tonight (7-17-03) about lawsuits against fast food. From their daily promotional email setting up the show:

Grocery shopping with my five year old is an excruciating experience. There is the meltdown on aisle two because I won't buy him the "Incredible Hulk" cookies. And then there's the tantrum on aisle four when I won't buy him the "Spiderman" potato chips. And finally, I cave on aisle six when he says he can't live without the "SpongeBob" Popsicles.

The marketing is brilliant and it works. Parents today must have the will, the time, the energy to fight these fights (or, better yet, find a way to go grocery shopping alone). Reinforced by television commercials, movie tie-ins at fast food chains, and even food promotions in books, kids today are hungry consumers.

Crikey, no wonder we've got so many screwed up younguns. N-O. End of story. What's so frickin' hard about that? No Spiderman chips or Harry Potter cereal. You get some decent nutritious Cheerios. Where's the big battle? You're bigger, and you have the wallet.

Sara Just and the Nightline staff are not anomalies. What she's writing here probably reflects the attitudes and experience of a great many American parents. I don't mean to single her out as exceptionally wimpy, but as a representative of our common wimpiness. Indeed, I will confess to the occasional spot of overindulging children.

But at some point the adult has to be, well, the adult. Grocery shopping with children presents boundless opportunities to model and teach impulse control. Perhaps you get ONE indulgence purchase per shopping trip. Or they can pick out $3 worth of treat items. This works particularly good for teaching decision making and the value of money. You can get this one small box of crappy cereal, or several packs of baseball cards, or even buy just a candy bar and have a couple of bucks cash!

Or you can teach children that whining and grasping at every little thing that passes before their eyes will get them what they want. These tactics absolutely do not create the wealth which allows the indulgence. Demanding and having temper tantrums only work as ways of getting things if there's someone else to pay for it.

Indeed, if enough people raise their kids this way, we'll end up with a society where every overgrown brat thinks that the world owes them anything and everything they want or need whenever they want. If that ever happened, we'd have a huge creaking welfare state with ridiculously high taxes destroying the whole damned economy. Hell, we'd probably have congress already running hundreds of billions of dollars a year in deficits, and still busy trying to add huge new entitlement programs on top of that.

Rand help us if that day ever comes.