The Myth of the Spoiled Child

by Alfie Kohn

  It would be reassuring to be able to report that research offers a definitive verdict on the matter, but that’s not the case. As I mentioned earlier, it’s possible to “prove” that narcissism is a product of just about any parenting style depending on which aspects of the diagnosis are emphasized. Moreover, the handful of studies that have been conducted are small, and their methodology doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence: One or two hundred college students are given a fifteen- or thirty-minute questionnaire that’s designed to tap narcissistic qualities and that asks about how they were raised. That’s pretty much it. Apart from the doubts one may entertain about the accuracy of a twenty-year-old’s memories of early childhood, self-report measures are often problematic—and particularly so, for obvious reasons, when we’re asking narcissists to describe themselves.78

  In any case, the effects in most of these studies aren’t particularly large, even when they reach conventional levels of statistical significance. When viewed together, moreover, the results are actually inconsistent. If there’s any generalization to be made about this line of research, it’s that children who score (a little) higher on measures of narcissism are at least as likely to have been raised by strict or cold parents as by permissive or overindulgent parents.79 Meanwhile, “healthy, adaptive narcissism in young adulthood is predicted by early gratification of physical and psychological needs.”80

  And what about outcomes that are less serious than narcissism, even if they’re still troubling? Can permissiveness be held responsible for these? Some proclamations along these lines seem like common sense, but that may be because they’re based on circular reasoning: “Spoiling kids produces spoiled kids.” Hard evidence is hard to come by, but one large study, published in Pediatrics, did turn up an interesting result. When parents of three-year-olds were questioned, there was indeed something they did that correlated strongly with the likelihood that their children, two years later, would be unusually loud, disobedient, argumentative, demanding, and mean. However, it wasn’t indulgent parenting that contributed significantly to this profile of the classic spoiled kid. It was the use of spanking.81

  By the same token, if we believed that young people lacked empathy, what generalization, if any, might we tentatively offer about how they were probably raised? Well, we’ve had the answer to that question for many years: Look for old-school parenting, precisely the sort that conservative critics of our “permissive” age recommend. It’s easy to parody liberal “let’s talk it out” child rearing, but the greater danger—and the far more common reality—is for kids to be bullied or bribed into obedience. The result is that they may never progress beyond the level of pure self-interest. (I’ll say more in the following chapter about what does promote empathy and concern for others.)

  It’s also possible that self-centeredness is connected to the extraordinary emphasis on achievement and winning in contemporary America: schooling that’s focused on mastering a series of narrowly defined academic skills in rapid succession, that’s measured by nearly continuous standardized testing, that leaches from the school day into the evening with copious amounts of homework, and that’s defined by a desperate competition for awards, distinctions, and admission to selective colleges, the point being not merely to do well but to triumph over everyone else. Indeed, research has long shown that competitive individuals—or people who have been instructed to compete—tend to be less empathic, less generous, and less trusting. That makes perfect sense when you think about it: If other people have been defined as obstacles to your own success, why would you be inclined to help them or see things from their point of view?82

  If we’re looking to identify likely sources of narcissism or egocentricity, we might do well to consider unresponsive parenting or achievement pressures. Here, too, there’s probably no simple, satisfying cause-and-effect relationship. The one thing that is clear is that no persuasive reason exists to hold permissiveness responsible.

  CHAPTER 2

  Parenting in Perspective

  One evening, as a group of us waited for a meeting to begin at the high school our children attended, a mother mentioned that she had figured out a way to make her daughter’s phone shut down automatically at a certain hour, thereby preventing her from texting when, in the mother’s opinion, she ought to be doing homework or sleeping. Somewhat undiplomatically, I pointed out to this woman that she had excluded her daughter from any role in figuring out whether there really was a problem with her texting and, if so, how it might be solved. The mother shrugged off my comment. “Sometimes,” she replied with an air of self-satisfaction, “you just have to be the parent.”

  That sentence was still echoing in my ears the next morning. The mom hadn’t objected to the way I characterized her intervention. She seemed perfectly willing to acknowledge that she had used coercion to achieve her goal of restricted phone use. But rather than simply defending that way of handling the situation, she took the position that her approach defines the essence of the parent’s role—a position I found more troubling than what she had done to her child’s phone, or even to her child.

  Parenting at its core—or at least at its best—is a process of caring, supporting, listening, guiding, reconsidering, teaching, and negotiating. There will be days when we lack the time, the skill, or the patience to do these things properly. But if we resort to compelling children to do what we want, or using force (physical or digital) to prevent them from doing what we don’t want, then we should be willing to admit that our response was less than ideal. There’s a big difference, after all, between forgiving ourselves an occasional lapse and not even recognizing that what we did was a lapse.

