The Myth of the Spoiled Child

by Alfie Kohn

  That’s certainly true of the accusation that parents involve themselves too closely in their children’s lives and don’t allow them to fail. It’s common to come across—in fact, it’s hard to avoid—hyperbolic references in the media to “kids who leave for college without ever having crossed the street by themselves” and “‘Lawnmower Parents’ [who] have ‘mowed down’ so many obstacles (including interfering at their children’s workplaces, regarding salaries and promotions) that these kids have actually never faced failure.”1 Just in the couple of years before this book went to press in 2013, articles about overparenting appeared in The Atlantic, the New Yorker, Time, Psychology Today, Boston Magazine, and countless newspapers and blogs.

  In each case, just as with condemnations of permissiveness, the phenomenon being attacked is simply assumed to be pervasive; there’s no need to prove what everyone knows. The spread of overparenting is vigorously condemned by journalists and social critics, but mostly on the basis of anecdotes and quotations from other journalists and social critics. On the relatively rare occasions when a writer invokes research in support of the claim that overparenting is widespread (or damaging), it’s instructive to track down the study itself to see what it actually says.

  A case in point: In 2013, several prominent American blogs, including those sponsored by The Atlantic and the New York Times, reported an Australian study purportedly showing that parents were excessively involved in their children’s schooling. But anyone who took the time to actually read the study realized that the authors had just asked a handpicked group of local educators to tell stories about parents whom they personally believed were doing too much for their children. There were no data about what impact, if any, this practice had on the kids, nor was there any way to draw conclusions about how common the practice was—at least beyond this small, presumably unrepresentative sample. More remarkably, only 27 percent of the educators in the sample reported having seen “many” examples of this sort of overinvolved parenting. (This low number somehow did not make it into any of the press coverage.) If anything, the effect of the study was to raise doubts about the assumption that overparenting is a widespread problem. But the study’s very existence allowed bloggers to recycle a few anecdotes, giving the appearance that fresh evidence supported what they (and many of their readers) already believed.2

  Another example: In 2010, Lisa Belkin, a writer for the New York Times Magazine, devoted a blog post to an article in a California law review that declared a tilt toward excess “has dominated parenting in the last two decades.” But how did the authors of the law review article substantiate that remarkable assertion? They included a footnote that referenced a 2009 New York Times Magazine column written by . . . Lisa Belkin.3

  It’s striking that evidence on this topic is so scarce that academic journals must rely on opinion pieces in the popular press. But in this case, the popular press was actually claiming that the trend had already peaked.4 That was true not only of Belkin’s column (“Could the era of overparenting be over?”) but of a Time cover story (“The Growing Backlash Against Overparenting”) that was cited by an essay in another academic journal. The latter essay began with the sweeping (and rather tautological) statement that an “epidemic” of overparenting was “running rampant”—which is exactly what its sources claimed was no longer true.5 So who’s right? There are, as far as I can tell, no good data to show that most parents do too much for their children. It’s all impressionistic, anecdotal, and, like most announcements of trends, partly self-fulfilling.

  Here’s one more illustration of the misleading way in which those already committed to the overparenting story cite research to bolster their position. It’s commonly claimed that children whose parents do too much for them will grow up with a sense of entitlement. Thus, given the supposed spread of overparenting, our society has raised a generation of obnoxiously entitled young people. A few years ago, a prominently placed article in the New York Times made just this claim, focusing on how students expect high grades as their due. The apparent justification for publishing this complaint as a news story was a “recent” study on the subject.

  But that study, which at the time was actually more than a year old, had merely distributed questionnaires to students at a single university. Moreover, even if one took the results seriously, they had the effect of undermining the very conclusion they were being used to support, just like the Australian report. On all but one item on the questionnaire, a majority of the students—in most cases, a substantial majority—gave a negative answer to the questions intended to measure academic entitlement. Nevertheless, the Times invited readers to conclude that kids today feel entitled, presumably just because any of the students had said yes to any of the questions.6 (Judging by the unusually large number of outraged letters to the editor published a few days later, readers didn’t need much prompting to share this view.)7

  Neither that study, nor the one published in Australia, has anything to teach us about the extent of overparenting or entitlement—except, perhaps, that neither phenomenon may be as common as is widely believed. But the articles that mentioned these studies, like many other publications taking the same position, do reveal something important: the strength of the ideological commitment that leads people to complain about an epidemic of overparenting.

