How to Not Raise Spoiled Kids: Founder and Clinical Director Matt Lundquist in The Huffington Post

Some of the hardest work for parents is to tolerate that their children can both be wonderful and do things that aren’t so wonderful. However, this fact, along with the need to name and, when necessary, give consequences for bad behavior, is a key piece of raising kids who aren’t spoiled. Our Founder and Clinical Director Matt Lundquist recently spoke to The Huffington Post on how parents can avoid spoiling their children by intervening when their kids act unkind.

In “6 Habits to Avoid if You Don’t Want to Spoil Your Kids,” Matt explains the term “spoiled” is typically used to “reference privileges, often without a sense of them being earned or that they’re taken for granted. We also think of spoiled children as lacking empathy.” With kids, in particular, spoiling relates more to parents “preventing kids from experiencing the unpleasant parts of themselves than doing too much supporting and celebrating what’s great about them.”

While not in the article, there is also a class element to the conversation about spoiled children. Spoiled can be a proxy for privilege, which, in some contexts, is synonymous with wealth or access to certain benefits. This brings up two related but distinct concerns. The first relates to the desire parents have to raise children who are kind and appreciative, as well as understand the importance of work and doing their part. The second concerns understandable conflicts and hard feelings about who has access to opportunities and power, as well as the ways that children of privileged families have a leg up. Both matter, but when we conflate these issues, we water down both.

On questions related to the former, though, Matt encourages parents to hold kids accountable for unkind behavior rather than making excuses or protecting them from natural consequences. “There’s a sense with kids who don’t experience enough limits that being unkind isn’t much of a big deal or, more problematically, that there’s something special about them that exempts them from having to do the work of kindness and caring,” he reveals. In particular, there can be a sense of victimization from kids without enough limits. They’re so used to being let off the hook that they have a difficult time when they’re not. For instance, a child who often gets away with lax work can feel targeted (or mistreated) when they come across a teacher who grades hard.

By calling out bad behavior and asserting boundaries, parents help children gain a more complex view of themselves—one that says, “I’m pretty great, but sometimes I can be hurtful, and those are all part of me.” This doesn’t mean kids will not push back at limits. “Kids (like all of us) don’t like limits and, typically, when a limit is introduced (or there’s a new effort to really enforce a rule that’s been too loose), they’ll push back,” Matt says. Parents should keep in mind that this pushback “doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea.”

Matt also urges parents to not fall into the trap of thinking that praising their kid is apt to spoil them. “There’s no amount of praise…hugs and high fives that will make a child spoiled,” he notes. “Far too often, nurturing and praise are maligned under the umbrella of a kind of anti-spoiling strategy…In fact, the more the good stuff is cheered, the easier it is to absorb the hard stuff.”