Interview hits close to home

A producer for "The Jane Pauley Show" called me recently, asking if I'd be interested in appearing on a segment they were doing on spoiled children and how not to raise one. I said I would consider it, and she began the pre-interview, which is for the purpose of making sure that the potential guest has a viewpoint that will fit the show's purpose.
"How does one spoil a child?" she asked. By saying "yes" to most of the child's requests for things, I replied, the end result of which is that the child becomes increasingly demanding, petulant, ungrateful and intolerant. The aforementioned qualities reflect self-centeredness, which is the antithesis of positive character development.
Catering to child createslifetime of bad manners
"Can a child be spoiled in other ways?" she asked. Well, I said, you can add catering, enabling and rescuing, but no one of those attributes ever stands alone. The parent who caters always is a parent who enables and rescues.
Furthermore, the parent who enables and rescues is a parent who feeds his or her child a constant diet of "yes." Oh, and by the way, I said, children who are catered to and enabled and so on always develop bad manners, which is how you can spot them.
She then asked the question that headed the interview south: "Can you give me an example?"
I gave the example of a parent who permits a child to complain about the food he is served at the dinner table and then, taking it one step further, "customizes" the evening meal for the child.
"I don't understand that at all, John," she replied, with an edge in her voice. "Why shouldn't a child be allowed to express dislike of food at the dinner table?"
"Because it's rude," I said. "You are training your child, during the evening meal, to display good manners when he is a guest in someone else's home, and it's downright rude to tell someone who has prepared food for you that you don't like it."
"So what should a child do if she doesn't like something that's served to her?" said producer queried, but I could tell she took issue with my example. I said that parents should teach their children to eat all sorts of food, and that there's a way of doing just that, a tried-and-true way of making sure that your child does not develop into a picky eater.
How? By putting a ridiculously small amount of each item being served on the child's plate -- i.e., one teaspoon of mashed potatoes, one bite of roast beef, and one-half of a dreaded green bean -- and informing the child he can have seconds of anything he wants when he has eaten everything on his plate.
The dreaded green beanand the bedtime snack
"What if the child eats the mashed potatoes and the roast beef and leaves the green bean?" she asked, to which I replied that the parents should cover the bean and set it aside. If the child complained of being hungry later in the evening, he would be told that when he ate the dreaded bean, he could have pretty much anything he wanted.
"So the child might go to bed hungry?" she asked, testy now, and I said yes, but that would obviously be the child's choice. Furthermore, I'd never heard of a child making that choice for long. In short order, the child discovers that green beans are not nearly as noxious as he imagined them to be, and that is how one rears a child who is not only not a picky eater but who also has good table manners.
"Well," she said, "I just don't agree with that at all!"
"I'm sorry," I said. "Am I talking about you and your child?"
There was a pause. Finally, she said, "Well, if my children don't like something, I respect that and I fix them something else."
But catering is not respect! Respect is helping a child understand that the world does not revolve around him. Respect is helping the child develop good social manners. Respect is discipline. I said none of that, of course, because I work at being well-mannered.
Anyway, don't expect to see me on "The Jane Pauley Show" any time soon.
XJohn Rosemond is a family psychologist. Questions of general interest may be sent to him at Affirmative Parenting, 1020 East 86th Street, Suite 26B, Indianapolis, IN 46240 and at his Web site: http://www.rosemond.com/.