The question whether a child is becoming spoiled most often hits the parents of a first baby between birth and three months of age. It’s a period when many babies do a lot of fussing. The inexperienced parents have discovered that walking him around is as effective as anything in comforting him. A nursing will also work (at least for a while, even though a feeding has recently been given) or a pacifier. The parents want to comfort him; but sooner or later they begin to wonder and worry whether he may be getting spoiled, what with the frequent repetition of the fretful spells and their being stopped, at least for the time being, by carrying and walking.
I decided many years ago that since we really don’t know what makes many babies fussy during their first three or four months, it’s better to tell inexperienced parents, who have too many things to worry about anyway, not to worry about spoiling in that period but to do what works. Experienced parents come to that decision by themselves; they just say, “This baby is a fusser and needs more settling time.” Another reason for not worrying about spoiling in the first three or four months is that it is fairly easy to cure. You say to the baby (he doesn’t understand the words but he gets the tone) “I think you are getting spoiled. Your doctor says you probably don’t have much indigestion or tension by this age and that it’s all right to let you fuss for a little while when you’ve recently been fed. You and I know that you are not hungry. I’ll be right in the next room.” You say this not angrily but in an affectionate, reassuring tone. Hug him, lay him down and walk briskly to the living room. Your cheerful, self-confident manner reassures him that there is nothing seriously wrong and that you haven’t stopped loving him.
Of course, if he cries louder and louder you pick him up and apply the old remedy for a couple of more weeks. The older he gets, beyond four or five months, the more likely it is that his fretting now has an element of habit and demandingness—it’s not all discomfort. So you can be firmer in your declaration to him and in your decision to let him fuss for longer. I don’t want to become more arbitrary than this in my advice or suggest that you should ignore your own feelings. But I have seen a few cases in which the baby has clearly gotten the upper hand, when he was of a very determined disposition and his mother was more yielding than average. He had learned to bully her. You could see his dominating nature also in his angry facial expression, until his mother gave in. Then he would promptly sweeten up.
Between eight and fifteen months, some babies who have been good about going to sleep quickly and sleeping soundly start waking in the middle of the night and crying. Some cases begin with a painful ear infection complicating a cold. In other cases we can guess (although there is no proof), it is pain from teething that wakes the child, especially if he is drooling, fretting, and biting objects, by day. First molars erupt at about fifteen months and they are more likely than earlier or later teeth to cause discomfort. The parent naturally hurries to pick the baby up and comfort him at this unusual happening. It may take an hour of walking, playing, singing, and perhaps a feeding to get him comfortable and sleepy again. He has appreciated all this company and fun. The next night—and the next—the waking and the parents’ prompt response may be repeated. Whether or not the discomfort persists, the expectation of a good time may soon become a pleasant habit, at least in a minority of cases in my experience.
My advice is to be skeptical the second and third night of waking and let the baby fuss for a few minutes, to see if he will go back to sleep. If he cries harder and harder, I suggest not picking him up right away but sitting beside his crib in the dark, singing a lullaby, however long it takes to get him back to sleep. One more bit of advice. Keep the room he is in dark, especially if he sleeps in your room. Nothing makes a baby who wants to be picked up madder than to see his parents pretending to be asleep.
If you think this advice up to now is too severe, ignore it. A doctor sees the cases which have gone from bad to worse, not the ones which the parents have solved with indulgence, and this makes the doctor a little more strict.
In the age period after three years, I think of several varieties of spoiled behavior that bother me. One is the child who always puts up a disagreeable argument when asked to do something: “Why do I have to?” “None of my friends has to go to bed this early!,” etc. How this begins and continues shows up when the parent, instead of indicating, however pleasantly, that of course she expects their child to cooperate, goes back to a novel, newspaper, or work from the office, as if she wonders whether perhaps she is expecting too much in asking for this particular form of cooperation.
I think that this parental hesitancy, in asking for cooperation or politeness, is the most common problem among conscientious, loving parents in America nowadays. I certainly don’t remember any such hesitancy in my parents or the parents of my friends in the first part of this century, though I saw it by the time I started pediatric practice.
What has eroded so many parent’s self-assurance in asking for reasonably good behavior? I think of several possible factors. First is the preoccupation with child psychology which has filled the shelves of bookstores and created a dozen magazines in the past thirty years. Its impact has been to make some parents feel that only professionals know how to raise children and that parents are more apt to do wrong than right. It’s the parents who themselves were raised in such a spirit that they doubted their competence, from childhood on. Parents allowed to acquire average self-esteem in childhood simply take it for granted that they’ll know how to do it right, whether they incline toward strictness or leniency, and they can make either philosophy work.
Another factor, I suspect, is the mobility of young couples, who settle down far from the grandparents. So they can’t turn to them easily for advice as they slowly acquire their own self-assurance, but are dependent on magazines and newspaper columnists who, too often, without meaning to, belittle or condescend to their parent readers.
Small families these days mean that many children grow up without the experience of caring for younger brothers and sisters, which is the easiest way to learn child care.
A common cause of spoiling, I think, is the guilt of mothers who have full-time, outside jobs, which, however essential for financial reasons, nevertheless make them feel they are neglecting their children. As a result they not only fail to ask for cooperation and politeness, they lavish gifts and other forms of indulgence on their children—give in to endless demands for reading more stories and treats, and permit rudeness and even abuse.
Such indulgences and inappropriate self-sacrifices on the part of parents do not work right in the long run. The parent, at least unconsciously, begins to resent the slavery to a tyrannical child and takes it out on the child in obvious or subtle ways—lack of enjoyment of the child’s company, for instance. And underneath, the child knows that he is getting away with murder, feels guilty but cannot stop. He may behave worse and worse, as an unconscious way of asking for limits. He may become so selfish and demanding that he is unpopular with other children, too.
A mother or father has to recognize overindulgence and dare to become a parent who leads rather than submits, with or without the help of a counselor.