SPOILED CHILDREN

Spoiled Children

Spoiled Children

Introduction

Family is both affection and obligatory system. Love and obligation characterize all enduring human relationships. Parents not only love their children, they are obligated to provide care and support for them to maturity. However, obligations of adult children to their elderly parents require them to provide care and nurturance, reciprocating for their earlier receipt of such benefits.

Discussion

According to the American Heritage College Dictionary (2004), to spoil means to impair the value or quality, too damage irreparably; ruin, to impair the completeness, perfection, or unity of; flaw grievously and to harm the character, nature, or attitude of by over solicitude, overindulgence, or excessive praise.

The third meaning is probably the one most commonly associated with spoiling as it relates to children. But what is the meaning behind this definition, and what precisely do people mean when they say: "You are spoiling the baby"? Empirically there is very little data on spoiling; however, there is an abundance of information from the popular literature on this topic.

The end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century marked the launch of the child development field. Believing that a child's behavior is learned solely from the child's environment and surroundings, researchers coined the term behaviorism as the foundation for their beliefs regarding development. The history of spoiling as a concept reflects the two paradigms of child development-behaviorism and the maturational/emotional approach-which were vying for control in the popular literature.

A spoiled child is created by parents who are asked by a physician to be strict with their child by enforcing rigid regimes for eating, sleeping, and even for controlling the bowels of infants younger than two months. By being so firm with the children, the parents do the exact opposite of what is needed to be done to create ...