By Jean Illsley Clarke Ph.D.

Kids’ wants and wishes seem to be never ending. Lucia wants shoes and a better bike and a TV in her room and a new cell phone. Dario insists that a motorcycle will meet all of his needs, especially if he has white leathers and a really cool helmet and money for the bike club dues. Tony is accustomed to holding the line on most of the requests. “Lucia, you get shoes when you need them. We’ll look at your bike, and you show me why you need a new one. No TV in your room. That’s non-negotiable. You called me today. Your cell phone seems to be working just fine. Dario, we’ll talk about it after you get your automobile driver’s license and I see how responsibly you drive. You’ll have to think about how you’ll pay for the insurance, and who’s paying for the motorcycle?”

Tony wondered, as he often did, where all these requests kept coming from. Marketing, he supposed. And peer pressure. He tried to remember how much stuff he had when he was 14 and 16. He supposed Lucia would feel deprived, but she has so much. Dario does too. Is it really good for kids to have all this stuff?

Tony decided to find out if his children understood about overindulgence. So he asked them. He did it in a way that so often works with adolescents. He didn’t ask them about themselves, but rather their friends. “Lucia, Dario, I need your observations about the kids in your school. Do you think any of them are overindulged?”

“What’s that?”

“Some people call is spoiling. It’s about kids who have too much.”

“Too much what?”

“Oh, I suppose anything.”

“Like too many clothes?”

“Could be.”

“How about so many games they don’t know what they have?”

“Sounds like it. What do you think?”

“Oh yeah, we know kids that like that. Grace gets anything she wants — clothes, electronics, tickets, vacations, a BMW on her 16th birthday. She’s already smashed the front end.”

Lucia and Dario compared notes, naming kids they know and identifying what they had too much of. Soon they were ranking classmates from “way-spoiled,” to “spoiled,” to “probably too much stuff.”

Tony was intrigued. When the listing slowed down, Tony asked, “What are these kids like?” Dario hooted, and Lucia rolled her eyes.

“They are too good for the rest of us.”

“They’re snotty.”

“They don’t care if they ruin our stuff.”

“They don’t care about other people.”

Tony listened, fascinated by the casual but confident way his children described their classmates. “How do you feel about the kids who are like that?”

“I don’t like them very much,” Lucia confessed.

Dario thought a bit and agreed.

So, Tony had the information he wanted. His children could identify overindulgence and didn’t like it very much. “They’re really good kids,” he thought. “The constant asking must be a teen habit. I’ll continue to hold the line, and, if I need to, I’ll ask, ‘What would you think of someone else who got everything they asked for?’”

(Jean Illsley Clarke, Ph.D., Connie Dawson, Ph.D., and David J. Bredehoft, Ph.D. are co-authors of How Much is Enough? Everything You Need to Know to Steer Clear of Overindulgence and Raise Likeable, Responsible, and Respectful Children. Jean can be reached at jiconsults@aol.com. To read more about overindulgence, go to www.overindulgence.info.)