The Myth of the Spoiled Child

by Alfie Kohn

  ARE PARENTS PERMISSIVE?

  To call attention to the vintage of our whines—or, if you prefer, how long our gripes have been fermenting—is just one of many possible responses when we hear sweeping claims about how children nowadays are spoiled because parents fail to set limits. A reasonably thoughtful person might point out that there are actually three assertions being made here: parents don’t set limits, children act in a way we might describe as “spoiled,” and the first problem causes the second.

  Each of those claims needs to be proved; anecdotes, even the sort that make us shake our heads and click our tongues, simply aren’t sufficient. There has to be some reason to believe that the stories we hear, or the behaviors we happen to observe, are representative of the population at large. And that, in turn, means we need to define more precisely what we’re talking about. “Parents let their kids get away with murder” or “Kids are out of control” are not testable propositions—not just because they’re vague but because they’re infused with the values of the speaker, who is really saying, “Parents put up with behaviors that I think they should forbid” or “I disapprove of how some kids act.” If we want to claim that more people act this way today than did those of prior generations, we need a clear way to circumscribe what we’re looking for so we can compare data from different eras.

  So how should we evaluate a complaint such as “We live in a child-centered society where children’s wants and demands are increasingly being given priority”?25 Our first response might be to ask how that assertion squares with deeply disturbing social indicators such as the high number of American children in poverty or the fact that juveniles are still tried and imprisoned as adults. More prosaically, we could point out that, as a culture, our attitude toward children appears to be ambivalent at best. Parents love their own kids but often have little patience with everyone else’s. Sometimes we find children adorable, but more often we seem to regard them as nuisances. A “good” child is one who sits still and keeps quiet. Surveys of American adults consistently find what one newspaper report called “a stunning level of antagonism not just toward teen-agers but toward young children as well.” Substantial majorities of our fellow citizens say they disapprove of kids of all ages, calling them rude, lazy, irresponsible, and lacking in basic values.26

  In the 1930s, a researcher named Harold Anderson commented, “I think as a culture we have not yet learned to like children.” One would have a tough time making a case that things have changed since then. In 2012, the late Elisabeth Young-Bruehl devoted an entire book to the “huge range of anti-child social policies and individual behaviors” still in place.27 Child-centered? It’s not clear that America today could be described even as child-friendly.

  On the other hand, there has been a shift over a long period of time toward regarding children as individuals who possess intrinsic worth, as human beings who should be treated humanely. Children in the industrialized world today are much less likely to be forced to work, or to be viewed chiefly as economic assets, than they were as recently as the 1800s.28 Similarly, they are less likely to be seen as sinful creatures whose wills must be broken than was the case a few centuries ago. In the New England of Puritan times, children were publicly flogged. Play was viewed as unacceptably frivolous, even for toddlers. Babies were described as “filthy, guilty, odious, abominable” beings and dealt with accordingly.29 Indeed, infanticide was common throughout human history, with children routinely abandoned, tortured, and sexually abused. “Prior to modern times I have not been able to find evidence of a single parent who would not today be put in jail for child abuse or neglect,” writes the historian Lloyd deMause.30

  The answer to our question, then, depends on the time span we’re considering and the definition we’re using. Yes, there has been “greater expression of affection toward children and a greater interest in their development . . . over the past several centuries in industrial Western societies.”31 But that doesn’t mean our culture is “child-centered” in the specific, and pejorative, way that phrase is often intended, with adults’ needs and wishes made subservient to those of children.

  And what if the question is whether parents today are more “permissive”? Again, we need to proceed carefully. Does that word refer to treating kids more humanely, giving them something to say about what happens to them, allowing them to be heard as well as seen, acknowledging their preferences rather than bending them to our will? Does it mean we’re willing to take our cue from young children about when they’re hungry or tired rather than making them eat or sleep when it’s convenient for us? That we’re willing to allow kids to fool around and have fun sometimes, and to comfort them when they’re sobbing?

  In fact, these do seem to be just the sorts of attitudinal changes to which the word permissive referred when it was first used. And in those days the general trend was indeed in that direction. One writer refers to “the ideology of permissive child rearing” that characterized advice to parents in the 1930s32—a decade that produced a book with the revelatory title Babies Are Human Beings. Another writer points out that what was described at the time as the “new permissiveness . . . reads today like common sense.”33 People were starting to talk about children’s needs and to realize that they progress through stages of development such that they may not be ready to assume a given responsibility or acquire a proficiency just because we demand that they do so. However, this progress didn’t take place in simple, linear fashion. The strictness that gave way to permissiveness was itself a reversal of an approach to child rearing during the nineteenth century that had been more responsive to children’s needs.34 Things had gotten worse before they got better again. And that reversal was later reversed once more: The 1950s brought retrenchment, as even some of these basic principles were once again viewed with suspicion.35

