Why do a majority of their parents spoil their kids?

Parents Forum
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<p>I’m no parent (a undergrad in college rather), but I was wondering why so many parents spoil their kids, especially in certain areas of the country.</p>

<p>There’s an interesting (but slightly outdated) USAToday article on this. Excerpt below:</p>

<p>"Kindlon, who teaches psychology at Harvard University, bases his parenting theories on his survey of 654 teens and 1,078 parents. Most had annual incomes over $50,000; many had incomes over $200,000. Also, he drew from his private practice as a child psychologist and his experience as a father of two girls, 12 and 8. He has incorporated his findings and theories in a new book, Too Much of a Good Thing: Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent Age (Talk Miramax Books, $23.95).</p>

<p>In Kindlon’s survey, 58% of the parents said they knew their kids were at least somewhat spoiled.</p>

<p>In fact, many kids today have benefited materially from recent economic boom times, he says. Some receive luxury sports cars for their birthdays; they have laptop computers, cellphones and pagers; they go to exclusive summer camps and on exotic vacations to Africa and take it all in stride, experts say.</p>

<p>Frequently, parents shower their kids with gifts and attention, Kindlon says. They bend over backward so everything is perfect for their children. They hate when they’re upset. All this attention makes children feel they are the center of the universe, he says.</p>

<p>Children who are given so much without having to work for it acquire a sense of entitlement and may not develop a work ethic, which they will need later in life, says Susan Newman, a social psychologist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., and author of Parenting an Only Child (Broadway Books, $12.95).</p>

<p>Parents need to ask themselves if they are indulging their child for themselves or for the child. “Many parents live through their children and the indulgences they wanted for themselves,” Newman says.</p>

<p>(full article at [USATODAY.com</a> - Are you spoiling your kids?](<a href=“http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2001-09-11-spoiled-kids.htm]USATODAY.com”>http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2001-09-11-spoiled-kids.htm))</p>

<p>So, more than half of you KNOWINGLY do it. but WHY? is it really because it was something you wanted as a child? or to beat the Joneses kid’s nextdoor? or are there other reasons?</p>

<p>Discuss.</p>

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<p>Just laughing at your user name. Did your parents buy your car? :wink: FTR I’ve never spent that much on a car, for my offspring OR myself.</p>

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<p>Before we discuss, why do you care? What’s in it for you? Why do you care? If you are writing a paper, let us know. If it’s a slow Sat night for you, state as such.</p>

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<p>I would suspect a lot of parents think their kids are spoiled when they aren’t necessarily just because they give their kids more than they had. I don’t know how anyone could study that sort of thing accurately without measuring a variable besides whether or not the parents think they are spoiling.</p>

5

<p>I get what BMWdude means. I guess I’m spoiled, because my parents are well-off and I never wanted for anything growing up.</p>

<p>But I’m so grateful for the way they raised me - other kid’s parents would practically do their HW/projects for them, my parents made me learn to do things myself. Other parents would make excuses for their kids if the paper or project was late - my parents never tolerated that crap. In college, I hear students begging Profs for extensions because they never learned to make a deadline. Other kids parents did their laundry for them til 18, my parents politely pointed out the washer/dryer to me when I was 12. Now i see other college students who seriously haven’t figured it out yet. :p</p>

<p>I think parents always want the best for their kids, sometimes sacrificing and saving a lot so the kids can have more. No good parent wants to see their child go without. And most kids grow up to be independent adults, so I guess most parents aren’t spoiling them. </p>

<p>Materially, we’re definitely more spoiled, but I guess this is due to modern tech - cell phones are cheap now, laptops aren’t as expensive as they used to be, etc.</p>

<p>I work as a part-time nanny for rich Manhattan parents and you wouldn’t believe some of these kids! I’m one of several nannies for 1 family, these kids have like a team of servants. :)</p>

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<p>I think that many of us parents think that our children are “spoiled” because they faced few hardships during their childhoods.</p>

<p>But what were we supposed to do? Create hardships artificially? That would feel phony, and kids have very astute phoniness detectors.</p>

<p>For example, when I was a child, I had to be extremely careful not to make mistakes while doing my homework because school supplies are expensive and my parents could not always afford to buy more. Sometimes, I was unable to finish my homework because I had run out of notebook paper or had made a mistake on the one posterboard that my mother had bought for me, and there was no money for more. </p>

<p>Should I have replicated this situation for my children, even though we could easily afford school supplies? I think not. It would have seemed ridiculous to both them and me. But because they did not experience this situation, they were wasteful with school supplies. Many projects required a second or third posterboard, and many sheets of paper ended up in the trash can. I would have liked them to learn to be more careful and frugal with these supplies, but I can’t think of a way that I could have accomplished that without creating an extremely artifical situation.</p>

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<p>Oops, I posted twice. Sorry.</p>

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<p>I’ve been independent for my life, and I was always happy for that. Sure, my parents gave me food, necessities, and a few extra things that I wanted, but I always had limits. These limits were pretty strict limits too. I always had to help work around the house, so things didn’t really come free for me. I’ve come to understand the value of money. I am happy for this. Ya, so I didn’t get as much as other kids and could be said to be deprived. I think the real people who are deprived are those who don’t get to experience the reality of life.</p>

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<p><em>snort</em> Yeah, there’s a representative sample of parents!</p>

