Frothy Paradise

Pauline Wallin, a clinical psychologist in Camp Hill, Pa., said that Americans tended to be relatively courteous in public, toward performers and one another, for the half-century leading up through the ’70s. But people have become brattier as the children of the Consciousness Revolution, encouraged to indulge their inner child, have come of age. “The baby boomers were self-centered and had self-centered children because they thought ‘Everything is for me and my child,’ ” Dr. Wallin said. “Now these under-30s have grown up and just assume what was cute for their parents is now cute to everybody else.