  Today, the word permissiveness has a different meaning: It doesn’t signify humane treatment or a willingness to nurse infants when they’re hungry; it means coddling kids in a way that’s unhealthy by definition. (Interestingly, the connotation of coddle also shifted. It once meant “to treat tenderly”; now it means “to overindulge.”) Permissive parenting these days is understood by the general public as well as by developmental psychologists to refer to an approach in which demands and limits are rarely imposed and children are pretty much free to do what they like.36

  So has any researcher tried to quantify the number of parents who could reasonably be classified as permissive in this sense? Most people who refer to an epidemic of permissive parenting just assume that this is true, that everyone knows it, and therefore that there’s no need to substantiate the claim. My efforts to track down data—by combing both scholarly and popular databases as well as sending queries to leading experts in the field—have yielded absolutely nothing. I’m forced to conclude that no one has any idea how many parents could be considered permissive, how many are punitive, and how many are responsive to their children’s needs without being permissive or punitive. (The tendency to overlook that third possibility is a troubling and enduring trend in its own right.) In short, there is absolutely no evidence to support the claim that permissiveness is the dominant style of parenting in our culture, or even that it’s particularly common.

  Notice, though, that many authors, journalists, and casual commentators aren’t just saying that lots of parents fail to set limits. They’re asserting that this is true today to a greater extent than it has been in the past, that permissiveness is, as Time magazine put it, a problem of “our age” because there has been an “erosion” of parental authority. Of course, if there’s no good snapshot available of current parenting practices based on a representative national sample, we have no evidence about whether these practices have changed over the years—and, if so, in what direction.

  A few decades ago, John Goodlad visited more than a thousand classrooms across the country in an effort to draw informed conclusions about the kind of education that’s offered to most American childr
en. He found that schooling was overwhelmingly traditional—fact-based, teacher-rather than student-centered—notwithstanding common claims that progressivism was running rampant.37 It would be dauntingly ambitious to attempt such a comprehensive investigation of parenting practices. Such a study would have to overcome a long list of methodological challenges, beginning with how permissiveness should be defined and how to determine the way any given parent actually parents.38 (Asking both the parent and the child often yields different responses,39 and, interestingly, it’s the child’s that often proves to be more accurate and more relevant.40) But no one, as far as I can tell, has even proposed such a study.

  Again, I came to this conclusion only after a reasonably exhaustive search. But that process yielded a couple of tantalizing false leads. For example, after I published an essay in which I mentioned the dearth of research on the question, a psychologist named Jean Twenge wrote to tell me I was wrong. She directed my attention to two academic journal articles by a sociologist named Duane Alwin,41 which I quickly tracked down—only to discover that the word permissiveness, or even a discussion of the idea, didn’t appear in either of them.42 In fact, these articles were virtually silent on the question of how children are actually raised. Rather, their focus was on the qualities that parents of different generations desired in their children. Alwin concluded that parents have come to be less concerned about raising kids to be obedient people and more likely to want them to be able to think for themselves. Of course there’s no reason to believe that these parents raised their children more permissively, or that doing so would have been a logical strategy toward that end.

  Then I discovered a book written by a political consultant and pollster named Mark Penn that dealt with trends in popular opinion. One chapter was devoted to raising children, and it included some intriguing poll results:

  Fifty-five percent of parents say they’re strict, compared to only 37 percent who say they are permissive. Fifty-two percent of parents (and 58 percent of older parents) say it’s better to guide children with “discipline and structure” than with “warmth and encouragement.” And by more than 2 to 1, American parents say it is more important to make their children good citizens than it is to make them happy.43

  An opinion poll is not the same as a scientific study, but these numbers do seem to offer a solid challenge to the conventional wisdom about permissiveness.44 When the pollster then asked people for their impressions of other parents, those results, too, were striking. “A whopping 91 percent say that ‘most parents today are too easy on their kids,’ compared to only 3 percent who say most parents today are too strict.”

  The vast majority of people, in other words, are saying, “Almost everyone is permissive except me.” So what should we make of this finding? It’s certainly possible that respondents are mischaracterizing how they raise their own children, perhaps because they’re eager to describe what they’re doing along the lines of what they think they ought to be doing—and in our culture strict discipline, not permissiveness, is regarded as the ideal. But it seems more reasonable to doubt the accuracy of people’s perceptions of what’s happening in other families—perceptions that reflect the uncritical assumption that permissiveness is widespread in our culture. This belief is called into question by what we know to be true of our own parenting, so we’re forced to resolve the dissonance by regarding ourselves as an exception to what we continue to assume is the rule. (Either that, or we believe that other children require a degree of strictness that our own children do not.)

  But Penn instantly arrived at the opposite conclusion: If most parents think that they’re strict but that others are lenient, well, “they’re only half-right—and it’s about the others. Today in America, nearly all parents are more permissive with their kids than in generations past, despite their self-perceptions.” How in the world does Penn justify his certainty about this? Just as Twenge’s determination to believe that parents are permissive led her to cite irrelevant evidence (about parents’ desire for their kids to be independent thinkers), so Penn managed to justify that same conclusion primarily on the basis of his own conservative attitudes. (That he’s a consultant for Democratic candidates shouldn’t be surprising: As I pointed out in the introduction, even political liberals often sound like Fox News hosts as soon as the conversation turns to children.)

