Want less spoiled kids? Have more of them

Kids are different these days. Kids are spoiled these days.

It sounds like something an old curmudgeon might say, but sometimes the old curmudgeons are right, aren’t they?

Loving children doesn’t require arranging the world around them. In fact, doing so can hamstring the very people we’re trying to help.

There have always been rich people who could spoil their children. But for most of human history, ordinary people simply didn’t have enough money to do much spoiling with things. They lived modestly, and their children did too.

Kids didn’t have bedrooms and closets overflowing with toys. They might have a doll, a wooden train, a ball, a bat, a top, and a few other things. Read old memoirs and accounts of childhood, and you encounter children delighted by