| Criminal Or Simply Spoiled?
by Ralph LaFlamme
This article is adapted from “Why Parents Indulge” with Dr. Dan Kindlon, author of “Too Much of a Good Thing.”
Working for years in counseling and prison ministry convinced me that there is often a connection between criminal behavior and being spoiled as a child. I did some research on the subject and found the wonderfully insightful website above on the subject of indulged children and how to deal with the issue.
Dr. Kindlon writes the following about why it is wrong to indulge kids:
By protecting our children from failure, adversity, and pain, we deprive them of the opportunity to develop a realistic sense of their strengths and limitations, and to learn important coping skills. Indulged children are often less able to cope with stress, for example, because their parents have created an atmosphere where their whims are indulged, and where they have always assumed that life should be a bed of roses. The body cannot learn to adapt to stress unless it experiences it.
Indulged children can also be at risk of:
- Being self-centered (and disrespectful, Ed.)
- Angry
- Depressed
- Spoiled
- Envious
- Overly competitive and driven or
- Unmotivated
- Lacking in self-control, and thus be more likely to get into trouble with drugs, alcohol and risky sex
Compared to earlier generations, parents nowadays are emotionally closer to their kids and are more able to have fun with them. But they also tend to be too indulgent because they want their children to be happy. But their happiness as adults is largely dependent on giving them the right tools, tools that allow them to:
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Develop emotional maturity
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Be honest with themselves
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Be empathetic
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Take initiative
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Delay gratification
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Learn from failure and move on
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Accept their flaws
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Face the consequences when they’ve done something wrong
The four-step workshop Dr. Kindlon presents teaches you:
- How to raise children of character
- Help you gain back control of your family and your home
- Discover why you may be indulging your child
- Learn how to make important and significant changes in your parenting behavior
- Set limits without feeling guilty
- Teach your children self-control
- Fight back against greediness
The workshop helps you learn to combine emotional closeness with your kids and the ability to set limits. It explores topics such as:
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Understanding why we indulge
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Stopping the Spoil-Cycle
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The importance of limits
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Understanding our fear of limits
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Choosing proper punishment
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Teaching frustration tolerance
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Real dangers of spoiling
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Stopping the Spoiling Syndrome
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