by Michelle Meier RN BSN

Created on: April 23, 2008

Worship is a word we often associate with religion, celebrities, and for me, anything covered in chocolate. Parents fall in love with their babies, but to worship them? That seems a bit extreme. It should be the other way around. Interacting with children and parents on a daily basis, often in a stressful context such as illness or injury, I have seen first hand the difficulties indulged children have coping with things that are beyond their control. Parents who indulge their child's every wish or give into tantrums promote in their children a false sense of control. These children can be excessively demanding, uncooperative, anxious, fearful, and angry when things don't go their way.

I've seen an emerging trend in parenting (or lack of parenting) style. Many parents who raised children in the 70's and 80's chose to use a permissive parenting style which allowed children the freedom to make choices about things that previously were a parent's domain. Bedtimes, food choices, curfews, church attendance and more, were all left up to the kids to decide. Giving kids a choice is great, but with choice comes responsibility and accountability and that is where this generation fell a bit short. Children didn't often make the right choices, and as a result, parents needed to intervene. Unfortunately, intervention often meant bailing the child out of whatever jam they were in, negating the consequences of their choices. What would evolve is a new generation of parents who are used to having freedom with minimal accountability. Their parents allowed them to make poor choices and then bailed them out. There was no other parenting structure for them to model, and so now they are floundering. Here is an example:

A mother brought her four year old son in to the hospital be checked out. He had a seizure disorder and had been having more frequent seizures, he also complained that his mouth hurt so she thought maybe he had a sore throat. During the exam I discovered that he had multiple dental cavities, and when the labs came back, his blood level of seizure medication was very low which explained the more frequent seizures. When I asked about his medication and oral hygiene routine, the mom told me her son wouldn't let her give him his medicine, and that he refused to brush his teeth. This mother felt uncomfortable forcing her child to take his medicine or brush his teeth because he would become upset.

Adults that were indulged as children assume that they are exempt from the

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