The Myth of the Spoiled Child

by Alfie Kohn

  5.What we’re talking about here is extrinsic motivation, which ultimately harms everyone, including the valedictorian. Research by educational psychologists suggests that grades typically do three things: They reduce students’ interest in learning, they lead students to prefer less challenging tasks, and they encourage students to think in a more superficial fashion.17 The effect of class rank, honor rolls, and grade-based scholarships—all of which are essentially rewards for having been rewarded—is to exacerbate all three of those effects by making grades even more salient.

  6.Pitting students against one another for the status of having the best grades adds the arsenic of competition to the strychnine of extrinsic motivation. It not only makes the high school experience unnecessarily stressful but simultaneously undermines the sense of community and support that can help students get through those years intact.

  PAIN: BETTER GET USED TO IT

  The upshot of the previous two sections is this: Even if we thought it would be productive to subject kids to unpleasant experiences, neither rewards nor competition is productive, let alone necessary. To that extent, efforts to minimize those experiences don’t really constitute overprotectiveness on the part of parents and educators—just good sense.

  But let’s take a step back and ponder that phrase “subject kids to unpleasant experiences” in more general terms. We often hear an argument that runs as follows: If adults allow (or perhaps even require) children to play a game in which the point is to slam a ball at someone before he or she can get out of the way, or hand out zeroes to underscore a child’s academic failure, or demand that most young athletes go home without even a consolation prize (in order to impress upon them the difference between them and the winners), well, sure, they might feel lousy—about themselves, about the people around them, and about life itself—but that’s the point. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, and the sooner they learn that, the better they’ll be at dealing with it.

  The corollary claim is that if we intervene to relieve the pain, if we celebrate all the players for their effort, then we’d just be coddling them and giving them false hopes. A little thanks-for-playing trophy might allow them to forget, or avoid truly absorbing, the fact that they lost. Then they might overestimate their own competence and fall apart later in life when they learn the truth about themselves (or about the harshness of life). We do them no favors by sheltering them from the fact of their own inadequacy or from the cruelty that awaits them when they’re older.

  That’s why a teacher-blogger had no reservations about describing herself as coercive, insisting her approach is justified because, first, “the role of school is inherently to prepare students for adulthood,” and second, “when we become adults, life itself is coercive by nature. Most everything we do, we do with some amount of coercion present, in one form or another.”18 Now take this logic one more step. If children are going to have teachers who coerce them, then parents should start coercing them even before they start school. One parenting author offers the cautionary tale of a boy who was distressed when his preschool teacher punished him; the fault, according to the author, lay with his parents who hadn’t “prepared him for the real world” by punishing him earlier.19

  In sum, the best way to get children ready for the painful things that may happen to them later is to make sure they experience plenty of pain while they’re young.

  When the premise is spelled out so bluntly, it sounds ridiculous. But that summary captures a mindset that is widely accepted and applied. I call it BGUTI (rhymes with duty), which is the acronym of Better Get Used To It. It brings to mind a Monty Python sketch that featured “getting hit on the head” lessons. When the student recoils and cries out from the pain, the instructor says, “No, no, no. Hold your head like this, then go, ‘Waaah!’ Try it again”—and gives him another smack. Presumably this is extremely useful training . . . for future experiences of getting hit on the head.

  We smack elementary school students by subjecting them to grades and standardized tests. There is absolutely no evidence that kids of that age derive any benefit from either of these practices, but the practices nevertheless persist and are rationalized on the grounds that, because children will encounter them when they’re older, they had better start getting accustomed to them now.20 So, too, for homework, which, according to the available research, provides no advantages whatsoever, either academic or attitudinal, when assigned to elementary school students. Yet even many educators who know this is true fall back on the justification that homework—time-consuming, anxiety-provoking, and pointless though it may be—will help kids get used to doing homework when they get to high school. One researcher comes close to saying that the more unpleasant (and even unnecessary) the assignment, the more valuable it is by virtue of teaching children to cope with things they don’t like.21

  Or consider an English instructor named Mark Bauerlein, who argues against making high school more engaging and relevant. Why? Because college, too, will be boring. Success, he says, requires the “ability to slog through” whatever is required. “In adjusting curriculum and pedagogy to student interest, educators may raise certain secondary school results but, ironically, stunt students in preparation for the next level of their education.” Rather than making school better, we should just teach students the “skill of exerting oneself even when bored.” After all, the more people who adopt this BGUTI view, the more boredom they’re likely to face later.22

  This reasoning is often applied outside of school as well. In an article about devices used to monitor and control children while they use technology, a father shrugs off any concern that his daughters will conclude he doesn’t trust them: “They should learn that they will be monitored throughout their lives: ‘It’s not any different from any employer.’”23

  BGUTI actually takes two forms. The positive version holds that it’s beneficial for children to have unpleasant experiences of the type they’ll presumably encounter later. The negative version says that the absence of unpleasant experiences—or the presence of experiences that are “unrealistically” supportive or reassuring—is harmful. Thus, if children are spared from having to do things that cause them anxiety, if they’re permitted to revise and resubmit a school assignment without penalty or introduced to cooperative games (where the point is to accomplish something together rather than trying to defeat one another), a typical response is “That’s not how things work in the real world!”

