The Myth of the Spoiled Child
Page 25
5. Academic article: Vinson. Time cover story: Gibbs 2009.
6. The article: Roosevelt. The study: Greenberger et al. Academic entitlement didn’t seem particularly common among students in this study, but even the amount that did turn up was probably overstated because of how the concept was measured. The most frequently endorsed item on the questionnaire—the only item, in fact, with which a majority of students agreed—read as follows:
“If I have explained to my professor that I am trying hard, I think he/she should give me some consideration with respect to my course grade.” (Not an automatic A, mind you—just “some consideration.”) The second most-endorsed item, by 41 percent of the students, was this: “I feel I have been poorly treated if a professor cancels an appointment with me on the same day as we were supposed to meet.” Does such a reaction really constitute “entitlement”?
7. Most writers expressed incredulity or disgust at today’s entitled students, or offered their own explanations for this phenomenon (whose reality they took for granted). Should we be satisfied with a heart surgeon lacking talent just because he worked really hard? asked one. Would a professional athlete get signed merely because he made an effort? another wanted to know. It’s all because when these students competed as children, everyone got a trophy, declared a third.
8. For example, see Day and Padilla-Walker and the research they cited before describing their own findings.
9. Marilyn Watson, personal communication, March 2013.
10. Ungar, p. 262.
11. Segrin et al., especially pp. 238–40. Another pair of researchers defines it as “intrusive and unnecessary micromanagement of a child’s independent activities, and strong affection in the absence of child distress or need for comforting” (Padilla-Walker and Nelson, p. 1178). “The term ‘helicopter parent’ was coined by Charles Fay and Foster Cline (authors of the Love and Logic parenting series) and was popularized by a [1991] Newsweek article” (Somers and Settle, p. 19).
12. Munich and Munich, p. 228.
13. Rosenfeld and Wise, p. xviii.
14. Levine.
15. For repeated examples of such misleading citations, see Bernstein and Triger. This article is also the source of the assertion that this generation of young people is “the first . . . raised by intensive parents.”
16. Segrin et al. When I say “weak,” I mean a correlation of .11, which means that, even if we accept that those two ideas were validly defined and measured in the study, each explains only about 1 percent of the variation in the other.
17. See Lessard et al.; quotations on pp. 528, 522. Arnett (2007) has challenged the tendency to classify as entitlement (in the purely negative sense of the word) what might better be described as high aspirations on the part of adolescents and young adults. A “sense of entitlement” is also central to sociologist Annette Lareau’s account of how middle-class children are prepared for success: They’re encouraged to have opinions and speak up, to believe they have “a right to pursue their individual preferences and to actively manage interactions in institutional settings”—as opposed to a “sense of constraint” that’s more characteristic of working-class and poor children (Lareau, p. 6).
18. The studies: Wood; Hudson and Dodd; and McLeod et al., respectively.
19. Jennifer Hudson of Macquarie University is quoted in Sullivan.
20. In reality, there is often a reciprocal relationship rather than a neat cause-and-effect relationship between two variables. One affects the other, which then affects the first. Thus, even if a parent is hovering because of the child’s apparent unhappiness or neediness, those characteristics may have been amplified by a parenting style that cultivates or encourages the child’s dependence.
21. Several studies observed parent-child interactions during assigned tasks and noted the extent to which the parent took over for the child—a pretty clear example of control. The meta-analysis of anxiety (McLeod et al.) explicitly tallied examples of controlling parenting. And it was “higher parental control” that “was associated with significantly higher psychological entitlement” in another study (Givertz and Segrin).
22. Grolnick, p. 150. Also see a review of relevant research in Joussemet et al. 2008.
23. See Wendy Grolnick’s work; Pomerantz et al., esp. pp. 381–84; and Wuyts et al.
24. Soenens and Vansteenkiste, pp. 92–93; Grolnick, p. 30. Also, “in a study of parenting in emerging adulthood . . . mothers and fathers [who] scored high on indices of control—both behavioral and psychological control . . . had children with the most negative child outcomes” (Padilla-Walker and Nelson, p. 1179).
25. Wang et al.; Soenens and Vansteenkiste, pp. 94–95; Grolnick, pp. 71–79; Ng et al. It’s sometimes assumed that control is less destructive, and autonomy support is less beneficial, in more collectivist societies. This misapprehension may be based on a confusion of autonomy with individualism. An autonomous person, psychologically speaking, experiences his or her actions as “authentic,” “integrated,” “willingly enacted”—but doesn’t necessarily see him- or herself as separate from others, independent, or in opposition to the larger culture (Chirkov et al.). Thus, “because of its pressuring and manipulative character, psychological control frustrates individuals’ universal need for volitional functioning” (Soenens and Vansteenkiste, p. 95)—including in Asian societies.
26. Kim et al.
27. See in particular the work of Brian Barber, including the collection of essays he edited in 2002.
28. I discussed the contrast between conditional and unconditional parenting in a previous book (Kohn 2005a) and will have more to say about the relevance of that distinction to self-esteem in chapter 6.
