Are You Spoiling Your Children?

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Every holiday season, parents face the impossible dilemma of wanting to make their children’s holidays as magical as possible while also trying to prevent “spoiling” their children. We all love making our children’s holiday wishes come true, but many parents quietly wonder whether we are doing so at the expense of raising entitled and overprivileged kids. But does giving too many material items really “spoil” children or is it more about the way that we parent and model values for them? Research provides a more surprising and reassuring answer to this question than you might expect.

The Research on Spoiling Children

Researchers refer to spoiling a child as overindulgence and have identified three different types of overindulgence:

1. Material overindulgence: giving a child an excessive number of toys, gifts, treats, electronics, clothing, or luxury items (holiday gifts would definitely fall into this category)

2. Relational overindulgence: being overprotective or over-involved, solving problems for children, prioritizing the needs of the child over everything else, or treating the child like a peer or a friend

3. Behavioral overindulgence: having low expectations and demands of children, lack of consequences or discipline, few rules or limits, or shielding children from the results of their behavior

Research has found that the type of overindulgence really matters.

• Research finds that relational or behavioral overindulgence is linked to worse outcomes for children than material overindulgence.

• In fact, research does not consistently find that material overindulgence is linked to negative outcomes for children or their parents.

• One study even found that material overindulgence from mothers was linked to less stress and depression