  Suppose, then, that this mom had said, “Sometimes you can’t be the parent; you have to resort to being the dictator.” I still might want to challenge her as to whether that’s really true and ask her to reflect on all that’s at stake: the need to help children take more responsibility for (and learn how to regulate) their own actions, the importance of inviting them to figure out how to persuade us that their position is reasonable, the urgency of making sure that we take them seriously and treat them respectfully. What’s more, imposing our will on kids just teaches them to do the same with others when they find it possible and expedient to do so.

  This mother might have disagreed with me about any of this, but if she at least had distinguished between a parent and a dictator (rather than equating the two), she would have avoided rationalizing her action by pretending that it was implicit in the very idea of parenting. Better yet, she might have put it like this: “Sometimes it’s easier to impose our will on kids, but we have to resist that temptation . . . and be the parent instead.”

  IN DEFENSE OF “WORKING WITH”

  So what does it mean to “be the parent”—or to be a good parent? These are critical questions in their own right, but they may also help us solve a puzzle suggested by the last chapter: If there’s little support for claims about a rise in permissive parenting (or the number of spoiled or narcissistic children), how is it that such claims are widely accepted? Why are so many people willing, even eager, to believe them?

  I’ll be (relatively) brief in laying out a vision of high-quality parenting, mostly because I’ve done so at length in another book.1 But let me say clearly at the start that by criticizing the critics, as I’ve been doing here—by challenging the casual assertion that most parents are too indulgent—I’m not defending mainstream approaches to parenting. While I don’t endorse permissiveness (in the latter-day sense of noninterference), I suspect that most parents are so fearful of being permissive, or even of having other people accuse them of this, that they overcompensate by being excessively controlling.

  In reviewing popular books and articles written for parents, I’m struck again and again by how their focus is on how to elicit compliance. There’s considerable variation in the strategies they propose, from bullying to bargaining, from techniques frankly modeled on animal training to subtler forms of manipulation.
But the animating question in such texts is rarely “What do kids need, and how can we meet those needs?” Rather, it’s “How can you get your kid to do whatever you want?”2

  The consumers of such advice seem to crave permission to feel good about making children feel bad. Thus, there’s an inexhaustible audience for declarations that we’re too permissive, that the main task for parents is to set more limits, impose more stringent regulations, devise more clever strategies for getting obedience—and to do so without regret. (Sample book title: Don’t Be Afraid to Discipline.) We seem to want absolution for establishing this sort of relationship with our children, perhaps because we can’t entirely silence our nagging—and appropriate—doubts about doing so.

  Parenting authors are happy to oblige, telling us not to bother explaining the reason for our demands, to pay no attention to children’s objections, even if they have logic on their side. “Don’t take any crap from your kids when you make a decision. You’re in charge,” says Fred Gosman. “One should expect a child to simply do what he is told most of the time,” says Robert Shaw. “Your word, not your reasoning, is what matters,” adds Wendy Mogel. “Calmly ignor[e] his arguments.”3

  In short: I am the boss of you. Do whatever I demand, or else.

  Some of us find this way of treating children intrinsically objectionable. But for anyone whose verdict depends on the result it produces, a mountain of research has established the detrimental impact of a single-minded focus on obedience, of relying on control and making children suffer when they act in a way that displeases the parent. Euphemisms and rationalizations aside, this is parenting defined mostly by power. And power is exactly what it teaches kids—with results that are all too apparent.

  Elsewhere I’ve reviewed a number of studies on this topic—showing, for example, that children raised by parents who rely on punishment and coercion are especially likely to be disruptive and aggressive with their peers, even at the age of three, the consequence being that other children may not want to have anything to do with them.4 Subsequent research has confirmed such findings, and the most interesting of the newer studies have looked at what parents did at one point in time and then evaluated how their children were faring years later (in an effort to sort out cause and effect).5 Thus, a Canadian study investigated how two- to five-year-old children were being raised and then checked back after eight years had gone by. Punitive parenting, it turned out, was associated with higher levels of aggressive behavior, more anxiety, and also less helpfulness and sharing.6 A US study discovered that stricter, less sensitive parenting produced children who were more likely to be overweight two years later, even after adjusting for family income.7 And many other studies have found a variety of negative outcomes linked to the use of spanking in particular.8

  What about permissive parenting? Assessing its effects is tricky because not all researchers distinguish between parents who can’t be bothered to respond when their children do something wrong (or need help), on the one hand, and those who, with care and deliberation, choose a policy of minimal intervention, on the other. However, there is some evidence that even the former, which few of us regard as ideal, may be less damaging than authoritarian parenting. One study found that the extent to which children were punished was a powerful predictor of how aggressive and antisocial they were years later, whereas the use of “lax, inconsistent rules” was not.9 Another study, which assessed older children and their parents, discovered that authoritarian parenting was associated with lower levels of “family satisfaction” but that permissiveness had no negative effect.10

  The good news, though, is that it’s not necessary to choose between punitive, power-based parenting and the kind of family environment in which there is a lack of structure (permissiveness) or a lack of parental involvement (neglect). I don’t mean just that we can replace an either/or choice with a continuum on which there are many gradations. That’s certainly true, but a span between the extremes of “authoritarian” and “permissive” actually doesn’t represent much of an improvement. What we need is a different approach altogether. Sometimes the alternative to black and white isn’t gray; it’s, say, orange.