  Underlying such a comment are a couple of assumptions. First, it’s taken for granted that life is pretty damn unpleasant, a belief that may be most informative for what it tells us about the experiences and attitudes of the people who offer this objection. The claim, for example, that kids ought to be forced to compete because “life is competitive” is based on a partial truth. Life actually consists of some activities that entail competition, some that involve cooperation, and some that require neither. So why prepare children mostly for adversarial encounters? If the goal were really to get them ready for what they’re likely to experience, wouldn’t there be a comparable emphasis on helping them learn how to collaborate and empathize? Yet rarely do we hear people complain that kids mostly taught to compete are being ill prepared for the real world.

  The second assumption is that childhood is—and should be—mostly about preparation for what comes later. It doesn’t matter if you’re miserable now because what you experience as a child isn’t important in its own right. Everything is about the payoff, which doesn’t come until some (unspecified) period during adulthood. School, for example, may be awful for you—it may squelch your excitement about learning—but that’s okay because the purpose of education is to acclimate you to gratuitous unpleasantness. Anyone who finds this premise unsettling, anyone who agrees with John Dewey that education is a process of living and not merely a preparation for future living, would object to BGUTI even if experiencing pain as a kid did succeed in diminishing the effects of pain as a grownup.

  But do
es it? Often we hear people say things like “In life, everyone doesn’t get a trophy” or “When you grow up, people aren’t going to think you’re special.” But those are grumbles, not arguments. In themselves, they don’t offer any reason not to give everyone a trophy or to treat children as if they were special. We need to focus on the primary empirical claims driving BGUTI: that bad experiences really are useful preparation for subsequent bad experiences, and that children who are treated too well, or who don’t experience enough frustration, will suffer later when they’re treated less kindly by others. What matters is whether those statements are true.

  Let’s concede that a hypothetical child who managed to succeed in every one of his endeavors, or who always got everything he desired, might find it hard to cope if things suddenly turned sour. But are we entitled to conclude from this fanciful thought experiment that parents and teachers should deliberately stand back rather than help out? I’m not aware of any evidence to support the hypothesis that a relatively bump-free childhood leads to adjustment difficulties down the line.

  On the other side of the ledger, long-term follow-ups of people who attended nontraditional schools—the sort that afford an unusual amount of autonomy and/or nurturing—suggest that the great majority turned out well and seemed capable of navigating the transition to traditional colleges and workplaces.24 Second, even if early, supportive experiences were responsible for some children’s developing unrealistic expectations about themselves or the world—and I don’t know of any evidence to substantiate that connection—research challenges the belief that those young people implode once they’re unceremoniously brought back to earth.

  Take students who thought they would graduate from college but didn’t end up doing so. Some would argue that “teenagers’ achievement expectations are related to their sense of entitlement” and when they “fail to achieve the level of education to which they feel entitled, they are likely to respond with anxiety or depression.” But that doesn’t appear to be true. In fact, “higher expectations are associated with fewer symptoms of depression in adulthood” and, overall, there were “almost no long-term emotional costs” when expectations weren’t realized. That finding confirmed another, more general study in which young adults were asked, “Have things worked out the way you thought they would since high school?” Despite the fact that many respondents answered no, “None of the interviews was characterized by fatalism, resignation, or even notable distress.”25

  If it doesn’t hurt to expect too much, we’re left wondering why it would help to be brought down to earth even before one had the chance to soar. Anyone who supports BGUTI-inspired practices has an obligation to explain how exactly this is supposed to work. What’s the mechanism by which the sting of a zero, or the smack of an undodged ball, or the silence of a long drive home without a trophy, is supposed to teach resilience?

  And how hurtful does an experience have to be before an adult is allowed to step in to help? Not so long ago, humiliation—even physical abuse—at the hands of bullies was regarded as a rite of passage that kids were expected to deal with by themselves—without assistance from “overprotective” teachers and parents. The talk about toughening them up and forcing them to learn how to handle problems on their own isn’t so different from the BGUTI rhetoric that’s still used today to justify painful experiences.

  When I hear people complain that kids are being spared the necessity of hard work, sheltered from the inevitability of competition, deprived of the benefits of skinned knees, and so on, I’m tempted to respond with satirically feigned heartiness:

  Damn right! And you know what else these touchy-feely parents are doing? They’re reading to their kids at night! Not only that, but they’ll read any book the kid demands—because of course their precious little angels are the center of the universe, right? I’ll tell you what, though: Those tykes are going to be in for a rude shock when they get out into the real world and discover that no one’s going to crawl into bed with them and read aloud while they just lie there and do nothing. Sorry, Charlie—that’s not the way life works. If you want to know what a book’s about, you’re going to have to damn well find out for yourself!

