Well, my daughter is 22, but when she was 18-19, she was very selfish and nothing has changed except that she no longer lives with me. When she and her fiance got their own apartment, they had one set of sheets. I was looking at the JC Penney site one day and they had some sheets on sale, so, I ordered a set for them. This is a portion of an email I got from her a few days later.
You didn't even ask me about the sheets before you went and bought them and that ticked me off, you buying a sheet set for us without even asking or asking about what color we'd like at the least. i can appreciate the gesture but i would have appreciated it more if you'd ASKED us since we're going to have to be the ones to sleep on them. IMO if you'd really cared you would have asked because you got a color without talking to us about it that now we have to decorate around and MAYBE we didn't want to use the color blue for our room. how would you like it if i got you sheets without asking you in some random color. i mean, it would have been nice if you'd talked to US about it, the ones who will be USING the sheets. yes i said thank you because it's expected, i wouldn't have picked that color but i didn't say anything negative i didn't want to be mean i just wanted to say thank you and have the issue over with.
I was GOBSMACKED!!! I've always know that she could be selfish, but this really shocked me. I walked around the house with my mouth hanging open for a good 30 minutes after reading what she wrote. I did not raise her to be so scornful about a GIFT, so I've decided there will be no more gifts.
I really think most kids today have it way too easy. They don't appreciate anything because they don't have to work hard and save up to get something they want. They expect to have things just as nice at their new place as what they had at home, without stopping to realize that it took years to accumulate those nice things. Well, my daughter doesn't have to worry about me buying the wrong color sheets again. They can sleep on a bare mattress as far as I'm concerned.