29. Barber 1996, p. 3299. Citations within this sentence have been omitted.
30. Soenens et al. 2005; Soenens et al. 2008.
31. Soenens and Vansteenkiste, p. 89.
32. Aunola and Nurmi.
33. Kins et al., p. 1107. Some children “go back and forth between feelings of excessive loyalty [to their parents] and feelings of resentment for not being accepted for who they are” (Soenens and Vansteenkiste, p. 82). Elsewhere, these theorists suggest that there may actually be two versions of psychological control: the kind whose primary purpose is “to make children emotionally and psychologically dependent on the parent” and the kind used to enforce impossibly high standards of achievement (Soenens et al. 2010).
34. Givertz and Segrin; Assor and Tal, p. 257 (emphasis added).
35. Baldwin and Sinclair, p. 1138.
36. Slater, pp. 22, 57; Bowles and Gintis, p. 145 (emphasis added). One implication is that “internal motivation” is not necessarily a good thing and is quite different from intrinsic motivation. I’ll say more about this in chapter 7.
37. I offered some thoughts on this question in Kohn 2005a, chapter 6. Grolnick divides possible explanations into pressures that parents experience from below (that is, from their children, who may be experienced as challenging as a result of their temperaments), from above or without (social and economic factors that induce parents to socialize children in certain ways), and from within (having to do with the parent’s own needs and background).
38. Conditional parenting “originates, at least in part, from parents’ own experience of being subjected to the practice of [conditional parenting] as children, and from parents’ contingent self-esteem and competitive world view” (Assor et al, in press).
39. Grolnick et al.; and Wuyts et al., Also see Soenens and Vansteenkiste, pp. 90–91.
40. Soenins, Vansteenkiste, and Luyten, pp. 246, 248.
41. For more on this point, see chapter 4.
42. Fingerman et al., p. 880.
43. According to one national study in 2007, nearly 40 percent of college freshmen had some kind of contact with their parents every day (Liu et al., p. 16). And the National Survey of Student Engagement, conducted that same year with freshmen and seniors, found that about seven of ten students communicated “very ofte
n” with at least one of their parents (NSSE, p. 24).
44. When students’ ethnic backgrounds were examined, amount of parental contact and amount of parental involvement didn’t always rise and fall together. See Wolf et al.
45. NSSE, p. 25.
46. The first comment is a direct quotation from Marjorie Savage, director of the parent-liaison program the University of Minnesota; the second is a paraphrase. Both appeared in Hoover.
47. First study: Rettner. Second study: Padilla-Walker and Nelson, p. 1188.
48. Gardner. Sure enough, National Public Radio broadcast a segment on the topic in early 2012 and declared that “one-quarter of employers reported hearing from parents urging the employer to hire their son or daughter”—instead of noting that, despite the common belief that such behavior was widespread, more than three-quarters of employers had never encountered it.
49. Fingerman et al. “Intense” support was defined as offering several types—emotional, practical, financial, etc.—several times a week. The one-in-five statistic was based on interviews with the children; it dropped to one in six if the estimate was based on the parents’ reports. And the researchers noted that, because of the sample they used, the results probably overstated the prevalence of intense support compared to the general population.
50. Rettner.
51. LeMoyne and Buchanan. Having a helicopter parent, based on the student’s report, explained less than 9 percent of the variation in well-being.
52. Schiffrin et al.
53. Padilla-Walker and Nelson emphasize that HP can be distinguished from other forms of control because it also includes parental support for children and involvement in their lives. They point to a factor analysis as empirical confirmation of this distinction, but of course the relationships they found among those attributes are just a function of the items they included in their questionnaire as examples of HP—which is to say, how they chose to define the concept in the first place. Interestingly, reports of parental “warmth” were not correlated with other aspects of HP, raising the possibility that parents’ concern “for their children’s well-being . . . may also be driven by concern for how their children’s behavior will reflect on them”—a motive consistent with the use of psychological control.
54. LeMoyne and Buchanan, p. 414 (emphasis added); and Schiffrin et al.
55. Personal communication with Neil Montgomery, July 2010.
56. Kins et al., pp. 1106.
57. Padilla-Walker and Nelson.
58. Adams 2012a, 2012b. The latter article reported that 33 percent of the population now graduates from college, as compared with 12 percent in the 1970s, with “record levels of college completion among all groups: men and women; blacks, whites, and Hispanics; and foreign- and native-born Americans.”
59. NSSE, p. 25.
60. Kinzie quoted in Aucoin; Kuh quoted in Mathews.
61. Personal communication with Neil Montgomery, July 2010.
62. Small et al.
63. Coontz quoted in Aucoin.
64. Fingerman et al., pp. 890, 888. As if to confirm the researchers’ point about uninformed statements in the popular media, a Time cover story the following year asserted that the trend of young adults’ living with their parents means “their development is stunted” (Stein, p. 28).
65. Nor is this necessarily a bad thing. As Arnett and Fishel point out, people in their late twenties are probably more likely to make better decisions about marriage partners and careers than people in their early twenties (p. 15).
