Pandering to Children II: When They Grow Up

Patricia Dalton is a family therapist in practice in Washinton, D.C. While her politics are more conservative than mine, I think she's on to something here

The guiding principle -- that the child is to be happy no matter what -- and the corollary -- that more will make them happier -- has been well ingrained over the years.

[big snip]

When a child's achievement and contentment matter so much they make parents constantly intervene, an important boundary between "self" and "other" is blurred, and the child's learning curve is stunted.

[big snip]

And those who have been given too much have a strange and unarticulated debt to their parents. They seem to have two reflexive reactions of "conform" or "rebel," without much of a repertoire in between. They become young adults who resent their parents' involvement in their lives even as they seek it.

Dalton points out that this pandering to adult children crosses ethnic lives, as depicted in the movie Baby Boy.

The whole article was reprinted in the website for Smart Marriages.

CMFCE is an interest group whose members are convinced that family breakdown can be reduced through education and information. America's divorce rate has held steady at an unacceptable 50% for thirty years. That's for first marriages. The divorce rate is even higher for second and subsequent marriages -- which shows we don't learn from our mistakes. We learn through education. [Oct. 15, 2004 addendum--I'm almost positive this group is working to block single-sex marriage. I endorse single-sex marriage. My linking policy is such I try to warn readers when I've linked to a site whose content I don't share.

There's a blog. The politics don't always line up with mine, but as a person who thinks that the current "throw-away" marriage culture is devastating to culture and to marriage, I'm willing to read what they have to say.

And it's not just the Christians: Betsy Hart says, "What's really happening? Grown people don't want to grow up. They're not just putting off moving out of the house — they're putting off adulthood."

By Patricia Dalton

We all know the routine that plays out in most families when they get together over the holidays. Parents and grandparents fondly recall the days when all the kids were still at home, and now-grown children proudly regale their elders with tales of their adventures and accomplishments of the past 12 months. But there is a growing group of parents and adult children with a very different story to tell, one that I'm hearing more and more often these days in my office. Their lives, they explain, are still intertwined. Many children, the parents complain, continue to expect too much from them for too long.

It's almost always the parents who bring these problems to therapists -- like the couple I saw whose 30-year-old son still relies on help with the rent, and another couple whose twenty-something daughter still expects subsidies for her high-fashion clothing. The frequency with which I'm hearing this refrain suggests to me that, as a society, we are failing in what we psychologists refer to as the process of separation and individuation. In other words, we're failing to prepare our kids for leaving home.

There is a terrible irony at work here. While parents today want more than anything else for their children to be happy, the formula by which they raised them is an almost guaranteed prescription for unhappiness. The children have never learned to be self-sufficient, because they have never been expected to be.

To wit: An affluent couple comes to my office worried about their 32-year-old son, who talks big but goes from one job to another while they subsidize him and his girlfriend and take them on overseas vacations. And it's not just in therapists' offices that you hear the complaint. My husband, an oncologist, has similar stories. One man of retirement age, who accompanied his wife for chemotherapy, said of their daughter: "That's it. I'm drawing the line. I'm cutting her off when she turns 40."

That's one way of stopping the problem. The other is for the offspring to decide to stop relying on the parents. As psychiatrist Thomas Szasz said, "The proverb warns, 'You should not bite the hand that feeds you.' But maybe you should, if it prevents you from feeding yourself."

The complaints I am hearing are markers of the ways that family life has changed as our culture has become more and more prosperous and parents have invested more and more (both financially and emotionally) in their children's well-being. Today's parents strike me as extraordinarily earnest. They are sincere -- sometimes downright grim -- in their dedication to doing a good job and to realizing their ambitions for their children. In my first therapy session with any family, I make a point of assessing the degree of earnestness in the parents, since it bears a close relationship to the degree of difficulty in solving problems of this sort.

These uber-parents are identifiable in two principal ways: by what they do for their kids, and by what they give to their kids. Typically, they do everything they can to make sure their children have every advantage.

They decorate their children's rooms in stimulating colors, buy educational toys, forgo playpens and give baby massages. They space their children according to the best advice of child-development experts. They sign their kids up for Marva Tots gymnastics classes and apply to the most progressive preschools and enroll them in soccer at age 4. They sacrifice personal time, friendships and their own interests -- sometimes even their sex lives. They let their kids interrupt them and drop everything to take advantage of every teaching moment. And perhaps most important, they take every opportunity to build up their children's self-esteem by complimenting them on how smart, athletic, artistic, talented and good-looking they are.

