'Spoiling' children deprives them of necessary limits and challenges
Dear Kerry,
When I visited my sister-in-law with my kids this weekend I was shocked to see what brats my nephews were. They whined all the time and then always got their way. What is she thinking of? This can’t be good for those kids!
—JR, Detroit
Dear JR,
It’s hard to see potentially nice kids acting so unpleasantly, and it’s painful to find your nephews pretty unlovable when they act so bratty! Spoiling is a terrible thing, and it’s important to address it early.
Little babies have plenty of built-in frustration in their lives, since no parent can be there instantly every time to feed them or pick them up at the first whimper. So there’s no such thing as “spoiling” a tiny baby.
But even a 6 month old who bites her mom needs a firmly-spoken “no” to begin to teach her what is and isn’t acceptable. As she begins to move around, no mater how much childproofing you do, there are still limits to set to keep her safe.
Health and safety are the bottom line priorities for limit-setting. They are an important practical model for the more complicated task of knowing how to create emotional safety for children. Spoiling a toddler or older kid does more than just create a whiney, constantly dissatisfied child. It also can make children very anxious.
If parents are afraid of their children’s upset feelings — anger, disappointment, frustration, sadness and so forth — they give their children the message that there is something dire or dangerous about those feelings. When parents leap to relieve any level of distress instantly, children take on that worry and start to believe that they have to have the cookie immediately, or the new toy, or someone’s attention, or the sky will fall. Something terrible is bound to happen.
Alternatively, parents sometimes bribe their children with things to stop them having hard feelings. This gives kids the idea that they can’t manage without constant supplies of stuff. If they don’t have more and more toys (or gadgets and electronics for older kids) they feel exposed or unequipped to deal with the world and distract themselves from any emotions.
Instead of letting children think that their inner and outer worlds are just scary and bad, parents can help them gradually develop the emotional muscles to notice and feel their feelings, name them, scale them to just the right size for the issue, and use them as internal signals for creative problem-solving together. When you come right down to it, important as feelings are for making sense of our experience, they are only feelings — they don’t make anything happen.
The opposite of a spoiled child is a kid who can manage his feelings in a way that matches his age and stage of development, who can be kind to others, occasionally putting his own needs aside, who has the muscle of persistence to work for something, and who trusts that people will listen to his needs and help him try to meet them. In other words, that is a child with parents who have strong emotional muscles, and who have taught him to use his strong emotional muscles.
I hope that your sister-in-law realizes sooner rather than later that she and her kids will all be happier and more successful in life, friendships and work if they pull it together and stop being afraid of feelings and conflict and learn to master them instead. Hang in there — you may be one of the people your nephews can turn to for a reality check!
Kerry Kelly Novick is a local child, adolescent and adult psychoanalyst, and author, with Jack Novick, of "Emotional Muscle: Strong Parents, Strong Children," available at amazon.com or through