How To Not Raise Spoiled Brats

The science of fostering gratitude.

As I mentioned in last Friday’s post, I often get panicked emails from parents who are worried, based on their kids’ behavior, that they are raising entitled jerks. As I explained in the newsletter, kids sometimes act spoiled not because they actually are spoiled, but because of other things they’re struggling with that we, as parents, can help to address.

Still, I’m guessing that you’d like to know what you can do to reduce the chance that your kid will grow up to be an entitled jerk. Maybe this is something that keeps you up at night. Maybe because your kid threw a plate at your head two days ago after he informed you that you cut his sandwich in an unsatisfactory way.

I’ve got good news: Research suggests that there are concrete steps you can take to raise (at least somewhat) unspoiled kids, and that the magic ingredient may be gratitude. Research has linked feelings of gratitude with less entitlement and materialism, and it makes perfect sense: If you are aware of and feel thankful for what you have, you are less likely to expect and demand even more. (Bonus: grateful kids are happier and more satisfied with their lives than those who are ungrateful.)

Recent studies have shed light on what parents can do to shape gratitude in kids. When Andrea Hussong, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel-Hill, and her colleagues asked parents to keep daily diaries as part of a 2019 study, they found that when parents interacted with their kids in certain ways, their kids showed more gratitude. Hussong’s graduate student Rachel Petrie, whom I spoke to earlier this week, recently led a study as part of her dissertation that found that these same strategies led to increases in gratitude in kids that lasted as long as three years.

Thankfully, the strategies are fairly simple.