  BGUTI proponents often give the impression that the sin being committed by overzealous adults is leaving kids unfamiliar with the tough challenges they’ll face later. This raises three questions.

  1.Are children, including those raised in very supportive families or taught in progressive schools, really unaware of the larger culture in which they live (in all its unloving particulars)? Without evidence of this ignorance, the whole argument falls apart.

  2.If the goal is familiarity, wouldn’t a single exposure to any given practice be sufficient to ensure it won’t catch them by surprise when they’re older? Why would we need to keep clobbering them with grades, contests, and the like day after day, year after year?

  3.What reason is there to believe that mere familiarity with something equips one to deal with it productively? “Our kids must experience disappointments to develop skills in handling failure and imperfection,” one writer asserts.26 But the fact of being disappointed neither imparts a skill nor promotes a constructive attitude. Of course one could argue that we need to teach such skills to, and promote resiliency among, children—or at least those children who seem to lack them. But that’s not what the BGUTI contingent is saying. They’re arguing for giving homework and tests to all young children, or separating them into winners and losers, because these tykes need to get used to such things—as if exposure itself will inoculate them against the negative effects they would otherwise experience later. If we were interested in helping children to anticipate and deal with unpleasant experiences, it might make sense to discuss the details with them and perhaps guide them through role-playing exercises. But why would we subject kids to those experiences? After all, to teach children how to handle a fire emergency, we talk to them about the dangers of smoke inhalation and advise them where to go when the alarm sounds. We don’t actually set them on fire.

  But the key point is this: From a developmental perspective, BGUTI is flat-out wrong. People don’t get better at coping with unhappiness because they were deliberately made unhappy when they were young. On the contrary, what best prepares children to deal with the challenges of the real world is to experience success and joy, to feel supported and respected, to receive loving guidance and unconditional care and the chance to have some say about what happens to them. This is the foundation that allows one to see what’s wrong with unsympathetic people and coercive institutions, to realize that grades or punishment or competition is not a necessary part of life, and to imagine alternatives. Most of all, positive emotional experiences give kids the confidence and psychological stability to weather the bad stuff. That’s what all the research about effective parenting (pp. 40–41) teaches us: Loved, empowered kids are in the best position to deal constructively with unloving, disempowering circumstances.

  IS FAILURE BENEFICIAL?

  The case for BGUTI is, to a large extent, a case for failure. The argument is that when kids don’t get a hoped-for reward, or when they lose a contest, they’ll not only be prepared for more of the same but will be motivated to try harder next time. Overcoming failure is also believed to be the key to character, and character is the chief ingredient of success. Hence the indignation about indulgent parents: If adults intervene to help children succeed, or soften the distress caused by failure, that means they’re preventing them from confronting the full force of their deficient performance.

  The purveyors of this narrative, as of the others we’ve been examining, are not limited to self-identified social conservatives. A 2013 essay (on a mainstream magazine blog) titled “Why Parents Need to Let Their Children Fail” cued an enormous online amen chorus. Similarly, a columnist for a prominent magazine for teachers and school administrators insisted, “We need to be sure that [students] sometimes encounter frustration and failure” because “how can they learn to ove
rcome adversity if they haven’t experienced it?” And the journalist Paul Tough informed us, if you want to “develop [kids’] character, you let them fail and don’t hide their failures from them or from anybody else.”27 A casual Web search produces tens of thousands of similar declarations.

  Unlike the charge that kids are spoiled, which has been around forever, there was a time when it would have seemed surprising to make a case for failure—an example of what reporters call a “man bites dog” story—because it upends the expected order. It’s logical to think that success is good and failure is bad; we want to help kids succeed and reassure them about their capabilities. But listen to this: Failure can actually be helpful! It’s possible to feel too good about yourself! Parents may be hurting their children by helping them! These messages presumably raised eyebrows at first because they were unexpected and counterintuitive. Except now they aren’t. As I noted in the introduction, people are still telling this story as if it represents a bold challenge to the conventional wisdom, but the fact is that almost everyone else has been saying the same thing for some time now. It has become the conventional wisdom. Indeed, the notion that failure is beneficial, or that kids today have inflated self-esteem, is virtually the only message on these subjects that we’re likely to hear.

  The corresponding advice—let them stumble!—is offered in response to our alleged tendency to overparent, our failure to let children fail. So let’s begin by asking whether this assumption is really true. The idea that kids lack experience with failure and frustration is really just another way of saying that things are too easy for them. (Perhaps it’s not so different after all from the age-old complaints that they’re spoiled.) But have you ever met a child who doesn’t regularly experience failure and frustration? I haven’t. People who describe kids as entirely satisfied and successful are inadvertently confessing how little they understand of the inner life of children and perhaps how little they remember of their own childhoods.