The Myth of the Spoiled Child Read online

  THE MYTH OF THE SPOILED CHILD

  ALSO BY ALFIE KOHN

  Feel-Bad Education: And Other Contrarian Essays on

  Children and Parenting (2011)

  The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing (2006)

  Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason (2005)

  What Does It Mean to Be Well Educated?: And More Essays on Standards, Grading, and Other Follies (2004)

  The Case Against Standardized Testing: Raising the Scores, Ruining the Schools (2000)

  The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and “Tougher Standards” (1999)

  What to Look for in a Classroom . . . And Other Essays (1998)

  Beyond Discipline: From Compliance to Community (1996)

  Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes (1993)

  You Know What They Say . . .: The Truth About Popular Beliefs (1990)

  The Brighter Side of Human Nature: Altruism and Empathy in Everyday Life (1990)

  No Contest: The Case Against Competition (1986)

  Copyright © 2014 by Alfie Kohn.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For information, address Da Capo Press, 44 Farnsworth Street, 3rd Floor, Boston, MA 02210.

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  ISBN: 978-0-7382-1725-3 (e-book)

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  10987654321

  To M.W., whose marginalia always elevates what I started with.

  Contents

  Introduction

  1Permissive Parents, Coddled Kids, and Other Reliable Bogeymen

  2Parenting in Perspective

  3Overstating Overparenting

  4Getting Hit on the Head Lessons: Motivation, Failure, and the Outrage over Participation Trophies

  5The Underlying Values: Conditionality, Scarcity, and Deprivation

  6The Attack on Self-Esteem

  7Why Self-Discipline Is Overrated: A Closer Look at Grit, Marshmallows, and Control from Within

  8Raising Rebels

  Notes

  References

  Index

  Introduction

  While chatting with a friend in his garden one day, the linguist George Lakoff came up with an interesting thought experiment. Was there, Lakoff wondered, a single question that one could ask people such that their answer would predict whether they were liberal or conservative on a range of political issues? Yes, his friend replied. Just ask them this: “If your baby cries at night, do you pick him up?”1

  Lakoff tells this story at the beginning of his book Moral Politics to explain how he came to believe that our views on any number of topics—abortion, capital punishment, gun control, environmental regulation, foreign policy, immigration, and more—often bespeak a deeper “moral vision.” And this vision, he maintains, can be described in terms of “models of the family.” Conservative positions reflect what he calls a Strict Father model, while liberal positions point to a Nurturant Parent model.

  Even after making my way through his 425-page book, I’m not entirely clear what status Lakoff meant to attribute to these views of parenting. Are they metaphors? (Elsewhere, he’s written about how our thoughts and actions are shaped by metaphors we may not even be aware of using.) Or are one’s attitudes about raising children actually supposed to be correlated with one’s positions on all those political issues? And, if so, is there any evidence to support that hypothesis?2

  Whatever their status, the models themselves are coherent and undeniably compelling—I’ll say more about the Strict Father approach later—and it’s fascinating to imagine that the way you treat your kids really can predict and explain your politics. Does a heavy-handed emphasis on obedience in the home foretell opposition to affirmative action? Are parents who talk things over with their children rather than spanking them more likely to favor tax incentives to promote renewable energy? The possibilities lend new meaning to Wordsworth’s adage, “The child is father of the man.”

  There’s just one problem with Lakoff’s theory. An awful lot of people who are politically liberal begin to sound like right-wing talk-show hosts as soon as the conversation turns to children and parenting. It was this curious discrepancy, in fact, that inspired the book you are now reading.

  I first noticed an inconsistency of this kind in the context of education. Have a look at the unsigned editorials in left-of-center newspapers, or essays by columnists whose politics are mostly progressive. Listen to speeches by liberal public officials. On any of the controversial issues of our day, from tax policy to civil rights, you’ll find approximately what you’d expect. But when it comes to education, almost all of them take a hard-line position very much like what we hear from conservatives. They endorse a top-down, corporate-style version of school reform that includes prescriptive, one-size-fits-all teaching standards and curriculum mandates; weakened job protection for teachers; frequent standardized testing; and a reliance on rewards and punishments to raise scores on those tests and compel compliance on the part of teachers and students.

