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Yesterday I was too harsh and totally unfair to British TV. Yeah, yeah, I know. Today is devoted to being totally unfair and mean to children. Brace yourselves.

Kids today. Honestly, you wonder why they are so utterly horrible, unreliable, rude and ignorant. Try getting a kid – a teenager – to feed the cat while you’re away for a couple of days. For a good fee, by the way. You need to have two adults on standby because, in all likelihood, the kid will fail to turn up on one of the two days. Why? Forgot. Had a date. Needed to go skateboarding. Or, obviously, he would just die.

Say you’re at the store. Or Tim Hortons. You’re paying, say, $3.14 for something. You produce a $5 bill. Then the 14 cents, and the kid behind the counter, a genius at pushing buttons on the cash register, panics. Can’t count. Can’t do the math. Completely ignores the 14 cents and hands you the change specified by the cash register, change from a $5 bill. “Does your mother know you can’t count?” I asked once. The look of utter indifference turned to fury, and I felt sure he’d reach under the counter for the skateboard and attack me with it. Spent time at the gym, clearly, this kid, and was able to prove it. Mom’s credit card used for the gym membership, I’d guess.

Say you write for a newspaper. Just say you do. Play along here. You get an e-mail from a university student, asking for advice or assistance of some kind. This happens, actually. Not everyone thinks yours truly is an eejit. You’d find, as I do, that about 10 per cent of such queries contain multiple spelling errors. But oodles of ego. And then there’s the utter indifference to facts. Once I came across a kid who had just been given a BlackBerry for Christmas. Cool gadget. Yeah, man. When, by way of idle chat, I asked if the young man was aware that the BlackBerry was a Canadian thing, product of this wizard of a company called RIM, the reply was, “No it isn’t.” Such a concept was just too alien. Don’t. Get. Me. Started.

Hyper Parents & Coddled Kids (CBC, 9 p.m.) goes some way toward explaining why many kids are totally ignorant, rude and cursed with an enormous sense of entitlement. It’s the parents’ fault. Little Johnny and little Jane are perambulating geniuses, or at least are told that since they first emerged from their mothers and squawked.

A good deal of the material in the program – made by Sharon Bartlett and Maria LeRose – is derived from Carl Honore’s book, Under Pressure: Rescuing Childhood from the Culture of Hyper-parenting. And it often states the obvious – over-anxious, middle-class parents cultivate their children as exceptional creatures from the start. The kids never get to enjoy the pleasures or the freedoms of childhood. They are too managed. They are over-praised. The parents have a deeply unhealthy fear for their children’s safety at all times.

Still, for all the obviousness, we encounter startling examples of the over-parenting phenomenon. We meet one-year-old Abigail, whose Saturdays are busy with swimming and ballet lessons – even though she can’t walk yet. Everyone present applauds when little Abigail is lifted up and put on the ground, as if she’s just put in an Oscar-winning performance. We also meet a five-year-old facing a one-hour examination of her various skills, as part of the entrance requirements for a private school.

As Honore points out in the doc, one problem is peer pressure among competitive parents. A mom or dad might know, intuitively, that the child is under too much pressure and is too busy. But the parent doesn’t want to face the disapproval and scorn of another parent whose kid is obviously the next Picasso and will probably find the cure for cancer as a rainy-day project. It is also pointed out that there is a multibillion-dollar industry feeding the egos and anxieties of needy, preening parents. Nobody says it outright, but it’s a racket, like any other.

Another revelation is this – teenage rebellion is on the decline. A psychologist points out that overbearing parents cause their children to internalize the need to succeed. Thus, even through university, kids today will grant a lot of decision-making to their parents and are much less likely to rebel against their parents’ ideas and mores. God help us all. To top it off, we hear from a guy in the corporate world who says today there are even instances of parents intervening to negotiate a starting salary for a young person getting their first job. The program ends with a rather striking story about a young woman who ends up in bankruptcy. It’s worth sticking with the program to figure how and why that happened.

It’s a good and informative documentary, this one. Still, all the emphasis is on the kids and their parents. What's forgotten is that the rest of us have to put up with the dozy, self-absorbed brats. I’m just saying.

Check local listings.

Also airing:

CSI (CTV, 8 p.m., CBS, 9 p.m.) tonight focuses on the case of two high-school students, one dead and one missing. And the deadly cause? Street racing. What, they ran out of stories about Vegas dancers and call girls being murdered by out-of-town perverts? Sheesh. 

Innovators in Music: Billy Bragg (Bravo!, 8 p.m.) is for those of you who grasp the significance of Mr. Bragg. A god, of sorts, to some, the English musician/songwriter talks about “the role of political music in society, overcoming cynicism, the death of his father, of engaging his audience politically, his profound love for all things Smokey Robinson, and the elusive alchemical art of finding a great song hidden deep, down inside.” Fair enough. He’s an articulate, thoughtful fella and, well, he did write New England, a song that still takes your breath away.