The Myth of the Spoiled Child

by Alfie Kohn

  Just as we want them to be able to decide when it’s appropriate to exercise self-discipline (rather than simply “being self-disciplined”), so we want them to be flexible in thinking about when, as well as how, one ought to question and object. In one offensive situation, it will make more sense to hold one’s nose and bite one’s tongue; in a second case, it may be possible to find a compromise; in a third, speaking out will seem the only defensible response despite the risks it entails—and adults must help children fully understand those risks. Many considerations—practical and moral, short-term and long-term—may have to be weighed in deciding on a response to a disturbing situation. But notice how this balanced way of framing the role for parents differs from more conventional advice, which emphasizes the importance of following directions and being polite no matter what the situation, or teaches children to think exclusively in terms of self-interest.

  From about the age of five, kids tend to latch onto the concept of fairness, denouncing with genuine outrage whatever seems to violate that ideal. Sometimes they react that way about matters that seem trivial to us, but with our help they may soon begin to apply the concept to broader issues. Similarly, kids may insist it’s not fair that they were denied something they’d been promised (or something a sibling received), but here, too, we can help them understand that other people have comparable concerns—and, in fact, fairness by definition extends beyond their personal claims. Thus, we can build on children’s instinct to complain that something is unfair so that eventually they notice larger injustices. At that point, we help them develop and refine their sense of moral outrage—the insight needed to recognize wrongs and the courage needed to oppose them.

  By our own reactions to unfairness, we model for children, showing them what it means to notice, to care, to take responsibility. But modeling, when you think about it, just tries to get someone to behave in a particular way; it doesn’t necessarily promote a dedication to, or an understanding of, that behavior. Because imitation falls short of these more ambitious goals, we need to supplement showing with telling—or, more accurately, with conversation. In fact, the two can be combined into what might be called “deep modeling.” Here, we not only set an example for children but try to be explicit about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.

  Consider the challenge of real-world ethical conundrums. It’s fine for us to model honesty and compassion for our kids, but what happens when those two values seem to pull in opposite directions—for example, when telling the truth may hurt someone’s feelings? Similarly, it’s easy to say we should look out for other people’s interests, but to what extent must we give up something we enjoy so someone else will benefit?

  We can let children know how we think (and feel) our way through similar dilemmas by describing to them the factors we consider in making decisions: our previous experiences, the principles from which we’re operating, and all the thoughts and emotions we take into account. From watching and listening to us, kids not only learn more about how we try to live a moral life; they also figure out that morality is rarely cut-and-dried. It’s less often a choice between good and bad than between two goods or two bads.

  Deep modeling might be thought of as a way of taking children “backstage,” in the way that terrific teachers actually write, or solve problems, in front of students, freely making mistakes and thinking aloud about how to correct them. Kids are thereby able to experience what happens before (or behind or beneath) the ethical decisions that adults make, the essays they publish, and the scientific principles they discover—rather than being presented with these things as so many faits accomplis. This not only helps them learn about how a moral individual, writer, or scientist acts; it has a refreshing way of debunking authority, showing the decider behind the decision, someone who is imperfect and often uncertain, struggling to figure stuff out—or do the right thing and make his or her way in the world. It shows them how to question and it encourages them to do so.

  Since many—too many—of our children’s values and attitudes are formed by the mass media, every parent ought to offer an informal multiyear course in media literacy. Even if we were inclined to do so, most of us outside the Amish community will find it difficult to shield kids from movies, reality shows, sitcoms, and video games—and the smorgasbord of violence, competition, sexism, and consumerism they beam into our homes. We may not be able to say, “Don’t watch,” but we can watch with them and show them how to view critically, how to recognize propaganda tricks used to sell them stuff they don’t need, how to identify hidden values and defuse attempts to manipulate them.