  Admittedly there is some disagreement about the proper role of the federal government in all of this—and also about the extent to which public schooling should be privatized3—but otherwise, liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans, the New York Times and the Daily Oklahoman, sound the identical themes of “accountability,” “raising the bar,” and “global competitiveness” (meaning that education is conceived primarily in economic terms). President Barack Obama didn’t just continue George W. Bush’s education policies; he intensified them, piling the harsh test-driven mandates of a program called “Race to the Top” on the harsh test-driven mandates of “No Child Left Behind.”4

  Applause for this agenda has come not only from corporate America but also from both sides of the aisle in Congress and every major media outlet in the United States. Indeed, the generic phrase school reform has come to be equated with these specific get-tough policies. To object to them is to risk being labeled a defender of the “status quo,” even though they have defined the status quo for some time now. Many of the people who have objected are teachers and other education experts who see firsthand just how damaging this approach has been, particularly to low-income students and the schools that serve them. But a key element of “reform” is to define educators as part of the problem, so their viewpoint has mostly been dismissed.

  What’s true of attitudes about education is also largely true of the way we think about children in general—what they’re like and how they should be raised. Of course politicians are far less likely to speak (or newspapers to editorialize) about parenting. But columnists do weigh in from time to time and, when they do, those who are generally liberal once again do a remarkable imitation of conservatives.5 Articles about parenting in general-interest periodicals, meanwhile, reflect the same trend. The range of viewpoints on other topics giv
es way to a stunningly consistent perspective where children are concerned.

  That perspective sounds something like this:

  •We live in an age of indulgence in which permissive parents refuse to set limits for, or say no to, their children.

  •Parents overprotect their kids rather than let them suffer the natural consequences of their own mistakes. Children would benefit from experiencing failure, but their parents are afraid to let that happen.

  •Adults are so focused on making kids feel special that we’re raising a generation of entitled narcissists. They get trophies even when their team didn’t win; they’re praised even when they didn’t do anything impressive; and they receive A’s for whatever they turn in at school. Alas, they’ll be in for a rude awakening once they get out into the unforgiving real world.

  •What young people need—and lack—is not self-esteem but self-discipline: the ability to defer gratification, control their impulses, and persevere at tasks over long periods of time.

  These “traditionalist” convictions (for lack of a better word) are heard everywhere and repeated endlessly. Taken together, they have become our society’s conventional wisdom about children, to the point that whenever a newspaper or magazine addresses any of these topics, it will almost always be from this direction. If the subject is self-esteem, the thesis will be that children have an oversupply. If the subject is discipline (and limits imposed by parents), the writer will insist that kids today get too little. And perseverance or “grit” is always portrayed positively, never examined skeptically.

  This widespread adoption of a traditionalist perspective helps us to make sense of the fact that, on topics related to children, even liberals tend to hold positions whose premises are deeply conservative. Perhaps it works the other way around as well: The fact that people on the left and center find themselves largely in agreement with those on the right explains how the traditionalist viewpoint has become the conventional wisdom. Child rearing might be described as a hidden front in the culture wars, except that no one is fighting on the other side.

  In order to write this book I’ve had to track down research studies on the relevant issues so as to be able to distinguish truth from myth. But I’ve also come across dozens of articles in the popular press, articles with titles like “Spoiled Rotten: Why Do Kids Rule the Roost?” (The New Yorker), “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy” (The Atlantic), “Just Say No: Why Parents Must Set Limits for Kids Who Want It All” (Newsweek), “Parents and Children: Who’s in Charge Here?” (Time), “The Child Trap: The Rise of Overparenting” (The New Yorker again), “The Abuse of Overparenting” (Psychology Today), “The Trouble with Self-Esteem,” (New York Times Magazine), and “Millennials: The Me Me Me Generation” (Time again), to name just a few.

  If you’ve read one of these articles, you’ve pretty much read all of them. The same goes for newspaper columns, blog posts, and books on the same themes.6 Pick any one of them at random and the first thing you’ll notice is that it treats a diverse assortment of complaints as if they’re interchangeable. Parents are criticized for hovering and also for being too lax (with no acknowledgment that these are two very different things). In one sentence, kids are said to have too many toys; in the next, they’re accused of being disrespectful. Or unmotivated. Or self-centered. Anything that happens to annoy the writer may be tossed into the mix. Kids are exposed to too many ads! Involved in too many extracurricular activities! Distracted by too much technology! They’re too materialistic and individualistic and narcissistic—probably because they were raised by parents who are pushy, permissive, progressive. (If the writer is an academic, a single label may be used to organize the indictment—“intensive parenting” or “nurturance overload,” for example—but a bewildering variety of phenomena are offered as examples.7)

  In fact, the generalizations offered in these books and articles sometimes seem not merely varied but contradictory. We’re told that parents push their children too hard to excel (by ghostwriting their homework, hiring tutors, and demanding that they triumph over their peers) but also that parents try to protect kids from competition (by giving trophies to everyone), that expectations have declined, that too much attention is paid to making children happy. Similarly, young adults are described as self-satisfied twits—more pleased with themselves than their accomplishments merit—but also as being so miserable that they’re in therapy.8 Or there’s an epidemic of helicopter parenting, even though parents are so focused on their gadgets that they ignore their children. The assumption seems to be that readers will just nod right along, failing to notice any inconsistencies, as long as the tone is derogatory and the perspective is traditionalist.

