The Myth of the Spoiled Child

by Alfie Kohn

  Moreover, students with high grades seem, on average, to be overly conformist and not particularly creative. For evidence of that, we need look no further than two studies that Duckworth herself cited to prove that self-discipline predicts academic performance. One of the studies found that such performance “seemed as much a function of attention to details and the rules of the academic game as it was of intellectual talent.” High-achieving students “were not particularly interested in ideas or in cultural or aesthetic pursuits. Additionally, they were not particularly tolerant or empathic; however, they did seem stable, pragmatic, and task-oriented, and lived in harmony with the rules and conventions of society. Finally, relative to students in general, these superior achievers seemed somewhat stodgy and unoriginal.”65 The other study she mentioned also found that self-control was significantly correlated with students’ grades—but so was conformity and an aversion to risk-taking.66

  Do more self-disciplined or persistent students—which may include a disproportionate number of girls67—get higher grades? Perhaps. But that doesn’t make a case for grit so much as it points up the limitations of grades as an outcome measure. More generally, the only people likely to be persuaded by studies dealing with persistence are those who already approved of that quality—without regard for the widely varying reasons one might have for refusing to give up or the widely varying results of doing so.

  SELF-DISCIPLINE AS A MORAL IMPERATIVE

  If control over the self can sometimes be unhealthy, if waiting for more marshmallows or refusing to give up doesn’t always make sense, then why do so many people offer an unqualified endorsement of self-discipline, deferral of gratification, and grit? At various points in this book, I’ve suggested that a traditionalist perspective is based not only on assumptions about how things are but on beliefs about how things should be. Ideology, not just evidence, often accounts for stern condemnations of permissiveness, helicopter parenting, and the self-esteem movement—as well as enthusiasm about rewards, competition, and the alleged benefits of failure. The same is true here. The uniformly good press that self-discipline gets is a matter of conviction as much as prediction, so the fact that it doesn’t always produce good results may not dim the ardor of those who insist our children need to learn to control themselves.

  Self-discipline is at the heart of George Lakoff’s Strict Father model of conservatism. That model’s emphasis on “Moral Strength” makes self-discipline “a primary moral requirement,” whereas “the lack of it [is] immoral”—a sign of self-indulgence and therefore moral weakness. Whether it offers practical benefits, psychological or otherwise, is beside the point.68 To put it another way, the difficulty of making oneself do what one would rather not—or restraining oneself from doing what affords pleasure—is valued for its own sake. Suffering and deprivation (see pp. 113–15) are the requirements for, and perhaps the manifestations of, that “moral strength” Lakoff mentions. And as usual, a deeply conservative worldview has been adopted and accepted widely. Paul Tough, for example, declared in the pages of the New York Times Magazine that “what kids need more than anything is a little hardship: some challenge, some deprivation that they can overcome.”69

  One thinks of the credo so beloved by those who aspire to a culture of machismo: “What does not kill me makes me stronger,”70 which Nietzsche introduced with the phrase “From the military school of life.” This sensibility has echoes in Eastern cultures—gambaru (tough it out, suck it up) in Japan and chi ku (“eating bitterness”) in China—as well as in Western religions. Angela Duckworth has observed that “every major religious tradition advocates forsaking pleasure in the moment to realize greater, deferred rewards.”71 Indeed, the case for self-control may be primarily theological. The ultimate in putting off gratification, after all, is a call to wait until after one is dead to collect one’s prize for sacrificing and suffering. Nor is this a purely theoretical connection. People who identify themselves as religious—and their children—tend to exercise more self-control than others.72

  To more fully understand what lies behind attempts to rein in the self, let’s ask a different question: What must be true about children—or people in general—if self-discipline is required to make them do valuable things? Consider this reflection by conservative columnist David Brooks:

  In Lincoln’s day, to achieve maturity was to succeed in the conquest of the self. Human beings were born with sin, inflected with dark passions and satanic temptations. The transition to adulthood consisted of achieving mastery over them. You can read commencement addresses from the 19th and early 20th centuries in which the speakers would talk about the beast within and the need for iron character to subdue it. Schoolhouse readers emphasized self-discipline. The whole character-building model was sin-centric.73

  The implication here seems to be that self-discipline is a historical relic, which is far from the truth. Today we may be spared the florid, exhortatory rhetoric of yesteryear, but an Internet search for “self-discipline” or “self-control” offers ample evidence of how these concepts are still very much in fashion. Nevertheless, Brooks offers a useful, if disconcerting, reminder of the sin-centric assumptions on which the gospel of self-discipline (still) rests. It’s because our preferences are regarded as unworthy, our desires as shameful, that we must strive to overcome them. Taken to its logical conclusion, human life is seen as a constant struggle to stifle and transcend ourselves. Morality consists of the triumph of mind over body, reason over desire, will over want.

