Have you ever wondered why most children with behavior problems seem to have some sort of connection with either being smothered by their parents or not being loved enough? It’s not a coincidence. Children all over have to cope with not being loved and cared for enough, or they have to cope with their parents being excessively cautious and overbearing. “You can coddle your child and tell them, ‘You’re the best no matter what. ‘ But in the end, when they go out into the real world, I think it’s pretty tough out there and other children are cruel.
Amy Chua(2014) an American lawyer, writer, and legal scholar decided to share her stance on the topic of child coddling. The reason Chua has gone about saying this is because coddling children leads children down the path of dependency, expectation and making a negative impact on the development of generations being sculpted in successful adults. A parent’s job is to love them unconditionally, guide their children along their journey to make sure they don’t make any terrible mistakes and to support them every step of the way but if you coddle a child, you’re pretty much living their life for them.
This topic has always been on the verge of imminence. Of course parents should help their children and be there to guide them to their successful future, they should not be coddling and treated like an infant their entire life. The love from a parent and an obsession, or a need to be in control of their life are completely different. A balance needs to be met between achieving a healthy relationship on parents and an excessive, controlling relationship. If a balance is met between those two, children will become more independent, more caring because they will understand what people go through, and they will ultimately be better people.
Although coddling children protects them from outside forces, excessive child coddling has negative effects on the development of children, so we should try to reduce the amount of coddling because it would have a better outcome on future generations. Although we can not eliminate the problem completely, we should teach children to be more successful on their own. Child coddling creates negative effects on children’s mental health. Such as depression, substance abuse, Anxiety and 2 out of the 3 effects I just named can lead to Suicidal thoughts.
We found evidence that when parents try to help their anxious children they do a lot of things. ,” said study co-author Armando Pina, an associate professor of child developmental psychology at Arizona State University. ” Some children are good, like promoting courage with warmth and kindness. Others are less helpful when it comes to presenting positive behavior and tend to do the opposite due to the annoyance caused by overprotecting they have suffered from because of their parents, which many times leads to more anxiety. ” Anxiety is only of the outcomes of coddling children.
Anxiety is an extremely crippling problem when it comes to everyday life. And if this diagnosis is left untreated it can lead to even more harmful risks. “Left untreated, Anxiety disorders in youth are associated with greater risk for other psychological problems such as depression and substance abuse problems,” said Donna Pincus, director of research at the Child and Adolescent Fear and Anxiety Treatment Program at Boston University. That being said, Anxiety could possibly lead to depression and substance abuse which makes the effects of Coddling even worse.
Parents especially new parents never think there is an issue with being too over protective, but as an outcome it could become extremely drastic and lead to even worse extremes. Even special needs students feel that child coddling is a very important topic that needs to be dealt with. Abbott, a special needs child, feel strongly that the coddled child does not grow to be emotionally healthy. He grows up fearful and lacking in a sense of what he can or cannot accomplish. Ironically, he also can become self-absorbed which will stand in the way of his ability to have empathy. Empathy is a learned behavior: it does not come naturally.
In order to be an emotionally healthy adult, you must develop this critical virtue reported Judy Loseff Lavin, Author of Special Kids Need Special Parents and former Psychologist. Along with the children understanding that it’s an issue, so do the parenting experts such as Linda Suleski, a Hartford Parenting Issues Examiner and a with extreme background knowledge on children from personal experience of being a mother, and step mother stated that from first hand knowledge, she has witnessed that when a child is treated with an excessive amounts of coddling, it produces a sense of fear about the world which leads to insecurity.
And that makes a child shut down because they don’t feel like they can do anything. Children should be taught with respect and love, but they also need to make mistakes so they can learn from them and know how to cope with similar situations. Some people think that coddling children is necessary for their well being, to keep them aware from every harmful situation they could be successful in, such as Bethel Moges and Kristi Weber, Psychological Researchers at Vanderbilt University have found research to come to their conclusion that parents who are physically there are not enough.
A study investigating the connection between parent’s investment and children’s competence suggests that the emotional involvement of parents really does matter and affects the outcome of their child’s emotional competence and regulation. ” So the way this should be interpreted is that parents need to spend excessive amounts of time with their children to help their emotional involvement. The reason children have so many emotional issues is because they have some form of issues in their home life, social life, or personal life that they need to find a way to cope with their emotions.
If parents provide too much support by not allowing their children to fall, or to avoid challenging situations all together, they are implicitly sending a message that their child is unable to handle difficult problems. This kind of mentality creates a very hostile and needy personality which makes them very difficult to get along with and very easy to have problems with due to the mindset of being better than everyone else for not having to work for the things they are being given.
These kind of thoughts can also be extremely self destructive if not receiving things and having things go their way. Coddling makes children unsuccessful because it makes them lack the confidence and the experience of solving problems on their own. “Children of risk-averse parents have lower test scores and are slightly less likely to attend college than offspring of parents with more tolerant attitudes toward risk,” says a team led by Sarah Brown of the University of Sheffield in the UK(2013).
Kids need to fall a few times to learn it is normal; teens likely need to break up with a boyfriend or girlfriend to appreciate the emotional maturity that lasting relationships require. Even in the field of relationships, it’s extremely important for a person to make mistakes to learn from them because if you don’t try at all, how are you going to know how it works the right and the wrong ways? Mark Hemingway, writing at The Federalist, asks: “You know what it’s called when kids make mistakes without adult supervision and have to wrestle with the resulting consequences?
Growing up. ” Children are cosseted by intensive parenting that encourages passivity and dependency, and stunts their abilities to improvise, adapt and weigh risks. When children learn to live without dependency, they are going to be more successful because they can do things on their own and live freely without having to have someone there watching over them making sure everything is the way it should be.
Two-thirds of parents say their children are spoiled, according to a CNN survey(2011). And it’s worse than even a decade ago, 80 percent of those surveyed agreed. Now this isn’t generalizing children then, but it is also generalizing children now as well. While parents uniformly agree that self-control and self-discipline are important for children to learn, only a third said they’ve successfully imparted these qualities, according to a 2012 survey by Public Agenda.