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<p>My mom grew up during the great depression and the big two, and the thing about it for her was that she was only able to have bananas very rarely. I always had bananas sitting in the fruit bowl when I was a kid.</p>

<p>What I did without was nice clothes. Guess what my kids have tons of that they don’t really appreciate.</p>

<p>I don’t have a guilt trip speech for my kids about how I wore Toughskins like my mom’s banana speech, which as a kid I found tremendously boring, because I don’t blame them for being born when they were.</p>

<p>Also, I was able to work for money as a teenager because kids worked in landscaping, babysitting, food service, and convenience stores at that time and in that place, and because school wasn’t all that taxing for me. Now, where I live, those jobs are done by adults or at the very least college kids, and school is a more-than-full-time job for my kids.</p>

<p>I’m not going to buy my kids a sportscar, but I consider their laptops and cellphones just shy of necessities. They provide a level of convenience and safety that I really value.</p>

<p>I teach my kids to appreciate what they have, and I hope they truly do, but I don’t think that prosperity is in any way bad for children. Anyway, if the economy expands as much in the next sixty years as it has in the last sixty, my great grandkids are going to own some really cool stuff.</p>

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<p>I guess I have a different interpretation of the word “spoiled”. To me , it doesn’t mean just having a lot of material things/advantages, it means having a lot of material things/advantages and having either a sense of entitlement about them or a lack of appreciation for how fortunate they are to have them. So by my lights, there can be very privileged offspring who are not spoiled at all.</p>

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<p>I agree, MommaJ. I’ve really enjoyed giving my daughter things that I couldn’t have when I was young-- and it hasn’t seemed to make her feel ‘entitled’ at all. The day she turned 14 (old enough to work), she got a job and has refused spending money from me ever since. I think some kids, feeling left out of their parents’ true affections, start to grasp at material things because they’ve given up hope of anything more meaningful. That’s spoiled, all right, but in a much sadder sense than BMWdude (?) seems to mean.</p>

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<p>I think the short answer is because we can. This generation of youth have grown up during a period of enormous economic prosperity. Of course, after the last year or so, all bets are off. I doubt we will ever see that kind of economic growth again, at least not anytime soon because a lot of it was based on faulty economics (ie, bubbles, excess credit, etc).</p>

<p>I agree with MommaJ. In a lot of respects it’s about attitude not the quantity of material things. We are careful not to give son too much and we often make him work or wait for it. But the reality is there is so much more ‘basic’ stuff to buy these days that wasn’t available when I was growing up (computers, cell phones, ipods, etc).</p>

<p>What concerns me more than anything (and something I see every day) is that this generation is going to struggle to keep up with what their parents had. It puts a huge amount of financial pressure on them. I had a young lady working for me that decided to go to medical school (she already had a graduate business degree) because her parents were very well off and she said that becoming a doctor was the only way she was going to be able to have that standard of living and be worthy in her father’s eyes.</p>

<p>I could see why she thought that, At 25 she already had three 50" flat screen TVs, a BMW (bought by her father), would only buy $500 designer bags, had to have a $2,500 MacAir to take to med. school, flies around on her father’s private corporate jet, etc.</p>

<p>To me, that is very sad. She is trapped in a cycle of needing expensive things that will be difficult to afford unless she becomes a doctor or marries sometime pretty well off.</p>

<p>We have tried to teach our son some basic financial rules:</p>

<p>1)You don’t buy anything on credit (except a house and car). If you don’t have the money today, you don’t need to buy it today.</p>

<p>2) Happiness is not about having the best, the biggest or the most expensive. </p>

<p>3) Find something you love to do and the money will follow.</p>

<p>4) You work for what you get but you help those who are in need. Because not everyone is lucky enough to be born to a middle class family that can afford to support you both financially and emotionally. Where you end up depends a lot on where you start. Be grateful for that.</p>

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<p>As many other posters have said, I believe some parents spoil their child because they have more then they had when they grew up and feel it is their duty to help their child have more during childhood than they did. If someone has access to things to help their child, I doubt any parent would withhold that from their children. </p>

<p>As for the survey, it seems as if the question is slightly too opinion-based. Does ‘spoiled’ have the same definition for every parent? Some might see it as having a lot of stuff, others might see it as having ‘a sense of entitlement’.</p>

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<p>I don’t think kids spoil.
Not if they get the guidance and attention they deserve.
" Things" don’t spoil kids, expecting them to accept things instead of genuine interest and thoughtfulness does.</p>

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<p>Kids are spoiled when they aren’t expected to take responsibility for their actions and the consequences of those actions. It doesn’t have much to do with how expensive their laptop computer is.</p>

<p>The only caveat I would add is that parents who spend money that they don’t have (meaning they are depriving themselves of retirement savings and other forms of financial security) to buy material possessions for their children are modeling really dumb behavior for those children.</p>

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<p>I consider giving your child any more than food and shelter spoiling them.</p>

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<p>^Only food and shelter?</p>

<p>I’m picturing a bunch of naked, unloved, uneducated, undisciplined 5 years olds running around.</p>

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<p>In otherwords, let’s fret about children in the top incomes being too spoiled while ignoring the majority of the children in this country who have problems that, perhaps, trump the potential ill effect of being given a BWM as a teen.</p>

20

<p>Not sure why, but I am a little put off by the original post, followed by the directive to “discuss”.</p>