Don’t Spoil Your Son

The following essay first appeared as an article in Alvaro de Vicente’s Substack publication, Men in the Making. For more articles like this one, you can visit his page here. Subscribe to the publication to stay up-to-date on Alvaro’s writing.

No one enjoys a spoiled child—and, even more, no one wants to be around a spoiled grown man. For many of us, however, the culture surrounding our boys makes avoiding this pitfall especially challenging. Twenty-first-century America is one of the most affluent societies in human history. The average person today enjoys more comforts than a medieval king—less gold, certainly, but far greater comfort.

Such advances are cause for gratitude, but they should also make us attentive to how we raise our boys. If cultural currents are our guide, our boys will likely end up spoiled. They will, to paraphrase C. S. Lewis, develop an ever-increasing desire for comforts and luxuries with an ever-decreasing return on investment.

The alternative is to help our boys grasp that he who needs the least has the most. The aim is to prevent them from becoming accustomed to the affluence around them.

As with most matters of parenting, this is easier said than done. Even well-intentioned parents struggle to know when it is better to withhold something that is, materially speaking, good for their son—especially when he is asking for it with the persistence of the widow in Luke’s Gospel.

By a kind of gravitational pull, many parents—especially in affluent areas—find themselves effectively competing with other parents. They don’t want to seem negligent, so they feel pressure to give their children the same experiences and possessions others enjoy. FOMO is not just a teenage problem.

To be sure, the instinct to give your children good things is not bad. Naturally, you want to give your child the best. The real question is whether giving good things all the time is what is best. It may not be good for your son to have the latest version of everything. What other parents think of you, and what other children think of yours, is a poor guide for parenting decisions.

Practically speaking, what can parents do to form children who are not spoiled—whose sense of happiness is not determined by their happenstance desires?

It comes down to expectations. The spoiled child develops the expectation of a life of luxury—or at least of comfort. He begins to see the good life as one in which he always gets his way. His goal becomes obtaining what he wants when he wants it.

As a parent, then, you should not provide every comfort or luxury. Growing up in Spain with pre-Second World War parents, I often heard a saying that sounds strange to modern ears: “When you grow up, you will have fried eggs.” When my parents were young, eggs were a rare commodity. Only the men who worked the fields got to eat them, as they needed the protein to sustain the arduous labor that supported the family. A child didn’t need a fried egg because he wasn’t yet working hard enough to absolutely need one. Though I would not suggest using this exact line today, the principle behind it stands. Children do not need much to live a good childhood, and giving them more than they need spoils them.

Here are four practical battlegrounds in the fight against raising a spoiled son:

1. Schedule
2. Food
3. Clothing
4. Other Pleasures

Schedule

Have your children follow a schedule for the good of others, not merely for their own comfort. They should go to bed at a reasonable time so that they get enough sleep and contribute better to family life. They should get up when they need to for school—or on weekends when they should, in order to be part of the family. They should be at dinner with everyone else and do their homework when it is time. And don’t let the entire family’s schedule revolve around kid activities (like club sports) unless the activity is a direct investment in their future, such as school.

Food

Have them eat whatever is served at home. Discourage boredom snacking—snacks should be intentional, like when dinner is late or they genuinely need something after school. It is good for a boy to be hungry for an hour before dinner. He will learn he can survive a little hunger. (When is a boy not hungry, anyway?)

Clothing

Buy clothes for school and for the activities you want him involved in, such as sports. But you likely don’t need to buy school clothes more than once a year. Get him what he needs, and don’t add more just because of fashion or whims. He doesn’t need to keep up with trends. And if he loses or prematurely damages an article of clothing, consider letting him go without—or, if you replace it, give him what he would have gotten the following year.

Pleasures

It is good for him to have wholesome pleasures, and it is good for him to persevere in them. In The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis describes the “law of undulation”: every person’s engagement with pleasurable activities cycles between enthusiasm and boredom. Often the cycle mirrors the difficulty curve of the activity. Playing guitar may be exciting at first, but eventually improvement requires hard work for little immediate reward. The temptation is to quit. But sticking with it teaches him to do things not only when they are easy and enjoyable but also when they are difficult and less immediately gratifying.

The Point of “No”

There are many other battlegrounds, for sure, but the four above are especially common. Moreover, these are all arenas in which you can wage battle with your son. After all, the best way to avoid raising spoiled children is to avoid behaving like spoiled children ourselves. 

A final idea, which is worth bearing in mind and communicating to our children: the point of saying “no” to our passing whims is not the “no” itself. The point of saying “no” is so that we can say “yes” to greater goods and, ultimately, to others.