family time
y a S t s Ju
! NO why overindulging your child can have devastating, lifelong effects by traci neal
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uying your teen everything she wants. Doing your middleschooler’s homework for him. Confronting the T-ball coach when your first-grader is benched. Overindulgence takes many forms. Whether it’s an attempt to buy love or happiness, help your child fit in, fight his battles, or simply keep her from throwing a tantrum, constantly saying yes can be far more damaging than saying no. “I think a lot of parents are doing it from a good place,” says Carol Passmore, a licensed practical counselor and director of Care to Connect, a family educational and therapeutic practice in Fairfield. “They don’t mean to hurt their kids.” In fact, most experts agree, it’s just the opposite. “As parents, we want to give them what the other kids have,” says Tim Van Deusen, an adult and child psychiatrist in Fairfield and assistant professor in the Yale University Department of Psychology. “We want to see our kids smile. When they’re happy, we’re happy.” Elaine Levy Cooper, Ph.D., a parent-child specialist and psychoanalyst in Westport, adds, “It’s a very child-centered universe right now and in some ways we want to see our kids empowered and being able to advocate for themselves. But there’s a fine line between that and going over the boundary of the too-empowered child who thinks they have the right to every toy they point to.”
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But for most parents — and actually for the kids too — it isn’t really even about the toy. “Television commercials often show the parent and the child playing with the toy together,” says Laura Markham, Ph.D., a Brooklyn-based author of Peaceful Parents, Happy Kids: How to Stop Yelling and Start Connecting. “Often that’s the message the child gets: ‘If I get this toy, Mom and Dad will play with me.’ What kids really want is us.” We all have cravings for things, Markham says. “And our brains react when we ‘chase’ something and then get or ‘capture’ it. It feels good. And as a result, many of us have gotten into a habit, and have taught our children, that we can get what we want when we want it.” But at what cost? Researchers in the 1980s studied self-described overindulged children and identified what they called “spoiled child syndrome” to describe kids whose parents