The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Coddled Kids, Helicopter Parents, and Other Phony Crises

This is an annoying book. It is also dangerous. It is annoying because the author, Alfie Kohn, refutes nearly every commonly held belief about children and parenting and backs up his arguments with empirical evidence. He also uncovers how the evidence used to support the common wisdom is often bogus. He topples widely-held myths about coddled kids, narcissistic youths, helicopter parents, grit, self-discipline, and more. What makes the book dangerous is that Kohn’s evidence exposes and undermines the underlying ideology used to socially and politically justify how we raise and educate our children. He sheds light on how we have created a society that is in reality hostile to childhood. Be warned, reading this book may be hazardous to show more your assumptions about children and parenting. Of course, that is the reason it is important to read the book. show less

In Punished By Rewards (1993), one of Alfie Kohn's more popular books, he makes the case that we can do so much better than relying on the carrot/stick mentality to raise and educate our children. This idea of challenging long-held, potentially damaging beliefs about how children learn has informed Kohn's decades-long body of work.

With The Myth of the Spoiled Child, the target this time is the near-urban legend belief that today's kids are hopelessly coddled and overindulged. You hear the jokes about "Kids these days..." only most aren't joking. My initial impression was that Kohn might be overstating a problem that's been overblown by the media. Using an example from the other end of the spectrum, I've read all about Tiger Moms and show more accounts like these seem far more suited for stirring up indignation and generating book sales than actually advocating for a paradigm shift in parenting. I'll concede that, real problem or not, the damage could be enough to pose a threat and Alfie Kohn is leading the charge of dissent against what he refers to as the BGUTI (Better Get Used To It) argument. BGUTI is a lazy parting shot leveled at those facing life's hardships, and it almost always says more about the person giving the advice than the one receiving it.

Chapter by chapter, Kohn breaks down the accusations in order to discern what the actual problem is. (e.g. "Kids these days are too entitled!" "Well, what do you mean by entitled? Do you mean too much self-esteem because that's not necessarily a bad thing.") Similar to calling someone out on the baseless conspiracy theories that are often emailed around, Kohn usually discovers that people aren't reacting to real data. They're reacting to an impression that kids don't see the world as they do.

The last chapter, "Raising Rebels," is especially good because it makes the case for raising our children into adults capable of adapting to an ever-changing world. In order to do that, we need to instill values of willful independence, critical thinking, risk taking and to question everything. Otherwise, the result will compliance to a fault and deference to authority without first asking "Why?" show less

This is the first book I've read by Alfie Kohn, and his insightful critique of our culture's largely unquestioned assumptions about children and how they should be treated had my head spinning: at times, reading it, I felt as though he were proposing some entirely other reality—and wishing urgently for a cultural change. No, this isn't a parenting book, but rather a cogent analysis of mainstream attitudes towards childrearing and education, and, just as importantly, an exposure of the ideologies that underlie them, propagating common beliefs that often fly in the face of scientific findings. His call for a more humane understanding of children did have me questioning — well, but how would that actually work? So as soon as I finished show more this book, I immediately picked up Unconditional Parenting. I can't wait to get into it. show less

Free LibraryThing early review copy. Kohn starts from the premise that people have been saying that kids today are much worse than kids when they were growing up for centuries, so that the default response to narratives of deterioration should be skepticism. If kids are in trouble, Kohn suggests, it’s because of the larger collapse of social cohesion that leads parents to fail to model social responsibility and caring for others as values rather than just individually getting ahead. Rather than being too nice to our kids—trophies for everyone!—Americans are actually astonishingly punitive, which is a moral and not an empirical stance, given that there’s no evidence that “permissiveness” harms kids and a lot of evidence that show more spanking does. (A majority of Americans approve of at least occasional spanking.) “Parents love their own kids but often have little patience with anyone else’s…. Surveys of American adults consistently find what one newspaper report called ‘a stunning level of antagonism not just toward teen-agers but toward young children as well.’” Parents think that being dictatorial is the same as being authoritative: “It’s not unlike the way a dictator sees the world: Without martial law we have lawlessness; what you foreigners insist on calling ‘democracy’ isn’t the former, so it must be just a fancy term for the latter.”

