Parenting Reflections

Remember the song, What Is This Thing Called Love?  Overindulgence can look like love, feel like love, and come from a loving heart.  However, overindulgence is not love.  Call it helicopter parenting, curling parenting or spoiling, if it is beyond abundance it teaches the child to be helpless or irresponsible.  It is giving way more than enough.  It is giving children so much of anything that it slows learning what they need to be learning at their age.  That’s overindulgence.

Adults who had been overindulgence as children were surveyed in the nine studies of the Overindulgence Research Project (www.overindulgence.info).  Their most frequent complaint about being overindulged was not knowing what was enough.  They reported not knowing what was enough food, clothing, recreation, cars, work, alcohol, excitement, sleep, money, sex, amounts to put in recipes, you name it.  Some said, “There were too many things but not enough love.”

How much is enough?

This is a very debilitating situation.  One interviewee, who was mightily overindulged as a child, stated plaintively that she hopes before she goes to her grave that she has one afternoon when she knows what is enough of just one thing.  Anything.  This is not the impact parents plan to have on their children’s lives.  But it is a result of having had too much. 

 You have to be carefully taught

In part, the concept of Enough is learned, and one that parents teach as children grow.  At times, it is easy to let a child have too much in order to avoid dealing with the child’s frustration.  But teach about Enough we must.  So, in the car on the way to the toy store we say, “You may choose one toy today.  I will decide if the price is right and if you may have it.”  When our child begs for another, we say matter-of-factly, “You already have your toy.  That is enough.  If you continue to beg we will put this one back.”  And if that happens, we carry through.  Lucky is the child whose parent is not swayed by tears, begging, pouting, or shouting.

That’s not always easy, so we encourage ourselves to be strong.  We march around the house saying, “I am the parent.  Children do not need parents who are friends, they need parents who are friendly.”  We say, “I am more powerful than the media that tells children they always need more and newer.  I am more powerful than the peer group.  I am more powerful than the neighbor who tells me I am too hard on my children.  When I want to give too much, I stop myself.  I am firmly in charge.  I am teaching my child about Enough.”

Make lists of things your child wants or you want to give, and then you decide what is too little, enough, abundance, or too much.  Always give enough in so far as you can; give abundance sometimes.  But remember that too much is not better than abundance.  It is worse.  Much worse.

The Overindulgence Research Studies tell us there are three general ways that overindulgence occurs.

1. Giving too much of anything money can buy.
2. Doing things for children that they should be doing for themselves
3. Lack of rules and neglect of chores.

I’ll do a future blog on each of these.  Meanwhile, remember that we live in a cultural norm of overindulgence.  One could call it the new normal, so it takes courage to stick to giving children all of what they need and only part of what they want.  Let’s all be courageous.  You can read more in the How Much Is Enough? book.

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