66. Silva.
67. Stein, p. 28. The writer plucks this statistic from a national poll sponsored by Clark University but fails to report the broader array of results, which fails to support his attack on Millennials. For one thing, only 30 percent lived with their parents. For another thing, when the cohort is broken down by age, only 15 percent of twenty-six- to twenty-nine-year-olds still lived with their parents, as compared with 38 percent who lived with their husband or wife. Also, interestingly, 69 percent of the total sample received little or no financial support from their parents (Arnett and Schwab).
68. Settersten. Likewise Arnett and Fishel: “Research strongly indicates that when parents are able and willing to provide financial and emotional support during their grown-up kids’ twenties, the kids are more likely to emerge successfully into a stable and self-sufficient adulthood in their thirties” (pp. 278–80).
69. One college professor recalls that she once opined airily about the benefits of independence and the need for parents to back off. “Before I became a college parent, it was easy to come up with rules of disengagement for my students’ mothers and fathers. Now that I am one myself, I finally know what it is parents are going through” (Boylan).
70. The Time cover is cited by Arnett 2008, who offers a lucid analysis of the resentment of emerging adults on the part of those who are older.
71. Wolf et al., p. 332. On the general shift away from a simplistic equation of individuation with healthy development, see Samuolis et al.
72. Soenens et al. 2007. This, of course, is related to the confusion between autonomy support and individualism discussed in note 25, above.
73. Schiffrin et al.
74. Wolf et al., pp. 330, 332.
75. See Stephens et al.
76. Wolf et al., p. 350.
77. How much they want: Higher Education Research Institute. How much they get: Wolf et al.; Hoover. There is also a gender difference in the frequency of contact with parents: Wolf et al., p. 331.
78. Stephens et al., pp. 1193, 1192.
79. Arnett and Fishel, p. 92.
80. Depending on which issues they were asked about (e.g., applying to college, choosing courses, choosing activities, dealing with college officials), the range of students saying they thought their parents had the right amount of involvement was 72 to 84 percent, and the proportion saying their parents weren’t involved enough was 6 to 24 percent. “Students of color were more likely than white students to indicate that their parents were involved too little in all areas . . . [especially in] decisions made after college admission” (Higher Education Research Institute).
81. For an example, see Nelson.
82. Fingerman et al., p. 882.
CHAPTER 4
1. Neil Williams, quoted in Gehring. An educator at California State University at Sacramento adds, “In this day and age, when school violence is so prevalent, why would any physical educator or recreator want to promote a game that involves throwing objects at people? . . . Professionals dumped traditional dodge ball in physical education classes years ago” (Reese).
2. Steven Pinker, for example, in the middle of a careful analysis of the historical decline of violence, abruptly becomes unhinged over the fact that “in school district after school district, dodge ball has been banned” (indignant italics his). He quotes a statement by the National Association for Sport and Physical Education that points out the activity is not particularly popular among children who get “hit hard in the stomach, head, or groin. And it is not appropriate to teach our children that you win by hurting others”—only to deride these concerns by claiming that the comment “must have been written by someone who was never a boy, and quite possibly has never met one” (Pinker, p. 379).
3. “Hopscotch? Well, Maybe.”
4. Marrero. Something similar happened in San Diego in the early 1990s. The school board accepted a proposal (by a community task force on dropout prevention) in which high school juniors and seniors who failed a course would be able to retake it without penalty, with their record indicating “no credit” rather than an “F.” The move “triggered an avalanche of phone calls and letters” opposed to the idea (Smollar), and it was shelved before it could take effect.
5. Phelps.
6. For example, educational psychologist Harold Stevenson decried the awarding of unmerited trophies, along with “indiscriminate praise” and “lenient grading systems,” in a New York Times op-ed in 1994.
8. Kohn 1999a.
9. Studies of what the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow”—which consists of feeling active, challenged, and fully engaged by what one is doing—have shown that people report more of these pleasurable experiences while at work than anywhere else. (This is true of workers on assembly lines, too.) In fact, “flowlike situations occurred more than three times as often in work as in leisure” (Csikszentmihalyi and LeFevre, p. 818). Another researcher independently found that when participants were asked to rate the enjoyment they derived from more than two dozen common activities, it turned out that “the intrinsic rewards from work are, on average, higher than the intrinsic rewards from leisure” (Juster, p. 340).
10. It shouldn’t be surprising that competition, which is about proving one’s superiority over others, has the effect of retarding the development of empathy and helping. (For evidence, see Kohn 1992.) In light of that fact, it’s ironic that many writers who are critical of efforts to boost children’s self-esteem—warning that we’re promoting a narcissistic preoccupation with the self—are also dismissive of attempts to rein in competition. (For an example, see Twenge 2006).
11. The latest data confirm that people generally do not perform better on straightforward tasks when they’re competing than when they’re not. (See a new meta-analysis by Murayama and Elliot.) But again, competition’s effect is likely to be detrimental, not merely neutral, on more complex tasks. And competition also comes up short when compared to cooperation rather than just to the absence of competition. For evidence related to these points as well as to its negative impact on self-esteem, relationships, and intrinsic motivation, see Kohn 1992.