  Many theorists and researchers follow Diana Baumrind in nominating “authoritative” parenting as a third possibility, one that supposedly captures an optimal blend of warmth and support with firm control and predictable enforcement of rules. But I prefer not to use that term, mostly because it denotes more of a power-based approach to parenting than many people realize—apparently reflecting the traditional values that Baumrind personally endorses.11 Furthermore, when you look closely at studies that purport to show the benefits of authoritative parenting, they have sometimes defined the term differently from the way Baumrind meant it. The positive results they report are due to an approach that features less (or even no) emphasis on control.12

  Instead, I find it more useful to talk about “working-with”—as opposed to “doing-to”—parenting. This phrase emphasizes collaboration more than control, and love and reason more than power. It also includes these elements:

  •accepting children unconditionally—loving them for who they are, not for what they do,

  •providing regular opportunities for children to make decisions about matters that affect them,

  •focusing more on meeting children’s needs and providing guidance than on eliciting compliance,

  •regarding misbehavior as an occasion for problem solving and teaching, rather than as an infraction for which the child should be subjected to punitive “consequences,” and

  •looking beneath a child’s behavior in order to understand the motives and reasons that underlie it.

  “Working-with” parenting overlaps with what other writers have called “autonomy-supportive,” “responsive,” or “empathic” parenting. It’s quite different from a hands-off, disengaged style (permissiveness) as well as from an approach that emphasizes firm control, even when administered with warmth (Baumrind’s authoritativeness). And it should also be distinguished from the sort of parenting that relies on subtle, often insidious, kinds of control: time-outs and other examples of what might be called “punishment lite,” attempts to play on children’s guilt, and the use of positive reinforcement (including praise) in place of threats—all to get kids to please us. As I’ll argue in the next chapter, these, too, are forms of “doing to” parenting, particularly if they lead a child to believe that our love comes with strings attached.13

  While definitions and emphases vary from one study to the next, there is by now an impressive body of research to show that something reasonably close to what I’m calling working-with parenting is not just benevolent but also beneficial. One study found, for example, that very young children were more receptive to what their parents suggested if the parents had been responsive to their needs earlier. Another showed that kindergarten-age children whose parents routinely provided them with explanations and choices were better adjusted several years later, both socially and academically, as compared with kids whose parents were more controlling. Yet another study discovered that the healthiest young adolescents, psychologically speaking, were those whose parents were accepting of them and avoided using love as a form of manipulation.14

  One of the most powerful results of such parenting, though—and the most relevant to our concerns here—concerns children’s connections with, and attitudes toward, others. A few years ago, my local newspaper featured a comment by an academic who writes about children’s development, someone I knew slightly and regarded as generally thoughtful. He was quoted as saying, “You can make your kids self-centered by focusing too much on their needs.” I wrote to him, mentioning that I had heard statements to that effect for many years but had never come across any evidence to support this view. I wondered whether he knew of some.

  I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that he never wrote back because, in fact, the available research strongly supports exactly the opposite position. Among its many advantages, wa
rm, responsive parenting—the sort that is sometimes ridiculed and confused with overindulgence—is particularly likely to help children become compassionate, generous, and empathic.15 By contrast, power-based discipline and control, including punishment, often interferes with children’s moral development, undermines their capacity to feel others’ pain, and reduces the likelihood that they’ll reach out to help.16 Why? Probably because meeting children’s needs frees them from being preoccupied with those needs (and, by extension, with themselves), the result being that they can be more sensitive to others’ needs.17 Warmth and acceptance may not be sufficient to guarantee that children attend to others’ emotional states and take steps to assist them. But attacking “overindulgence,” or urging parents to say no to their children or be less committed to making them happy, does absolutely nothing to promote caring or reduce self-centeredness.

  IDENTIFYING ERRORS

  With this brief account of working-with parenting—and the evidence that supports it—we’re now in a better position to address the question of why so many people seem convinced that our culture has been engulfed by a tidal wave of permissiveness.

  To begin with, certain conceptual confusions make such assertions look more plausible than they really are. A few of these are generic lapses in logic and thinking that social psychologists have been documenting for quite some time. Consider, for example, what’s been called the availability bias: inferring a general rule from an example of something just because it’s particularly striking or close at hand. You witness a kid screaming at the mall while her parents do nothing and conclude, “People let their children get away with anything nowadays! When I was growing up . . .” Or you leap from the fact that you held the door open for a couple of teenagers and they failed to say thank you, to “the younger generation today is all about me, me, me.”18