They spend on their children as if they're made of money. They schedule elaborate themed birthday parties every year as if their children were princes and princesses. It's a short step from investing in Brio train sets and American Girl dolls to giving grown kids SUVs and excessive clothing allowances. ("The Sopranos" had a scene in which Meadow, the teenage daughter, helpfully suggested to her parents that they punish her by taking away her Discover card for two weeks.)

All too often, even when things start going awry, the kids keep taking the handouts, and the parents resist saying no. The most affluent are often the most appalled (and perhaps guilty) at the idea of depriving their son or daughter of those things the whole family has come to expect. But the true deprivation for their children lies in not being expected to leave the nest -- literally, as well as figuratively -- and not being permitted to experience the heady feeling of flying on their own.

The parents of today's young adults (and count me among them) were usually raised quite differently. Back then, kids hung out with kids, and parents with other parents. Mothers said things like "If you want sympathy, look it up in the dictionary" and "Don't bother me unless you're bleeding" (my friend Martha's favorite). Sports were after-school rather than weekend activities, and parents didn't always come to the games. Parents usually left their children's schooling up to the teachers. As a guy who grew up in the '60s put it, "The only reason my parents came to my school was to vote."

Perhaps the biggest difference is that our parents didn't worry so much whether we were happy; they worried whether they were happy. This can strike the uber-parents of today the height of selfishness. But the funny thing is that we kids actually kind of liked it (especially when we were teenagers).

When today's parents were children, families were usually bigger, houses were smaller and money had to stretch further. Many kids worked part-time during high school and college to help pay their own expenses. They only acquired cars when they could pay for them. And both parents and children assumed: that once a young person graduated from high school or college and got a job, he or she would become financially self-sufficient. That assumption became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

As California psychologist Wendy Mogel points out in her wonderful book "The Blessing of a Skinned Knee," today's parents seem to care a great deal about their children feeling good, and often forget to teach them about being good. And I don't mean this only in the sense of behaving well and having good manners, but in being decent human beings who think about others, not just themselves. One striking characteristic of children who have been given too much is a blunted sense of empathy for other people, although they have finely tuned concern for themselves. Indulged children make bad roommates and even worse spouses.

What kind of adults are the result of this phenomenon? The kids do grow up, and the parents breathe a sigh of relief. But the relief is short-lived. Their job as parents -- or at least as financiers and advisers -- is not over. There are more requests or, in some cases, demands. And they can't say no -- or they say it but don't stick to it. Another common variant is that one parent says no, while the other says okay, over or under the table. The guiding principle -- that the child is to be happy no matter what -- and the corollary -- that more will make them happier -- has been well ingrained over the years. What results is an entitled and petulant set of adult children and an increasingly resentful group of parents. They're tired, as in sick and tired. And they have no idea what to do about it.

The phenomenon I'm describing is by no means limited to affluent families. There are American kids at every income level who see their parents as Daddy Warbucks and Lady Bountiful. Many parents clip coupons and buy on sale for themselves, yet donate much of what's left over to their sons and daughters.

The recent movie "Baby Boy" depicts the phenomenon of black mothers who subsidize their sons' feckless lifestyles. I have a patient just like the mother in that movie, who has worked hard all her life as a single parent of two boys, with little support, financial or otherwise. One son was serious and hard-working, while the other was a witty, manipulative party guy who had her bailing him out of messes -- including getting jailed and wrecking her car. He was driving her into debt to the point where she would scream obscenities at him, to no avail. When we talked seriously about facing the fact that in all likelihood she would do this for the rest of her life, she got mad, stopped the money flow to her son, and stuck to it. Ten years later, she owns her own home in Northeast Washington and has no debt whatsoever. Her formerly errant son now has his own place, pays support for his kids, has been employed for years and has been promoted to management, supervising 100 employees.

Too often, a parent's largess deprives the child of a sense of agency, which the dictionary defines as "the state of being in action or of exerting power." It is no accident that one of the first complete sentences a young child utters is some version of "I'll do it myself." Erik Erikson, the late psychologist who described the stages of development over the lifespan, characterized that of late childhood as industry versus inferiority. Children learn both who they are and who they aren't by trying, and then either succeeding or failing. They also develop resilience -- the invaluable ability to bounce back from the inevitable slings and arrows of life. A lot of a person's vitality in adulthoood comes from a childhood spent learning what he or she wants and going after it and seeing parents who do the same in their lives. In a TV program I watched, a girl interviewing at a prestigious college said plaintively about her parents, "I just wish they'd get a life that's not mine."

