The Myth of the Spoiled Child Quotes

“Children don’t just need to be loved; they need to know that nothing they do will change the fact that they’re loved.”
― Alfie Kohn, The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom About Children and Parenting

“When we set children against one another in contests—from spelling bees to awards assemblies to science “fairs” (that are really contests), from dodge ball to honor rolls to prizes for the best painting or the most books read—we teach them to confuse excellence with winning, as if the only way to do something well is to outdo others.”
― Alfie Kohn, The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom About Children and Parenting

“They're arguing for giving homework and tests to all young children, or separating them into winners and losers, because these tykes need to get used to such things -- as if exposure itself will inoculate them against the negative effects they would otherwise experience later. If we were interested in helping children to anticipate and deal with unpleasant experiences, it might make sense to discuss the details with them and perhaps guide them through role-playing exercises. But why would we subject kids to those experiences? After all, 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. But the key point is this: From a developmental perspective, BGUTI [Better-Get-Used-To-It worldview] is flat-out wrong. People don't get better at coping with unhappiness because they were because they were deliberately made unhappy when they were young On the contrary, what best prepares children to deal with the challenges of the real world is to experience success and joy, to feel supported and respected, to receive loving guidance and unconditional care and the chance to have some say about what happens to them.”
― Alfie Kohn, The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Coddled Kids, Helicopter Parents, and Other Phony Crises

“Most children seem eager, even desperate, to please those in authority, reluctant to rock the boat even when the boat clearly needs rocking. In a way, an occasional roll-your-eyes story of excess in the other direction marks the exception that proves the rule. And the rule is a silent epidemic of obedience. For every kid who is slapped with the label “Oppositional Defiant Disorder,” hundreds suffer from what one educator has mischievously called Compliance Acquiescent Disorder. The symptoms of CAD, he explained, include the following: “defers to authority,” “actively obeys rules,” “fails to argue back,” “knuckles under instead of mobilizing others in support,” and “stays restrained when outrage is warranted.”
― Alfie Kohn, The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom About Children and Parenting

“I think our challenge as parents is to rise above that preference for the child of least resistance and to think beyond short-term success as a criterion—particularly if success is defined by conventional and insipid standards. Don’t we want our kids to be inspiring rather than spend their lives just collecting tokens (grades, money, approval)? Don’t we want them to think in the plural rather than focusing only on what will benefit them personally? Don’t we want them to appraise traditions with fresh eyes and raise questions about what seems silly or self-defeating or oppressive, rather than doing what has always been done just because it’s always been done?”
― Alfie Kohn, The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom About Children and Parenting

“The story of declining school quality across the twentieth century is, for the most part, a fable,” says social scientist Richard Rothstein, whose book The Way We Were? cites a series of similar attacks on American education, moving backward one decade at a time.3 Each generation invokes the good old days, during which, we discover, people had been doing exactly the same thing.”
― Alfie Kohn, The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom About Children and Parenting

“A society in which no one is willing to risk being called a troublemaker is a place where power is certain to be abused.”
― Alfie Kohn, The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom About Children and Parenting

“In my experience, most parents sincerely want their children to be assertive, independent thinkers who are unafraid to stand their ground . . . with their peers. When a child demonstrates the identical sort of courage in interactions with them, it’s a different story: At best, it’s a troublesome phase that kids go through; at worst, it’s an example of uncooperative, disrespectful, disobedient, defiant behavior that must be stamped out. The truth is that if we want children to be able to resist peer pressure and grow into principled and brave adults, we have to actively welcome their questioning and being assertive with us. We have to move beyond our need to win arguments and impose our will, beyond our fear that we’ll be seen as weak or permissive if our kids are given leave to challenge us.”
― Alfie Kohn, The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom About Children and Parenting

“How well you do things should be incidental, not integral, to the way you regard yourself.”
― Alfie Kohn, The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Coddled Kids, Helicopter Parents, and Other Phony Crises

“What provokes particular outrage and ridicule is the idea that children might feel good about themselves in the absence of impressive accomplishments, even though, as I’ll show, studies find that unconditional self-esteem is a key component of psychological health.”
― Alfie Kohn, The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom About Children and Parenting

“We’re told that parents push their children too hard to excel (by ghostwriting their homework and hiring tutors, and demanding that they triumph over their peers), but also that parents try to protect kids from competition (by giving trophies to everyone), that expectations have declined, that too much attention is paid to making children happy.