Some of Kohn’s criticisms are not well taken, it seems to me—he thinks there’s a contradiction between saying that parents are too permissive because they let their kids do whatever they want and saying that parents are overinvolved and overhelpful, doing too much for their kids, but I see some of both—parents acceding to demands and then doing too much to carry out those demands, even when the kid could be left alone to play with the whatever. Likewise, Kohn criticizes those who describe kids as coddled because their parents “err on the side of keeping their children safe,” since helmets, car seats, etc. are indeed very good ideas. But barring kids from walking to school or riding bikes in the street, which also happens, are not good ideas—the question is what is lost from any particular “safety” measure.

However, I’m persuaded by some of the larger points. Kohn says we have three interrelated misperceptions about childrearing, based on flawed morality: (1) conditionality (love must be earned or it’s not worth having); (2) scarcity (it’s important to compete for good things); and (3) deprivation (being in need is good for the soul). For example, though we criticize “helicopter parents,” having a close relationship with your parents isn’t itself bad and can even provide protection from some traps, such as binge drinking in college. He argues that maturity isn’t the same as self-sufficiency—it’s ok to need other people and it doesn’t make you inferior at adulting. American individualism ill serves us here. He’s also not a fan of awards for everyone, but because of their dampening effects on intrinsic motivation to achieve, not because life should produce lots of losers and very few winners (as other critics believe). What he describes as the “better get used to it” theory of childrearing is misguided: “People don’t get better at coping with unhappiness because they were deliberately made unhappy when they were young.” We can and should model and roleplay and prepare children for challenges in other ways, but, as one person he quotes says, “to teach children how to handle a fire emergency, we talk to them about the dangers of smoke inhalation and advise them where to go when the alarm sounds. We don’t actually set them on fire.” Failure is often demotivating; success, at something that the kid thought was worth doing, is motivating and helps the kid see herself as a competent person. I really empathized with the point that, “[a]s a rule, it’s hard to stop happy, satisfied people from trying to learn or from trying to do a job of which they can be proud.”

The broader social critique: by trying to raise kids with lots of grit and tolerance for hard, unpleasant work, we are trying to wring out the characteristics that lead people to challenge existing structures and work for positive change. He cites disturbing research indicating that high-performing students are often experts at playing the “game” of grades but not interested in learning for its own sake. (I know this isn’t a blanket rule, but if you’re rewarded for that, I can see it happening.) Kids who react badly to school are seen as defective, when the defects may well be in the schools that are asking them to do pointless work—kids aren’t given much reason to “do their best,” just ordered to do so. With the recent attention to the role of cops in schools, Kohn’s argument is particularly poignant/troubling.

Probably the biggest omission in the book, despite its rhetoric about social justice and political quiescence, is a discussion of class. “Helicopter parents” are a particular class phenomenon, and their kids usually don’t go to the same schools that mandate lots of rote teaching. (Yet; give privatization time.) I don’t think American children are all being raised the same way, even if the hostility directed towards them is often generalized—it’s even more often racialized, as when African-American children are seen by adults as several years older than their true ages, and thus more threatening. show less

I was a big fan of Kohn's anti-testing work as a high schooler, so like a good scientist, I put my critical goggles on extra tight for this parenting book, especially as his positions seemed obvious to me. I do wish there had been more positive evidence along with the negative evidence, but without diving into his references his points are well-supported and easily read. Those who expect a parenting advice manual will not find it here, though, as this is more of a sociological work.

Kohn has written another masterful debunking of commonplace ideas about children, parenting, and schools. Yes, there may be a few coddled kids and helicopter parents, but Kohn persuasively argues that they have been overmagnified in the media and in our everyday discussions.

While he might not change everyone's mind with his jeremiad, it's worth a read for the voluminous evidence he uses to support his arguments alone.

This book refutes the idea that kids today are more spoiled and self centered than ever before. He argues almost every line you'll hear about modern parenting techniques and dispels commonly held beliefs about how terrible we've made children. This seemed more like a dissertation than a parenting handbook. For me, frankly, it was a snooze-fest. The book's 60+ pages of references only helps reinforce the idea that this is an academic work. I don't think there is enough practical advice for this to be of much use for parents.