When a child's achievement and contentment matter so much they make parents constantly intervene, an important boundary between "self" and "other" is blurred, and the child's learning curve is stunted. This is not to suggest that parental help for children is always inappropriate. But even in cases of physical or mental illness, or handicap, there is a fine line between appropriate help and the kind that is infantilizing. Family therapist Jay Haley wrote his text "Leaving Home" because he grasped the fact that many chronic problems in adult life take hold when this passage is not navigated well by parents and their adult children. His sophisticated approach recognizes the difficult judgment calls that parents make in these situations, and their capacity to help or hinder their offspring's independence in later life.

Sometimes children have been so overdirected that they go on to have a terrible time making decisions, from "What should I wear?" to "Should I take this job?" or "Should I marry this girl?" And those who have been given too much have a strange and unarticulated debt to their parents. They seem to have two reflexive reactions of "conform" or "rebel," without much of a repertoire in between. They become young adults who resent their parents' involvement in their lives even as they seek it.

Children who have been raised with too much concern for their own happiness love themselves all right, but the biblical "Do unto others" is like a foreign language to them. They are takers, not doers or givers. They are not the ones who will inherit the Earth. And they, as well as their parents, often spend their lives wondering why.

Patricia Dalton is a clinical psychologist who practices in Washington, D.C., and the mother of three children ages 18 to 24.

Comments

[Kimberly]

That was a great article. Thank you for posting it.

[Ennis]

More on this later. For now, a comment. I think this isn't parents being selfless, they're actually trying to live through their kids. Just like this:

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2004/08/dad_is_a_stinke.html

Children rate their fathers as among their least popular playmates because they are too competitive, according to research among more than 1,000 youngsters.

They "played to win", lacked imagination or were simply at a loss as to how to play games, said the Children's Play Council, which commissioned the survey with the Children's Society

Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at the University of Kent at Canterbury, said: "Fathers are living through their children much more which means they lose sight of the line that distinguishes adult from child.
"It's also partly a power control issue. Fathers want to let their children know they are still 'players'."

[ME-L]

Sounds very much like the philosophy of John Rosemond, whom my mother keeps trying to push on me. Makes sense, though.

[kathy]

Thank you for this wonderful site. The article has provided some much-needed insight for me, as a widowed, but definitely ueber-mom, who raised a now- 29-year-old errant son completely on my own.
I now realize my many mistakes and, more importantly, the need to finally cut off the stream of support, stop the arguments, try to finally find what I want -- and to go after it!
Thank you so much.

[badgerbag]

But some of this (and I'm guilty of all of it, from the kid side of things) is I think from my parents' generation being wealthier in general. My dad pointed out in his memoirs that his own father, in the post wwii world, and peers expected with no fuss or fanfare that one parent's job - blue collar - would support a family, buy a house, have a vacation house as well and money for trips. This was true then. It became less and less true. So a lot of people were raised with that standard of living. I can't live up to the standard of living I was raised with. My parents wish I could, so they give me money to do that.

That's my explanation. Call me a brat if you like.

I admire my parents for helping me out of major life difficulties and having planned for the financial resources to do that. Other people whose parents couldn't or wouldn't do that are often resentful. can't help my bourgeoisness.

[MS]

Too many parents err on the side of caution and end up with 20-year-old children instead of young adults, and they aren't doing these children any favors.

I grew up in comfort. Then I left home and for the first two years I lived in a place with no hot water, shared showers/toilets, in a neighborhood populated by drug addicts. I still saved enough to travel, met many people who are still important in my life, and except for the flying cockroaches I was actually quite happy with the place (although my parents almost died the first time they visited me, and still turn white when I mention that apartment).

Most important, I was living on my own, and this established a realistic base to build on: I think my standard of living surpassed that of my parents about 10 years later. I'm sure it wouldn't have done so if I'd accepted handouts from them.

I also think the argument about previous generations being richer is bogus. Watch "The Honeymooners" for a look at what passed for a middle-class life post-WW2.