  This sensibility shows up not only among preachers and right-wing cultural commentators but also in the work of researchers who don’t just study self-discipline (or perseverance) but vigorously defend its importance. Baumeister, for example, has said more than once that his “advice is to forget about self-esteem and concentrate on teaching your children self-control.”74 Here he manages to combine two prescriptions in one sentence: Don’t think too well of yourself . . . and get to work! His academic articles—and those of certain other social scientists—clearly reflect this worldview.

  One educator contends that we need to teach self-discipline because of “our natural egoism [that threatens to] lead us into ‘a condition of warre one against another.’” His approving allusion to Thomas Hobbes’s dismal view of our species is followed by the remarkable assertion that “social class differences appear to be largely a function of the ability to defer gratification.” Thus, our obligation is to “connect the lower social classes to the middle classes who may provide role models for self-discipline.”75 While few people admit to this sort of thinking nowadays, its impact can still be witnessed—for example, in many charter schools that serve predominantly low-income African American and Latino students. It’s not uncommon to find a system of almost militaristic behavior control, with public humiliation for noncompliance and an array of rewards for obedience that calls to mind the token economy programs developed in prisons and psychiatric hospitals. Such authoritarian discipline is blithely justified in the name of “teaching self-control” to poor kids of color.76

  Another feature of conservatism that’s sometimes reflected in the call to impart self-discipline is the familiar complaint that our society—or at least its youth—has forgotten the value of hard work, the importance of duty, the need to accept personal responsibility, and so on. Of course, as with accusations of permissiveness, we sometimes forget that “the older generation has complained about the lack of self-control among the younger generation for decades, if not centuries,” says C. Peter Herman, a researcher at the University of Toronto. “The older generation of Vikings no doubt complained that the younger generation were getting soft and did not rape and pillage with the same dedication as in years gone by.”77

  Interestingly, many secular institutions and liberal individuals—who would strenuously object to the notion that children are self-centered little beasts that need to be tamed—uncritically embrace the concept of self-discipline, which ultimately can be traced back to this ver
y premise. It’s admirable to reject coercion and punishment in favor of gentler methods, but if self-discipline amounts to installing a policeman inside each child, then it’s worth thinking about the worldview from which that concept emerges.

  As I’ve said, that doesn’t mean there’s no value at all to the capacity to exercise self-discipline (or persistence) on those occasions when it’s useful for reaching goals we regard as worthwhile. The trick is to steer between the extremes of inadequate and excessive self-control, and to engage in a healthy kind of regulation that helps us to lead productive and satisfying lives. Similarly, we want our children to be able to strike a balance between the present and the future, between what feels good now and what’s likely to yield enduring satisfaction. But my point is that the case against a simplistic embrace of self-discipline or grit isn’t based only on what we know about its psychological dynamics. There’s also reason for concern about its philosophical premises. The case for self-control is based on assumptions and beliefs that many of us will find troubling on close inspection.

  IT’S NOT JUST YOU

  When you hear someone insist, “Children need more than intelligence to succeed,” the traits they’re encouraged to acquire, as I’ve mentioned, are more likely to include self-discipline than empathy. But let’s pause to consider the significance of thinking about any list of individual qualities—the attributes a particular child possesses (or lacks). When we encounter a behavior we don’t like, we assume the child needs to develop certain characteristics like grit or self-control. The implication is that it’s the kid who needs to be fixed.

  But what if it turned out that persistence or an inclination to delay gratification was mostly predicted by the situations in which people find themselves and the nature of the tasks they’re asked to perform? That possibility is consistent with Walter Mischel’s theory of personality. Indeed, it matches what he discovered about waiting for an extra marshmallow: Whether children did so was largely determined by the way the experiment was conducted (pp. 143–44). What we should be talking about, he and his colleagues emphasized, is not

  the ability to defer immediate gratification. This ability has been viewed as an enduring trait of “ego strength” on which individuals differed stably and consistently in many situations. In fact, as the present data indicate, under appropriate . . . conditions, virtually all subjects, even young children, could manage to delay for lengthy time periods.78

  Similarly, other experts have argued that it may make more sense to think of self-control in general as “a situational concept, not an individual trait” in light of the fact that any individual “will display different degrees of self-control in different situations.”79

  This critical shift in thinking fits perfectly with a large body of evidence from the field of social psychology that shows how we act and who we are reflect the circumstances in which we find ourselves. The most famous social psych studies are variations on this theme: Set up ordinary children in an extended team competition at summer camp, and you’ll elicit unprecedented levels of hostility, even if the kids had never seemed particularly aggressive. Randomly assign adults—chosen for their psychological normality—to the role of inmate or guard in a mock prison, and they will start to become their roles, to frightening effect. Make slight changes to an academic environment and a significant number of students will cheat—or, under other conditions, will refrain from doing so. (Cheating “is as much a function of the particular situation in which [the student] is placed as it is of his . . . general ideas and ideals.”80)

  The notion that each of us isn’t entirely the master of his own fate can be awfully hard to accept. It’s quite common to attribute to an individual’s personality or character what is actually a function of the social environment—so common, in fact, that psychologists have dubbed this the Fundamental Attribution Error. It’s a bias that may be particularly prevalent in our society, where individualism is both a descriptive reality and a cherished ideal. We Americans stubbornly resist the possibility that what we do is profoundly shaped by policies, norms, systems, and other structural realities. We prefer to believe that people who commit crimes are morally deficient, that the have-nots in our midst are lazy (or at least insufficiently resourceful), that overweight people simply lack the willpower to stop eating, and so on.81 If only all those folks would just exercise a little personal responsibility, a bit more self-control!