  You see how they tried to make you feel there’s something wrong with you unless you buy their product? Did you notice how all these reality shows are contests? (Pretty soon you get the idea that it’s natural for people to try to beat each other rather than work together.) Why do you think almost all the women—but not most of the men—who tell us about the news or the weather are young and attractive? How did the writer of this show manage to make us feel as if that character was justified in punching the other guy? (In real life, what else could someone in his situation have done if he was treated badly?) Did you pick up on the stereotypes in that comedy about fat people / smart people / old people / gays / Arabs? Did you know that the more TV someone watches, the more they likely he or she is to believe that most people are just out for themselves and would take advantage of you if given a chance?22 Can you see why people might come to believe that?

  This has to be done artfully, perhaps sparingly, lest we turn the living room into a classroom (in the worst sense of that word) with the result that our “students” understandably just want to be left alone to enjoy whatever they’re watching. In any case, such questions and observations from us may eventually become unnecessary as kids make it clear from their observations that they’ve acquired a skeptical sensibility. They proudly spot the Madison Avenue trickery and the dubious values just below the surface of so many Hollywood productions.

  Other results of our effort to help kids become reflective rebels may not be obvious right away, however. They may adopt a critical stance, but only later, when they’re older and ready. Even then, they may decide not to respond to a given situation the same way we would, and that’s something we have to respect. Any list of long-term goals for our children we formulate should include a meta-goal: We want them to be thoughtful enough to formulate meaningful goals for themselves. And whatever they come up with ultimately must supersede our goals for them.

  I began this book by examining complaints about permissive parenting: accusations that we let kids get away with too much, accompanied by demands that we clamp down. I conclude now by pointing out that it’s actually powerful adults and their institutions that get away with too much, which is why we need to raise a generation of kids who will push back. The same conservatism on display in our culture’s attitudes about children and parenting reveals itself again in the willingness to allow those institutions to continue unchallenged and unquestioned. Let’s ask whether widely accepted beliefs about narcissistic young people and helicopter parenting, conditional self-esteem and competition, really make sense. And then let’s take the commitment to rethink the conventional wisdom that’s reflected in this question—and pass it on to our kids.

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Lakoff, p. xv.

  2. All I’ve been able to find is a pair of studies in which a sample of devout Christians was asked to talk about their lives. Those who identified themselves as political conservatives (which doesn’t mean they necessarily held specific positions on the public policy issues Lakoff talks about) were more likely to emphasize the importance of respect for authority, strict rules, self-discipline, and personal responsibility (see McAdams et al.).

  3. Many conservatives support vouchers, in which public money is used to pay for private schools, whereas liberals are more likely to support subtler forms of privatization, such as diverting scarce public fu
nds to privately managed, but still nominally public, charter schools.

  4. In 2009, I listed several excerpts from Bush’s and Obama’s speeches about education and invited readers to try to match each passage with the correct president. See http://bit.ly/WmZsf.

  5. Three examples of this: Frank Bruni of the New York Times, Scot Lehigh of the Boston Globe, and the late William Raspberry of the Washington Post. Of course many other columnists take a conservative view of raising children; I’m focusing here on those whose views about this issue seem to contrast with their position on other matters.

  6. Here is just a sampling in this genre that have been published relatively recently: The Myth of Self-Esteem, The Self-Esteem Trap, The Feel-Good Curriculum, The Epidemic, Overindulged Children, Spoiling Childhood, The Narcissism Epidemic, Generation Me, and Pampered Child Syndrome. If you go back another decade or two (or ten), you’ll find many more along the same lines, as we’ll see in Chapter 1.

  7. For examples, see Bernstein and Triger, Gibbs 2009, Gosman, Hays, Kolbert, Mamen, Marano, Nelson, Rutherford, Stearns, Stein, Twenge 2006, Vinson, Warner, and Young-Eisendrath, among others.

