Are American Kids Spolied?

Last summer an article in The New Yorker entitled "Spoiled Rotten" got me thinking about my own parenting style and skills.

Since my kids are now 24 and 21 (both college graduates and both gainfully employed), it’s easier for me from this distance to reflect on what I did right and wrong as a parent.

The article focuses on how families in different countries with different cultures raise their children.

For the most part, children in the United States have the least responsibility/chores asked of them, yet they were the beneficiaries of the most material objects and attention from their parents. This all too commonly results in “parents wanting their kids approval, a reversal of the past ideal of children striving for their parents’ approval.”

 Two thirds of American parents feel their children are spoiled.

This is vastly different from child-rearing in a country like France, where the “French believe ignoring children is good for them. French parents don’t worry that they’re going to damage their kids by frustrating them. To the contrary, they think their kids will be damaged if they can’t cope with frustration…They view learning to cope with ‘no’ as a crucial step in a child’s evolution. It forces them to understand that there are other people in the world, with needs as powerful as their own.”

I’ve heard respected psychologist Robert Evans say that in America today parents want school to prepare the path for the child rather than prepare the child for the path.

I’ve heard Dr. David Walsh talk about how today we live in a "yes culture" with its resulting characteristics of impatience, instant gratification, and sense of entitlement.

I’ve written before about the how parents and teachers need to stress the importance of motivation, hard work, effort, determination, and perseverance as well as the benefit striving against obstacles and dealing with disappointment.

As parents, we need to help and support our children but also give them more responsibility and the latitude to make mistakes and solve their own problems.

While I regret not assigning more chores to my kids when they were young, my wife and I did place the responsibility for schoolwork on them. Before they each went off to college, we told them that we would cover reasonable college costs for no more than four years: if they didn’t graduate in four, they had to pay.

Had they not graduated in four years, I believe we would have followed through on our threat and made them take out college loans, but like most American parents, we would have struggled with this decision.