In the book Culture Shift, author R. Albert Mohler Jr. diagnoses a number of the things that are breaking down in our culture. Of particular concern is the poor parenting going on in our homes and families. Today's parents have turned into hyper-protectors, Mohler says.

Here are some of the key points he makes along these lines:

Today's parents are now spending a great deal of their time doing little more than protecting their children from life. Our kids are growing up to be pampered wimps who are incapable of assuming adult responsibility and have no idea how to handle the routine challenges of life.

Kids have to excel at everything, even if parents have to actually do the work or negotiate an assisted success. Although error and experimentation are the true mothers of success, parents are taking pains to remove failure from the equation. Smothered by parental attention and decision making during childhood and adolescence, these young people arrive on college campuses without the ability to make their own decision, live with their choices, learn from their experiences, and grapple with the issues of adult life. Even in prekindergarten programs, parents now show up with a list of special demands, insisting that their child must be treated with special care. Inevitably, this is often transformed into diagnoses of learning disabilities that will require special instructional accommodations. Cell phones are partly to blame. Even in college...students are typically in contact with their parents several times a day, reporting every flicker of experience.... When parents play along with this dependency, they 'infantilize' their children, 'keeping them in a permanent state of dependency.' Life is lived in an endless present tense, with no need to frame long-term decisions, make plans, or engage in sustained interpersonal conversations. Many see life as a competitive game, and they are determined to do whatever it takes to get their children on top. One college student said, "I wish my parents had some hobby other than me."

In tomorrow's blog, we'll take a look at what to do if you wake up one day and discover you've become a helicopter parent.