  AN ANATOMY OF INTRUSIVE PARENTING

  Any serious discussion of this topic must begin by acknowledging that children benefit, psychologically and in other ways, from having parents who are closely connected to them and involved in their lives. This, according to a solid foundation of research, is true not only in early childhood but through adolescence and beyond. Warnings about the harms of overparenting often gloss over the fact that there’s far more danger to children in having parents who aren’t sufficiently involved in their lives.8

  So why is disproportionate attention paid to the possibility of being too close? It could be due to the premium that our culture places on the value of self-sufficiency. We are deeply attached to the idea of not being too attached. We see creativity as a characteristic of separate selves rather than groups, and the heroes glorified in popular culture are mostly loners. Inevitably this value system colors our approach to parenting. When you think about it, the developmental milestones we celebrate are those dealing with the child’s capacity to do things without assistance, not about her growing capacity for more sophisticated connection to others. The parent’s job is to promote this independence, and the constant fear is that a child will be too clingy, will want to be carried rather than walk on his own two feet (first literally, then figuratively), will continue to need a parent’s help at an age when we think he should be able to—and should want to—do that task alone. (At the end of this chapter, I’ll focus on the version of this indictment that pertains to older adolescents and young adults.)

  Few of us stop to question this reflexive equation of maturity with independence. That’s why I found it surprising, even somewhat bracing, when Marilyn Watson, a developmental theorist and educator whose work I’ve long admired, suggested that parents should sometimes make a point of doing things for their children that the children are able to do for themselves. This advice reflects a commitment to balancing our support for the child’s growing competence with the value we place on our relationship with the child and the trust she has in us, acknowledging the developmental importance of secure attachment. It’s also a vote of confidence that kids will continue to acquire skills, and to enjoy demonstrating what they’re capable of doing, even if they aren’t always expected to fly solo as soon as they can. “Of course we can do too much for children, depriving them of the opportunity to stretch themselves,” she concedes. “But we can also be too afraid that if we help our children or do things for them, they will take advantage of our largess and be ‘spoiled.’ What a terrible message of mistrust.”9

  To some extent, then, good parenting is about providing support, not just assisting with separation—and we ought to be
skeptical about the cultural values that relentlessly privilege the latter over the former. Nevertheless, it is possible that some parents get carried away with providing support, so it’s reasonable to ask whether overparenting is a legitimate cause for concern. The trouble is, as with claims about permissiveness, we can’t say whether something is damaging or widespread until we’re clear about exactly what the term means. “Overparenting,” of course, is bad by definition: The prefix over- implies excess. But it’s hard to determine how much harm it really does, or even how many people are guilty of it, until we’ve figured out how much parenting is too much. Or whether that’s even the best way to frame the question.

  Is there an ideal amount of closeness or involvement in a child’s life? No, not that we can specify regardless of age or temperament. Some kids need more support even when they’re older; others not only don’t require it but actively resist it. And the demands of each situation also matter. We’re likely to keep closer tabs on our children when they’re in an unfamiliar neighborhood, or when the activity they’re engaged in is intrinsically riskier.

  Then, too, there’s the possibility that we apply different standards depending on whom we’re judging. What those people over there do with their children may seem to me like hovering, even though when I act in a very similar way with my children, I’m convinced that what I’m doing is perfectly appropriate—indeed, wonderfully loving. Thus, if it’s hard to be sure whether a given interaction, or a pattern of interactions in a particular family, constitutes overparenting, how in the world can we apply that term to an entire culture?

  Some books and articles stretch the concept to include parents who err on the side of keeping their children safe. But do we really want to condemn as excessive the use of safety helmets, car seats, playgrounds designed so kids will be less likely to crack their skulls, childproof medicine bottles, and baby gates at the top of stairs? One writer criticizes “the inappropriateness of excessive concern in low-risk environments,” but of course reasonable people often disagree about what constitutes both “excessive” and “low risk.” Even if, as this writer asserts, “a young person growing up in a Western middle-class family is safer today than at any time in modern history,” the relevance of that relative definition of safety isn’t clear. Just because fewer people die of disease today than in medieval times doesn’t mean it’s silly to be immunized. And perhaps young people are safer today because of the precautions that some critics ridicule.

  Nor is it clear that the desire to protect children is new. “We want to believe there was a time when it was all very different—when kids could be kids, and parents weren’t too risk averse to let their offspring grapple with the world’s harshness,” one journalist writes. “This is the idea embedded in much of the criticism one hears about contemporary child rearing.” But historians have shown that “parents in the Middle Ages worried about their kids no less than we worry about ours today,” and by the nineteenth century there is evidence of bars being placed on windows to protect toddlers from falling out as well as “leading strings” so that young children couldn’t wander off during walks.10

  Perhaps the question “How much protection—or involvement in a child’s life—is too much?” is misconceived. It may be the kind rather than the amount to which we should pay attention—a distinction overlooked by an awful lot of people who write about the subject. One group of researchers defines overparenting as “a form of developmentally inappropriate parenting that is driven by parents’ overzealous desires to ensure the success and happiness of their children.” That form of parenting, they add, usually reflects “benevolent intentions,” and the behaviors involved “may indeed be adaptive at modest levels.” The same is true of the closely related phenomenon of helicopter parenting, a made-for-the-media phrase if ever there was one, which denotes “a version of overparenting in which parents demonstrate excessive involvement in their children’s lives . . . [that fails] to allow for levels of autonomy suitable to their child’s age.”11

  But here, too, the water quickly becomes muddied. How do we know when an intervention is “excessive” or “developmentally inappropriate,” or how much autonomy this child needs or wants? Again, appropriateness may vary depending on the circumstances as well as the child’s personality. So maybe the definition of problematic parenting isn’t a function of how much, or even how, the parent gets involved. Maybe it has more to do with why. There are different reasons for helping or hovering, and some of them are healthier than others. With parents, as with children, to focus only on what we can see and measure is to ignore the all-important motives for what people do.