  8. One perceptive writer (Dries) noticed two articles that appeared during the same month in 2012, one in Forbes titled “Why Millennials Are Spending More Than They Earn, and Parents Are Footing the Bill,” which painted young adults as materialistic spendthrifts; and the other in the Boston Globe titled “Generation Broke,” which described the same generation as cheapskates whose underconsumption is bad for the economy. Another observer, meanwhile, pointed out that “the same people who say [young people] have no attention span [also] say they spend all their time playing video games, in which they show sustained attention” (researcher Michael Posner, quoted in Glassman).

  CHAPTER 1

  1. Hersey, p. 136. The author adds, “Nor will reading problems be solved by any single, simple panacea, such as ‘going back to phonetics’” (p. 137)—a caution just as relevant, and just as frequently ignored, today. Eight years earlier, in 1946, a professor at Princeton complained, “I know of no college or university in the country that doesn’t have to offer most or all of its freshmen courses in remedial English, beginning mathematics, beginning science, and beginning foreign languages. Consequently, we give two or three years of college and the rest in high school work.” (Theodore M. Greene’s essay in the Los Angeles Times is quoted by education writer Susan Ohanian on her website, www.susanohanian.org.)

  2. For details about the misleading claims and tendentious use of data on which the report is based, see Berliner and Biddle; and Bracey.

  3. Rothstein, Chapter 1. Quotation appears on p. 20. After producing a similar list of complaints in reverse chronological order, an historian observes, “Each probe resolutely refused to cite its predecessors, creating a sense of novel failure [in] every generation” (Stearns, p. 85). The idea that schools are worse today than in the past has also been forcefully rebutted in Berliner and Biddle, and in many writings by the late Gerald Bracey.

  4. The 1911 quotation is from Comer, who also complained that “the rising generation cannot spell . . . its English is slipshod.” She traced this disgraceful state of affairs to the fact that students were “victims of a good many haphazard educational experiments. New ideas in pedagogy have run amuck for the last twenty-five years.” The 1917 quotation is from a study published that year in the Journal of Educational Psychology, cited in a September 2007 post on www.blog4history.com.

  5. Mansfield. For more on this topic, see my discussion on pp. 110–13.

  6. Briggs et al. I acquired a copy of the original report from the Harvard University archives after seeing a reference to it in Lewis.

  7. Shaw, p. 18.

  8. Bird and Bird, pp. 60, 77, 160, 154.

  9. Gibbs 2001.

  10. Ehrensaft, p. 183.

  11. Wyden, p. 127.

  12. Lear, pp. 11, 14.

  13. Beecher, p. 3.

  14. “Not strict enough” poll cited by Mintz, p. 292; Parents article cited by Hulbert, p. 213.

  15. Ricker, p. 25.

  16. Spock 1946, p. 265. And a few pages later: “Some gentle, unselfish parents devote so much effort to being tactful and generous to a child that they give him the feeling that he’s the crown prince, or rather the king” (p. 268).

  17. The 1948 speech is quoted in Hulbert, p. 245. The magazine article: Spock 1971. A biographer contends that “the idea of permissiveness seemed foreign to his very soul. He had not been raised in a permissive home, nor had he tolerated such in his own house” (Maier, p. 325). For more of his response to the permissiveness charge, see the 1985 edition of Baby and Child Care, pp. 8–14, 398–99.

  18. Cross, p. 195.

  19. Quoted in Hulbert, p. 99. Hulbert argues that the pendulum has long been swinging between child- and parent-centered models of child rearing. So, too, the author Christina Hardyment: “Regardless of the time at which they are writing, [child-care experts] can be classified as cuddly or astringent—lap theorists or iron men (or maidens). The latter claim that things are now disgracefully lax, the former that fifty years ago child-care was appallingly strict” (p. xiv).

  20. Comer, pp. 31, 34, 37.

  21. Boas, p. 3.

  22. Trollope, p. 173.

  23. Quoted in Mintz, p. 19.

  24. The last two quotations can readily be found floating around the Internet—along with expressions of doubt about their authenticity.

  25. Mamen, p. 9.

  26. See the 1997 and 1999 surveys entitled “Kids These Days” conducted by Public Agenda, a public opinion firm. Details about the latter report are available on Public Agenda’s website; the former report was summarized in Applebome.

