Sweden Rethinks Child Punishment

[From article]
A best-selling Swedish academic has concluded that permissive parenting is creating a generation of arrogant young adults who lack social empathy, personal resilience and, after a childhood of pampering, are destined to be bitterly disappointed in life.
“Saying 'no’ to a child is not the same as beating a child. Parents should act like parents, not best friends,” says David Eberhard, psychiatrist, father of six and author of How Children Took Power. “They should prepare their kids for adult life by teaching them how to behave, not treat them like princes or princesses. In Sweden, they think that any form of intervention against the child is a sort of molesting.
[. . .]
“What strikes me as the most disturbing feature of Swedish society is the voluntary abdication of adult authority,” says Frank Furedi, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent and author of Paranoid Parenting. “It began with stigmatising the punishment of children and mutated into a fear of disciplining them, which is what parents are supposed to do. The area for concern isn’t what happens to them as children, but what happens to them as they grow up.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/mother-tongue/10636279/Have-Swedens-permissive-parents-given-birth-to-a-generation-of-monsters.html

Have Sweden’s permissive parents given birth to a generation of monsters?
As the children spared the rod come of age, doubts about the practice are growing, Judith Woods finds
By Judith Woods
7:13PM GMT 13 Feb 2014