The Other Shoes Don’t Fit - What happens when narcissists grow up and have kids?

The Rutgers University student who allegedly videostreamed over the Internet, without permission, scenes of his roommate having sex with another man probably never thought his action would trigger the roommate’s suicide. But this seeming invasion of privacy and its fatal consequence raise the question of whether this was merely a random incident, seized upon by a tabloid press ever hungry for sensational stories, or an indication of the jaded sensibilities and self-absorption of today’s college students in general.

In a series of studies and books, social psychologist Jean Twenge, author of Generation Me and The Narcissism Epidemic, has argued strongly that today’s younger people score considerably higher on narcissistic scales than previous generations at the same age. As causative factors, she points to three cultural trends: the rise of electronic communication, which has drastically cut down on face-to-face social interaction; increasingly violent and more sexually saturated mass media, which desensitize kids to others; and an avalanche of consumerism and materialism.

Social psychologist M. Brent Donnellan and developmental psychologist Kali Trzesniewski, however, insist that Twenge’s use of birth cohorts is rife with methodological problems that compromise her conclusions. Using different statistical analyses, they find that today’s 12th-graders score about the same as 12th-graders in the 1970s did on measures of egotism. Other critics point out that it’s difficult to determine what a high score in “narcissism” means in day-to-day interactions, or what the term actually refers to. While narcissists’ primary motivation may be garnering greater approval, their vehicle for doing so may be generosity and socially desirable actions.

Now a study by University of Michigan psychologist Sara Konrath, who coauthored one of Twenge’s previous narcissism studies, looks more precisely at empathy among college students. Among 13,739 college students who took the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) between 1979 and 2009, her study finds, empathy has plummeted. In Twenge’s studies, narcissism rose steadily from the early 1980s through 2006. Konrath finds that empathy stayed stable and then started declining after 2000. “Taking those studies together,” she says, “it looks like the narcissists grew up and had kids.”

Read more: http://www.utne.com/Science-Technology/Generation-Me-Capacity-To-Empathize-Narcissism-Epidemic.aspx#ixzz1NNyWAiV8

But IMO narcissists tend to have more empathic (and/or screwed up, underconfident) kids because they had to put their parents' needs first and never their own. And narcissists often find partners who are codependent to prop them up. Codependents tend to come from families with at least one narcissistic parent.

So you might have had heavily, overly permissive, empathic parents in the 70s raising entitled kids today, or vice versa. Or one parent overly permissive and the other overly selfish. So very different causes might have led to similar results.

I don't think her conclusion is warranted.

on edit: don't mean to sound snarky. I appreciate your posting the study. Just expressing a different interpretation of it. :-)

who they are. from spanking to selfish self involved parents to helicopter parents, these things can all affect kids differently. electronic media has to be having some effect on kids that isn't really understood yet. I have seen lots of kids that don't seem to have much empathy or concern for anyone but themselves but is that the normal ego centric kid nature or a more narcissistic one as suggested? I am not sure. Some of it I feel may have to do with some other things I have seen relating to parents who do not make their kids take responsibility for their own actions or behaviors and allow them to do whatever they want and act any way they want and seem afraid their kids won't like them.

Most of them are in therapy and they've all either taken the geographical cure or have cut the parent(s) out of their lives completely out of sheer self defense.

These kids were narcissists who hadn't gotten married yet and had kids to screw up.

I’m sitting in a coffee shop on Wednesday afternoon in a midsize, noncoastal American city. A fiftysomething is screaming into his cell phone; the woman sitting next to me is frantically blogging about her favorite new movie, Julie & Julia, a flick about the success of a narcissist and her blog; a pair of tweens just cut the checkout line; and I just got a spam e-mail for penis enlargement.

Read more: http://www.utne.com/Politics/Just-Do-It-Modern-Narcissism-Self-Importance.aspx#ixzz1NYMHgJ7b