  Like so many others who complain about how much worse things are today, Penn offered nothing to support his assertion that parents are “more permissive . . . than in generations past”; he had virtually no data from earlier times to compare to the results of his one-shot poll.45 And he chose to ignore the results of that poll because they conflicted with what he just knew to be true: “It has become socially unacceptable to discipline children. . . . In the old days, kids just got the rod, or at least the riot act. Now they get picked up, timed-out, and negotiated with at great length.”

  Here’s where things get interesting—and useful for helping us to understand why so many people share Penn’s perceptions. The notion that disciplining children is out of fashion has attained the status of a meme, widely circulated in books, articles, and blogs. So let’s look more closely at each of the three phrases in that last sentence of Penn’s. First, “picked up” refers to the fact that “sixty percent of the parents in our poll declared that ‘babies should be comforted whenever they cry.’” That’s exactly the response to a crying baby that’s supported by developmental research,46 so one might be dismayed that only three out of five parents accept this basic guideline of infant care. But Penn is evidently a fan of the long-discredited “let ’em cry it out” approach. What’s more, he seems to view any departure from that approach as evidence of permissiveness.

  Second, he refers to the popularity of giving children time-outs—that is, forcibly isolating them if a parent decides they have misbehaved.47 This is not only an example of discipline but of punitive discipline. Because spanking isn’t involved, however, we’re supposed to conclude that “it has become socially unacceptable to discipline.” Penn acknowledges that two-thirds of parents still approve of spanking, but, remarkably, this fact, too, is offered as evidence of permissiveness.48 How? Because the approval rate was even higher a few decades earlier. (Note, too, that these numbers refer to attitudes about spanking. The proportion who actually engages in the practice appears to be higher still.49)

  Penn’s last reason for pronouncing contemporary parenting permissive is that children are “negotiated with at great length.” Here he refers to poll responses suggesting that many parents say that if they had a nine-year-old child “who screamed a curse word at you and said he/she hated you,” or a fifteen-year-old who experimented with drugs, they would respond by having a conversation with the child to figure out what was going on. (In the first example, a substantial number actually said they would respond with punishment.) There is nothing in the responses to indicate that such conversations would assume the form of a “negotiation”—let alone that it would take place “at great length.” Those are Penn’s rhetorical embellishments, apparently intended to invite us to join him in rolling our eyes at the very idea that anyone would try to talk with a child who does something troubling rather than just resorting to punishment. And again, he believes that doing the former constitutes permissiveness.

  I’ve reviewed Penn’s account in some detail here partly because he’s one of the few writers on the subject to present hard numbers, even if they are from a poll, but mostly because the spin that he gives to those numbers reflects a perspective that is widely shared and enormously revealing. Even in the absence of data—indeed, even in the presence of data to the contrary—many people are willing to pronounce our culture (though not themselves) appallingly permissive. If spanking enjoys anything less than universal support, if children are punished by any means other than spanking, if parents are willing to have a conversation with them when they do something wrong—well, that’s all the proof we need.

  The idea that we live in
a permissive or child-centered culture also seems unshaken despite what things are like for children at school, where they spend a significant portion of their waking hours. There, a variety of behavior management programs—consisting of some version of bribes and threats—are employed to make students comply with rules that they almost certainly had no role in helping to formulate. The emphasis is not on promoting moral development but on eliciting compliance. More broadly, John Dewey’s characterization of most schools remains accurate today: The “center of gravity” is outside the child. We say, in effect: This is the curriculum; this is how we will evaluate you; these are our rules and requirements, all of them having been set up long before we met you. Your needs and interests—or even those of an entire class—will have no bearing on what we do and what we demand.

  Some of this is obviously a function of having twenty or thirty kids in a room and of the time and effort required to create a “learner-centered” environment. But not all of it can be explained that way, particularly since some teachers and schools have shown that it is possible to proceed more by asking than telling.50 Rather, there is an ideology at work here that’s similar to our approach to parenting—one defined by a fundamental lack of respect for children, by puritanical beliefs about the benefits of frustration and failure, by the assumption that children are best prepared for future unpleasantness by subjecting them to unpleasantness while they’re small, and by a view of human nature that implies little can be accomplished without employing rewards and punishments as inducements to learn or to treat others kindly.

  One may endorse or oppose this ideology, but how is it possible to suggest with a straight face that the main problem with American parenting or schooling is that punitive discipline is rare or that we’re overly inclined to listen to our children’s points of view? It’s as though a magazine were to announce on its cover that people today spend an alarming amount of time reading for pleasure (“Bibliophilia Craze! Does It Spell Doom for Electronic Entertainments?”) or that most of us are excessively careful to eat healthy foods in appropriate quantities (“Junk Foods a Distant Memory in Slenderized America”). The difference is that this weird inversion of reality regarding how we raise children isn’t a curious anomaly that showed up in a single periodical. Somehow it seems to have become the conventional wisdom.