Spoiling Kids
“We're only as needy as our unmet needs.”
John Bowlby
Psychologist John B. Watson wrote the now-infamous book Psychological Care of Infant and Child in 1928. It remained the most popular book on childcare until Dr. Benjamin Spock’s even more wildly popular Baby and Child Care was published in 1946. It is still impossible to calculate the tremendous damage Watson’s book did.
In time, the book was widely criticized and condemned by the psychiatric community. Watson himself later regretted having written on the topic, admitting that he “did not know enough" to do a good job. And yet, despite all the criticism, his fundamental advice can still be felt in many people’s parenting styles today.
Watson believed parents should treat children with respect, but with relative emotional detachment. They should not pander to children’s emotions, and they should not react to children’s cries or other signs of emotion. Watson prescribed a mechanical abandonment of children in which their feelings were ignored. While few parents in recent generations follow the harshness of Watson’s advice, we still see remnants of the concept that parents spoil their children by being attentive their feelings..
It would be unfair to suggest that this stern, emotionally detached parenting style originated with Watson. Many cultures have believed in such an approach for millennia. However, Watson did give academic and seemingly scientific legitimacy to what his successors would prove was a deeply damaging parenting style.
Nearly every acclaimed psychologist to study parenting since Watson (from John Bowlby to Harry Harlow to Marie Ainsworth to Melanie Klein, and many more) has shown that children whose emotions are listened to, attended to sympathetically and empathetically, treated as important, mirrored, and validated are better adjusted, healthier both mentally and physically, and tend to perform better throughout their lives. The notion that being attentive to kids feelings “spoils” them is a tragically mistaken idea that time-and-again since the time of Dr. Watson has been systematically disproved. In many ways the after-effects of Watson’s damage and those that want to believe him still lingers. However, there is no such thing as spoiling children emotionally. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. It is the kids whose emotions are frequently ignored who tend to act out more. Making the parent’s job harder and creating a difficult and often tragic downward spiral. Those, whose emotions are denied, tend to act out more not less.
Many adults minimize children’s emotions simply because they are children. However, it makes no sense to assume that a child’s feelings are any more or less valid or important than an adult's. I believe this insulting minimization is often tied up in the deeply ingrained thinking that stems from the mentality that children should respect their elders. However, as a culture, we would be well served to respect all people’s emotions, regardless of age.
Much of modern psychology revolves around the study of adults internalizing the messages they learned from their parents. Long after our parents are no longer involved in our day-to-day lives, our own internal voices continue to feed us their messages. If our parents’ actions and words suggested we weren’t enough, that we were not good enough, that we did not deserve to be happy, that our emotions were not important, that we were not lovable, or not unconditionally lovable, those are the messages we will continue to hear. However, if our parents and caregivers made us feel that we were enough, that we were inherently good people, that we deserved happiness, that our emotions were important, and that we were unconditionally lovable, faults and all, then that is the message we will be telling ourselves into adulthood. We will love ourselves. We will accept ourselves. We will trust our own emotions and desires. In this sense, it is my belief you can’t emotionally spoil your kids.
To be clear, I’m not discussing spoiling children in other non-emotional ways such as materially or by enabling them. That kind of spoiling is rooted in the parent’s needs rather than the child’s. Overly caretaking adolescents, teens, and adult kids is really about the parent’s need to feel needed more than it is about respecting the children’s emotions. Listening to and validating children’s emotions does not preclude teaching them that we do not always get the things we want, or that events don’t always go our way. Likewise, overly caretaking our kids is not the same as loving them. It is possible for a parent to become too involved in their children’s life, and to do so under the guise of loving them. Be careful to examine if you are acting in a loving manner towards the child, or if you are enabling them because of your own need to feel needed. Learning disappointment is a valuable lesson, but the deeper question is, how does one cope? Your child’s ability to cope with disappointment will be rooted in whether or not their emotions were respected and validated.
Kids whose emotions are listened to and treated as real, grow up understanding the importance of listening to their own feelings and beliefs rather than suppressing them. This does not mean you need be manipulated by your children, it does mean their emotions are as valid as any adults. I propose that it is worth respecting and acknowledging all people’s emotions are valid regardless of their age and size. Very much, including your own.
Ask Yourself:
Are a child’s emotions any more or less valid than an adult’s?
What risks are involved in treating my own children’s emotions as valid and real?
Do I respect my own emotions as valid and real?
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