Similarly, young adults are described as self-satisfied twits—more pleased with themselves than their accomplishments merit—but also as being so miserable that they’re in therapy. Or there’s an epidemic of helicopter parenting, even though parents are so focused on their gadgets that they ignore their children. The assumption seems to be that readers will just nod right along, failing to note any inconsistencies, as long as the tone is derogatory and the perspective is traditionalist.”
― Alfie Kohn, The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom About Children and Parenting

“Deferral of gratification may be an effect, not a cause. Just because some children were more effective than others at distracting themselves from [the marshmallow in the famous Marshmallow Test] doesn't mean this capacity was responsible for the impressive results found ten years later. Instead, both of these things may have been due to something about their home environment. If that's true, there's no reason to believe that enhancing children's ability to defer gratification would be beneficial: It was just a marker, not a cause. By way of analogy, teenagers who visit ski resorts over winter break probably have a superior record of being admitted to the Ivy League. Should we therefore hire consultants to teach low-income children how to ski in order to improve the odds that colleges will accept them?”
― Alfie Kohn, The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Coddled Kids, Helicopter Parents, and Other Phony Crises

“Most people who refer to an epidemic of permissive parenting just assume that this is true, that everyone knows it, and therefore that there's no need to substantiate that claim. My efforts to track down data -- by combing both scholarly and popular databases as well as sending queries to leading experts in the field -- have yielded absolutely nothing. I'm forced to conclude that no one has any idea how many parents could be considered permissive, how many are punitive, and how many are responsive to their children's needs without being permissive or punitive. (The tendency to overlook that third possibility is a troubling and enduring trend in its own right.) In short, there is absolutely no evidence to support the claim that permissiveness is the dominant style of parenting in our culture, or even that it's particularly common.”
― Alfie Kohn, The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Coddled Kids, Helicopter Parents, and Other Phony Crises

“Hence a report from Harvard’s own “Committee on Raising the Standard”: “Grades A and B are sometimes given too readily—Grade A for work of not very high merit, and Grade B for work not far above mediocrity. . . . One of the chief obstacles to raising the standards of the degree is the readiness with which insincere students gain passable grades by sham work.” Except that report was written in—you saw this coming, didn’t you?—1894.”
― Alfie Kohn, The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom About Children and Parenting

“It’s been said that the personal is political, and there’s no doubt that parenting is intensely personal. To argue against traditional ways of raising children, or to suggest that we can help children stand up for what they think is right, doesn’t introduce politics into parenting. It’s always been there. If we’ve failed to notice the political implications of child rearing, it may be because most advice on the subject has the effect of perpetuating the status quo. Hence the need to keep asking, “Cui bono?” When, for example, a researcher such as Diana Baumrind defends the idea of “moral internalization,” which she defines as “the process by which children come to espouse and conform to society’s rules, even when they are free of external surveillance or the expectation of external inducement,” that’s intensely political.3 The cornerstone of her notion of “authoritative” discipline is the creation of built-in supervisors to ensure conformity. But too many people respond by asking, “What’s the most efficient way to achieve such internalization?” and skirting the question of the value of those rules they’re being asked to internalize. In fact, we should invite our children to join us in asking which rules are worth following, and why.”
― Alfie Kohn, The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom About Children and Parenting

“Do we really want to condemn as excessive the use of safety helmets, car seats, playgrounds designed so kids will be less likely to crack their skulls, childproof medicine bottles, and baby gates at the top of stairs? One writer criticizes "the inappropriateness of excessive concern in low-risk environments," but of course reasonable people disagree about what constitutes both "excessive" and "low risk." Even if, as this writer asserts, "a young person growing up in a Western middle-class family is safer today than at any time in modern history," the relevance of that relative definition of safety isn't clear. Just because fewer people die of disease today than in medieval times doesn't mean it's silly to be immunized. And perhaps young people are safer today because of the precautions that some critics ridicule.”
― Alfie Kohn, The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Coddled Kids, Helicopter Parents, and Other Phony Crises

“Instead, you would probably hear, “No rewards and punishments?? Then how will we get our kids to do what they’re told, follow the rules, and take their place in a society where certain things will be expected of them whether they like it or not?” Indeed, there is evidence that greater concern about social”
― Alfie Kohn, The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom About Children and Parenting

“So if pundits were throwing up their hands even during the Eisenhower era about schools on the decline and students who could barely read and write, the obvious question is this: When exactly was that golden period distinguished by high standards? The answer, of course, is that it never existed. “The story of declining school quality across the twentieth century is, for the most part, a fable,” says social scientist Richard Rothstein, whose book The Way We Were? cites a series of similar attacks on American education, moving backward one decade at a time.3 Each generation invokes the good old days, during which, we discover, people had been doing exactly the same thing.”
― Alfie Kohn, The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom About Children and Parenting