  27. Anderson is quoted in Cable, p. 190. The Young-Bruehl quotation appears on p. 4 of her book. Also see Holt 1974.

  28. See Zelizer; and Alwin 1996.

  29. Reverend Benjamin Wadsworth is quoted in Mintz, p. 11. Mintz summarizes his history of American childhood as follows: “There has never been a time when the overwhelming majority of American children were well cared for and their experiences idyllic. Nor has childhood ever been an age of innocence, at least not for most children” (p. vii).

  30. DeMause, pp. 285–86. So, too, the Australian writer Robin Grille: “Child abuse and neglect [have] only recently become a minority occurrence, and only in some of the world’s societies. . . . We should view much of human history as a holocaust against children” (p. 92).

  31. Alwin 1989, p. 195.

  32. Hays, p. 45.

  33. Ehrenreich, p. 87.

  34. See Hulbert; and Mintz.

  35. “Full-blown permissiveness, even as an ideal, lasted for less than a decade. By the early fifties, most experts were renouncing ‘overpermissiveness’ and stressing ‘the importance of setting limits.’ . . . So, long before permissiveness became a political slur, it had fallen out of favor and come to be seen as a mistake, an overcorrection perhaps, but still a pitfall for the unwary parent” (Ehrenreich, p. 89). “Although the childrearing techniques of the postwar era are commonly labeled ‘permissive,’ childrearing was not nearly as indulgent as later commentators assumed. For one thing, no generation in American history was less likely to be breastfed. . . . Nor were parents especially permissive in terms of infantile sexuality or toilet training. The overwhelming majority of parents regarded masturbation as undesirable and attempted to stop it, while nearly half of all children began toilet training before they were nine months old [in the postwar years]” (Mintz, p. 281).

  36. See, for example, Baumrind 1966, p. 889.

  37. Goodlad. His subsequent investigations, as well as those of most other observers, suggest that, outside of a few oases of progressive education, his conclusion mostly remains true. In fact, the impact of corporate-styled school “reform,” which I described briefly in the introduction, has made schools even more traditional.

  38. As research psychologist Laurence Steinberg points out (personal c
ommunication, July 2008), parenting styles in most studies are assessed in relative terms—how one subject compares to everyone else in the sample—so it’s not clear where one would set the cut-off on various scales for determining that a response meets the criteria for being deemed permissive in an absolute sense.

  39. Not all researchers solicit children’s perspectives along with the parents’, so the latter are simply taken at face value. But when both are included, they often don’t tell the same story. In one study, “parents rated the family’s cohesion and communication more highly than their children did” (Givertz and Segrin, 11). In another, “parents generally reported that they included their children more in family decision making than the children perceived to be true” (Eccles et al., pp. 62–63). In a third, there were “significant perception differences between children and their parents on all but one of the family functioning scales and on all scales measuring child-rearing practices” (Stevens et al., p. 423). In a fourth, children were less likely to categorize their parents as supportive and more likely to see them as harsh, when compared to the parents’ self-reports (Kim et al., p. 16).

  40. When it’s possible to confirm what actually happened, children’s perceptions of their parents’ behaviors prove to be at least as accurate as the parents’ reports of their own behaviors. (Three studies are cited to support this claim in Kernis et al. 2000, p. 30.) Even when it’s impossible to know the truth, child reports of parenting are often “more strongly related to developmental outcomes than [are] parent reports” (Kins et al., p. 1106). In other words, it’s the child’s experience that determines the impact.

  41. Alwin 1988, 1989.

  42. I began to suspect a pattern when I subsequently came across this sentence in one of Twenge’s articles (2013b, p. 23): “For example, social networking sites such as Facebook increase users’ narcissism and materialism (Wilcox and Stephen, in press)”—only to discover that Wilcox and Stephen’s study contained no discussion of either narcissism or materialism.