  The Fundamental Attribution Error is painfully pervasive when the conversation turns to academic failure. Driving Duckworth and Seligman’s study of student performance was their belief that underachievement isn’t explained by structural factors—social, economic, or even educational. Rather, they insisted, it should be attributed to the students themselves, and specifically to their “failure to exercise self-discipline.” The entire conceptual edifice of grit is constructed on that individualistic premise, one that remains popular for ideological reasons even though it’s been repeatedly debunked by research.

  When students are tripped up by challenges, they may respond by tuning out, acting out, or dropping out. Often, however, they do so not because of a defect in their makeup (lack of stick-to-itiveness) but because of structural factors. For one, those challenges—what they were asked to do—may not have been particularly engaging or relevant. Finger-wagging adults who exhort children to “do their best” sometimes don’t offer a persuasive reason for why a given task should be done at all, let alone done well. And when students throw up their hands after failing at something they were asked to do, it may be less because they lack grit than because they weren’t really “asked” to do it—they were told to do it. They had nothing to say about the content or context of the curriculum. People of all ages are more likely to persevere when they have a chance to make decisions about the things that affect them. Thus, if students don’t persist, it may be because they were excluded from any decision-making role rather than because their attitude, motivation, or character needs to be corrected.

  There are, of course, many other systemic factors that can make learning go awry, but within the field of education, says researcher Val Gillies, “policy-makers’ attentions have shifted away from structures and processes [and] towards a focus on personal skills and self-efficacy.” Even relatively benign strategies designed to enhance social and emotional learning are sometimes motivated less by a desire to foster kids’ well-being than by a hope that teaching them to regulate (rather than express) their feelings will make it easier for adults to manage them and keep them “on task.” After all, Gillies points out, “Emotions are subversive in school.”82 And so is attention to structures and processes.

  WHO BENEFITS?

  Nothing I’ve said here should be taken to mean that personal responsibility doesn’t matter, or that differences in people’s attitudes and temperaments don’t play a role in determining their actions. But if we minimize the importance of the environments in which those individuals function, we’re less able to understand what’s going on. Not only that, but the more we fault people for lacking self-discipline or the ability to control their impulses, the less likely we’ll be to question the structures that shape what they do. There’s no reason to challenge, let alone change, the way things have been set up if we assume people just need to buckle down and try harder.

  To put it differently, the attention paid to self-discipline is not only philosophically conservative in its premises (as I’ve been arguing) but also politically conservative in its consequences:

  •If consumers are drowning in debt, the effect of framing the problem as a lack of self-control is to deflect attention from the concerted efforts of the credit industry to get people hooked on borrowing money as early in life as possible.83

  •The “Keep America Beautiful” campaign launched in the 1950s that urged us to stop being litterbugs was financed by the American Can Company and other corporations. The effect was to blame individuals and discourage questions about who profits from the production of dis
posable merchandise and its packaging.84

  •Conservative criminologists have claimed that crime is due to a lack of self-control on the part of criminals, which, in turn, can be blamed on bad parenting. If that’s true, then there’s no need to address systemic factors such as poverty and unemployment. Indeed, the most prominent proponents of this theory have explicitly called for an approach to crime control “that would reduce the role of the state.”85

  •Mischel’s marshmallow experiments have been used—for example, by David Brooks—to justify focusing less on “structural reforms” to improve education or reduce poverty. Instead, we’re advised to look at traits possessed by individuals—specifically, the ability to exercise good old-fashioned self-control.86 Similarly, Paul Tough has declared, “There is no antipoverty tool we can provide for disadvantaged young people that will be more valuable than the character strengths . . . [such as] conscientiousness, grit, resilience, perseverance, and optimism.”87

  All of this brings to mind the Latin question “Cui bono?” which means “Who benefits?” Whose interests are served by the astonishing proposition that no antipoverty tool (presumably including food stamps, Medicaid, and public housing) is more valuable than an effort to train poor kids to persist at whatever they’re told to do? The implication is that if people find themselves struggling to earn a living or pay off their debts, the fault doesn’t lie with the structure of our economic system (in which the net wealth of the richest 1 percent of the population is triple that of the bottom 80 percent).88 Rather, those people have only their own lack of “character strengths” to blame.