“In the pages that follow, I want to invite readers who don’t regard themselves as social conservatives to reexamine the traditionalist roots of attitudes about children they may have come to accept. And I want to invite all readers, regardless of their political and cultural views, to take a fresh look at common assumptions about kids and parenting. We’ve been encouraged to worry: Are we being firm enough with our children? Are we too involved in their lives? Do kids today feel too good about themselves? Those questions, I’ll argue, are largely misconceived. They distract us from—or even make us suspicious about—the shifts that we ought to be considering. The sensible alternative to overparenting is not less parenting but better parenting. The alternative to permissiveness is not to be more controlling but more responsive. And the alternative to narcissism is not conformity but reflective rebelliousness. In short, if we want to raise psychologically healthy and spirited children, we’ll need to start by questioning the media-stoked fears of spoiling them.”
― Alfie Kohn, The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom About Children and Parenting

“A willingness to question the way things are paradoxically affirms a vision of the way things ought to be.”
― Alfie Kohn, The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom About Children and Parenting

“Contingent on what, though? Some bases for feeling good about oneself may be worse than others. Jennifer Crocker, a psychologist at Ohio State University, and her colleagues have shown that the prognosis is particularly bad when self-esteem hinges on outdoing others (competitive success), approval by others, physical appearance, or academic achievement.47 Consider the last of those. When children’s self-esteem rises or falls with how well they do at school, achievement can resemble an addiction, “requiring ever greater success to avoid feelings of worthlessness.” And if it looks as though success is unlikely, kids may “disengage from the task, deciding it doesn’t matter, rather than suffer the loss of self-esteem that accompanies failure.”
― Alfie Kohn, The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom About Children and Parenting

“The second assumption is that childhood is—and should be—mostly about preparation for what comes later. It doesn’t matter if you’re miserable now because what you experience as a child isn’t important in its own right. Everything is about the payoff, which doesn’t come until some (unspecified) period during adulthood. School, for example, may be awful for you—it may squelch your excitement about learning—but that’s okay because the purpose of education is to acclimate you to gratuitous unpleasantness.”
― Alfie Kohn, The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom About Children and Parenting

“Good tennis players are those who beat other tennis players, and a good shot during play is one the opponent can't return. But that's not a truth about life or excellence -- it's a truth about tennis. We've created an artificial structure in which one person can't succeed without doing so at someone else's expense, and then we accuse anyone who prefers other kinds of activities of being naive because "there can be only one best -- you're it or you're not," as the teacher who delivered that much-admired you're-not-special commencement speech declared. You see the sleight of hand here? The question isn't whether everyone playing a competitive game can win or whether every student can be above average. Of course they can't. The question that we're discouraged from asking is why our games are competitive -- or our students are compulsively ranked against one another -- in the first place.”
― Alfie Kohn, The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Coddled Kids, Helicopter Parents, and Other Phony Crises

“Historians have shown that "parents in the Middle Ages worried about their kids no less than we worry about ours today," and by the nineteenth century there is evidence of bars being placed on windows to protect toddlers from falling out as well as "leading strings
so that young children wouldn't wander off during walks.”
― Alfie Kohn, The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Coddled Kids, Helicopter Parents, and Other Phony Crises

“(A habit of offering squeaky “Good job!”s often betrays a dark view of children and perhaps of human nature.)”
― Alfie Kohn, The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom About Children and Parenting

“Sometimes the alternative to black and white isn’t gray; it’s, say, orange.”
― Alfie Kohn, The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom About Children and Parenting

“We may not be able to say, “Don’t watch,” but we can watch with them and show them how to view critically, how to recognize propaganda tricks used to sell them stuff they don’t need, how to identify hidden values and defuse attempts to manipulate them.”
― Alfie Kohn, The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom About Children and Parenting

“Since many—too many—of our children’s values and attitudes are formed by the mass media, every parent ought to offer an informal multiyear course in media literacy.”
― Alfie Kohn, The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom About Children and Parenting

“Almost half a century ago, conservatives blamed a surge in college campus unrest on permissive parenting. My first response (in Chapter 1) was to question the accuracy of that causal link. Another response to their claim, however, might be: “Blamed?!” If there really were a connection, it would constitute a powerful argument in favor of such parenting.4 The political and cultural activism of the 1960s, after all, was defined by efforts to challenge oppressive institutions and restrictive assumptions, to demand equal rights for women and people of color, to oppose war and promote awareness about the environmental costs of economic growth. If a certain approach to parenting really could produce people who devoted themselves to those democratizing struggles, we should be sharing the good news with parents today.”
― Alfie Kohn, The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom About Children and Parenting

“Nostalgia is only amnesia turned around,” said the poet Adrienne Rich.”
― Alfie Kohn, The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom About Children and Parenting