Parents probably wouldn’t be so frantic about making children happy if their children had more concrete roles within the family. Writing in 1977, Jerome Kagan remarked that the modern, useless child cannot “point to a plowed field or a full woodpile as a sign of his utility.” Hence, he predicted (with uncanny prescience), children were at risk of becoming overly dependent on praise and repeated declarations of love to build their confidence.
Interesting. But don’t children have concrete achievements in their activities, sports, academics, hobbies? Or is there some need for children to have “adult” achievements?
