Boundaries was one of my favorite words in childhood. I have no idea where I learned it—probably from the therapist my parents forced me to see after they divorced when I was 9—but it captured for me the root of all the sloppy problems that existed in our family. "Boundaries!" I would yell, holding up my pudgy hand, when my father or stepmother would throw the bathroom door open without knocking. "Boundaries!" I would yell at my mother when she would start to tell me one of her labyrinthine stories about her failed marriage to my father. It was as if I had found the magical command that would protect me from the wilds of the adult lives around me.
Turns out I was onto something. "A child needs boundaries and structure to grow," writes Richard Bromfield, a clinical instructor in psychology at Harvard Medical School, in his new self-published book, How to Unspoil Your Child Fast. "A child who perpetually pesters her parent is searching for a limit she needs to grow straight." I was more of an angry child than a spoiled one, but the spirit was the same: I desperately wanted my parents to act like grown-ups, with an assured sense of authority and guidance.
Bromfield theorizes that parents today are also afraid to pick up the reins of parenting—but for different reasons than earlier generations. Living in an era of instant gratification and affluence—not to mention the long work hours required to maintain this status—many of us are tempted to fulfill our children's needs almost before they occur to them. We ourselves have only just emerged from our own protracted childhoods. (How many of us tried on several lives before finally settling into the one we have now? I have only just barely put aside my dream of being a movie star.) It makes sense, then, that we would want to offer the same advantages to our own children that we enjoyed in our long crawl toward adulthood. According to Bromfield, other reasons for our overattentiveness range from not wanting to prompt a tantrum to sleep-deprived apathy to "an (unconscious) pleasure in your children's misbehavior or defying." Spoiling, by Bromfield's definition, is driven by the inability to stand up to your child when he makes unreasonable demands—to stay up late, to eat ice cream before dinner, to have humbled parents racing to always meet his ever-multiplying needs. In addition, he warns that overpraising, perhaps the trademark problem of 21st-century parenting, is the equivalent of spoiling. "'Wow, what a great job you did sleeping!'" he writes, mocking modern mothers and fathers. "Complimenting children has become as second nature as breathing."
Indulgent parents, it seems to me, are also driven by the enduring mystery of how much children really know—that is, how vulnerable they truly are, and how much intervention is required on the part of parents. Indeed, this question fuels almost every debate in parenting today: Cry it out or cosleep? Day care or nanny? If only these little ones could speak up with the insight of an adult, if only they could say to us, "Go ahead, go to work! I have a sturdy, adaptable nature, and you have provided me with enough of a sense of security that I don't feel abandoned when you walk out that door."
Bromfield, however, believes that parents' necessary absences and denials prepare kids for reality. "Life is tough," he declares. "A child who's addicted to perpetual celebration will suffer much in a world that will often be busy with other things and people."
Next Page: Children unspoil us, and fast.
