This is How You Could Raise Spoiled Kids Despite Being Well-Meaning Parents
(Above: "Love em but don't spoil em" Matchmaker Hellen Chen teaches parents what is the fine line between loving and spoiling a child)
Megan C is a mother of 3 daughters and she has always wanted to give her children the very best.
She and her husband have a modest family background and both of them worked hard to provide great education for their 3 daughters.
"I have thought that I am actually loving my children by giving them what they want. Other than schooling, I ask very little of them." said Megan.
Megan found something extremely wrong after a while when her communications with her daughter became rough. She would come home and saw her kids sitting in front of television, and when asking them to stop watching TV, she would get swear words thrown back at her.
And whatever she tried to say to her children, she would get the most disrespectful behavior to the degree that she felt like a lowly servant to her kids.
"They are not horrible children. But I do not know what went wrong." Megan said.
Megan sought my help.
Both Megan and her husband have the simple goal of providing for their children with education and material comfort. But they are missing a huge part of raising children and thus they managed to raise spoiled irresponsible kids instead, and worst of all, their children do not feel their love at all.
In an article that I wrote for a magazine interview, I have talked about one of the biggest mistakes well-meaning parents commit is telling kids "all you need to do is study."
If you want your children to focus only in education and then making money after graduation, you unwittingly teaching them not to care for other aspects of their responsibilities in life.
So a child graduated from a good college. But he or she has no skills to have friends or carry a lasting relationship or start a family. Or be responsible at a job. The truth is, if those skills are not learned from very young, that child will pay the price when they reach adulthood.
It is no coincidence that when you look at someone who has marriage problems, one of the influencing factors is their home environment of the past. A parent who trained the child to only look at academic accomplishments as his or her responsibility is telling the child that life is all about getting a degree. And when the child grows up, you educate the child into thinking that all he or she needs to do is to make money.
So what are the skills and responsibilities a child should learn, in addition to academic skills? Here are some areas to consider:
- Learning and taking on household chores like simple cooking, cleaning etc.
- Learning how to have pleasant conversations with neighbors, parents, relatives, strangers etc
- Learning how to make friends with both sexes. (This is more important than it seems. Not letting your child learn about their role as a male or female is almost as cruel as not teaching them how to read and write.)
- Skills of courtesy and respect for others
In the end, what matters is not whether your child has a good degree but how your child will interact with his or her future spouse, children, colleagues, boss and also with you for the next many years.