  Rarely are any real data cited—either about the prevalence of what’s being described or the catastrophic effects being alleged. Instead, writers tend to rely primarily on snarky anecdotes, belaboring them to give the impression that these carefully chosen examples are representative of the general population, along with quotes from authors who accept and restate the writer’s thesis about permissive parents and entitled kids who have never experienced failure.

  Oddly, though, even as these writers repeat what everyone else is saying, they present themselves as courageous contrarians who are boldly challenging the conventional wisdom.

  Perhaps the experience of reading all those articles—sloppy, contradictory, or unpersuasive though they may be—wouldn’t have been so irritating if it were also possible to find essays that questioned the dominant assumptions, essays that might have been titled “The New Puritanism: Who Really Benefits When Children Are Trained to Put Work Before Play?” or “Why Parents Are So Controlling . . . and How It Harms Their Kids” or “The Invention of ‘Helicopter Parenting’: Creating a Crisis Out of Thin Air.” If anything along these lines has appeared in a mainstream publication, I’ve been unable to locate it.

  The numbing uniformity of writings on children and parenting, and the lack of critical inspection on which the consensus rests, is troubling in itself. When countless publications offer exactly the same indictment of spoiled children and entitled Millennials—and accuse their parents of being lax or indulgent—this has a very real impact on the popular consciousness, just as a barrage of attack ads, no matter how misleading, can succeed in defining a political candidate in the minds of voters. But of course what matters more than whether a consensus exists is whether it makes sense, whether there’s any merit to the charges. And that’s my task here: to dissect casual claims in light of the evidence.

  Those claims can be sorted into three categories. Some of them are descriptive statements. (Permissiveness is widespread. Failure is useful. Kids today are more narcissistic than those of previous generations.) Some of them are predictions. (Children who are “overparented” will not fare well as adults. The absence of competition will foster mediocrity.) And some of them are simply value judgments. (Self-esteem ought to be earned. A parent’s priority should be to make children more independent.) My goal will be to ask whether the descriptions are accurate, whether there are any data to support the predictions, and whether the values are defensible. I’m also intrigued by the worldview on which all these statements rest—along with the anger that often animates them—and what that tells us about ourselves.

  In the first two chapters, I’ll look at accusations that parents are permissive and children are spoiled—accusations that, as we’ll see, have been around for quite some time, with each generation insisting that the problem has never been worse than it is now. To understand why so many people are eager to believe these complaints, we’ll need to take some time to explore the nature of parenting itself and the version of it that actually helps kids to flourish.

  In Chapter 3, we’ll consider charges of “overparenting.” As with permissiveness, absolutely no evidence exists to support the claim that this phenomenon is widespread. Where it does exist, moreover, the impact on children is troubling not because they are being indulged but because they are being con
trolled. The common stereotype of young adults being directed by helicopter parents also turns out to have virtually no basis in reality—in terms of either its pervasiveness or its effects.

  The next two chapters consider a variety of situations in which children are supposedly protected from unpleasant experiences or allowed to feel more satisfied with themselves than they deserve. The claim is that kids are praised too readily, given A’s too easily, and allowed to go home with trophies even when they haven’t defeated anyone. Traditionalists have responded with fury at even modest efforts to scale back punitive practices as well as competitive activities that range from dodge ball to calculating high school students’ class rank. This intense opposition, I’ll argue, is based on three beliefs: that rewards are necessary to motivate people, that these rewards should be made artificially scarce and given only to winners, and that the best way to prepare children for future unhappiness and failure is to make them experience unhappiness and failure right now. Even though these assumptions prove false, each of them is driven by an ideological conviction that cannot be unseated by evidence—namely, that anything desirable should have to be earned (conditionality), that excellence can be attained only by some (scarcity), and that children ought to have to struggle (deprivation).

  These value judgments inform the usual appraisal of what adults do for kids, but also of how kids think of themselves. Chapter 6 examines what’s known about the psychological importance of self-esteem, and how that body of knowledge squares with traditionalists’ efforts to discredit the concept. It then zeroes in on the major point of contention, which again concerns conditionality: What provokes particular outrage and ridicule is the idea that children might feel good about themselves in the absence of impressive accomplishments, even though, as I’ll show, studies find that unconditional self-esteem is a key component of psychological health.