  Suppose you or I conclude that a particular parent down the street phones or texts her child more often than necessary to assure his safety or is a little too involved with his homework. Can this be attributed to a legitimate difference in opinion about the risks of a trip downtown, or about how important it is that the child turn in a high-quality school assignment? Or are we looking at something more psychologically complex and potentially worrisome, such as the belief that the more you do for your children, the better you are as a parent? Worse, consider moms and dads “whose own self-esteem is crucially dependent on their child’s success”—quoting here from an essay called “Overparenting and the Narcissistic Pursuit of Attachment.”12 Some parents use their children to meet their own emotional needs—and may be unaware that they’re doing so.

  In short, rather than just asking whether parents are doing too much for their kids, it may be more relevant to ask for whom they’re doing it. At first glance it may seem as though these parents are guilty only of putting their children’s “happiness ahead of [their] own” and are “heavily invested in their childhood at the expense of [the parents’] own lives.”13 But look again: Conspicuously sacrificing everything for one’s children, such that one’s very life seems to revolve around them, actually turns out to be rather egocentric. Parents who are plagued by doubts about their own worth may be so consumed with getting what they lack, psychologically speaking, that it becomes impossible for them to see their children for who they are and what they need—or who they aren’t and what they don’t need. “There is no parent more vulnerable to the excesses of overparenting than an unhappy parent,” as Madeline Levine, a psychotherapist, has observed.14

  CODDLED—OR CONTROLLED?

  The genuinely troubling phenomenon of using one’s child to shore up one’s own sense of self accounts for only some fraction of what’s commonly called overparenting. No one knows how common that version is, yet most articles and books on the subject feature such extreme examples of over-parenting and then imply, or even state explicitly, that this type is rampant.

  It’s also common, as with discussions of permissiveness, to offer claims (without any evidence) that overparenting is more widespread today than ever before—or even, as one article asserts, that we’re currently witnessing “the first generation of children raised by intensive parents.” Often, too, we find very different things lumped together as instances of “overparenting”—for example, efforts to protect kids from physical harm, to replace competitive with cooperative activities, and to induce children to work harder in school—as if these were instances of a single trend.

  Given this record of sweeping statements and sloppy analysis, perhaps we shouldn’t be shocked to find that, when such writings get around to discussing the effects of overparenting, the case once again tends to be built on anecdotes, quotes from a few observers who share the writer’s opinions, and, once in a while, a citation to a book or study that turns out to have been addressing something rather different.15

  We need to pose the question carefully: What are the effects on children of a certain degree of overparenting, or a certain kind, or a certain set of motives for it—and how do we know? The two disturbing outcomes proposed most often are entitlement and anxiety. Let’s look at each in turn.

  The suggestion that kids whose parents hover and protect them will engend
er a feeling of entitlement is rather like the claim that kids raised in a permissive environment will grow up to be narcissistic: While superficially plausible, there’s not much evidence to support it. I could find only one study that investigated the possibility of a connection, and it turned up a weak association between a self-report measure of overparenting and a sense of entitlement in young-adult children.16

  But the concept itself turns out to be more complicated than most people realize. Just as not all aspects of narcissism are pathological, so entitlement seems to come in different flavors—for example, “exploitive” and “non-exploitive,” according to one team of researchers. The latter means you think you have a right to positive outcomes, but you don’t take advantage of others in order to get them. Indeed, such individuals “may feel entitled to get things they want at least partially because they are willing to put in the necessary effort to obtain them.” And it’s this variant, which is rather innocuous even if it includes “unrealistically high aspirations,” that may be widespread. There’s no evidence that exploitive entitlement is common in young people, and, as we saw, there’s only weak evidence that it’s due to having been overparented.17

  But does this way of raising children contribute to anxiety? Here’s what some relevant studies found:

  •Intrusive, infantilizing parenting was associated with separation anxiety among a small group of children who were already predisposed to be anxious.

  •What investigators regarded as parental overinvolvement at age four was a modest predictor of anxiety in the same children at age nine.

  •A review of forty-seven studies concluded that childhood anxiety seemed to be associated with any of several parenting styles: rejection or withdrawal, hostility, or overinvolvement. The most striking findings, though, were that (1) the lowest levels of anxiety were found among children whose parents actively supported their autonomy, and (2) all the parenting variables put together explained a very small percentage of the differences in anxiety rates.18