Why Over Coddling Can Hurt Your Child’s Development

Why Over Coddling Can Hurt Your Child’s Development

As a parent, we want our kids to be always at our side. One of our biggest fears is when they go to college. As college students, they will leave our house and live on their own.

We always want to protect our kids as much as possible. That’s why we use a parenting style that our kids foresee as unfair. These include intruding on our child’s privacy or integrating the strictest home rules. In other words, we are over coddling our kids.

We cannot blame the overprotective parents. They always want to ensure that their kids are safe at all costs. But the parenting style used by overprotective parents could harm their child’s development. That’s why we must recognize, comprehend, and regulate our overprotectiveness as a parent. If for example every time, your child gets a small bruise you whisk them off to your doctors office then you might be currently having issues with over coddling your child.

The following are the reasons why over coddling our children could affect their development.

They May Show Risky Behaviors

If our parenting style includes enforcing strict home rules, there’s a high chance that our kids will grow as risk-taker. Overwhelming our kids won’t do any good for them.

When our kids feel like they are our prisoners, they will participate in risky behaviors if they see any chance. This is because we did not give them the independence and freedom, they need during their childhood days.

They are more likely to try every opportunity they have to try their limits and control everything. These activities may involve trying out alcohol and even drugs. Experimenting may seem harmless but if left unchecked might, spiral quickly into addiction. This could lead to potentially expensive solutions such as addiction recovery which could be a possibly traumatic event, depending on the severity of the addiction.

To protect our kids from developing risky behaviors, we must provide them enough room to breathe. Aside from giving them freedom, we are also letting them become a more responsible individual.

They May Develop Anxiety

Kids with parents who over coddle them are more likely to develop anxiety and other types of mental illnesses, which could rear their heads at any point during your child’s life and have them searching things like “is CBD oil legal?” in their search for something that could give them some relief from the negative thoughts. We know that loosening the grip on our children is quite hard. We don’t allow them to create decisions by themselves. But doing these things are important to the overall development of our children.

If we will always be the ones to solve the problems they make, we are not helping them to develop. They fear trying something new and solve even the simplest problem without our help.

We need to loosen their leash for the sake of our child’s mental health and development.

It May Affect Their Confidence

Our children can develop their confidence by dealing with challenges and solving them by themselves. This is impossible if a child has an overprotective parent.

Take this as an example: Paul’s piano instructor moved him out of the music lesson after five minutes of playing the piano. Before he approaches his coach to ask about what happened, his father angrily moves forward and starts criticizing his instructor. His father did not even allow him to manage the situation. Understanding and handling situations like this are important for the overall development and self-confidence of our kids.

They Will Feel Entitled

Helicopter parents are the type of parents who make their children feel entitled. If you are one of them, you are afraid to deny every request of your kids. You are doing almost everything to keep them away from disappointment.

Helicopter parents think that what they are doing could improve the development of their children. But in most cases, this could make their child feel entitled, especially during their teenage years.

When this happens, our kids would expect that everything they need will be handed to them by someone else. To prevent this from happening, we should let our kids feel disappointed at some time. When that happens, we must teach them that they cannot get everything they want in just one click. But rather, they should work hard for it.

As a parent, we should let our children experience difficulties in life while they are young. Over coddling won’t do any benefit to the development of our kids. Parents play an integral part in the overall development of our kids. You might want to prevent this sort of situation. Possibly giving them more room to make their own independent decisions might be helpful in developing some independence. For example, if they were getting their bedroom redecorated maybe asking them to make their own decisions on things such as the cool wallpapers they might want, or what color of bedsheet they may need, could possibly help. Also encouraging them to complete tasks by themselves might be beneficial.

Over coddling could negatively impact your child’s development, mental health, and self-confidence. Remember, there’s nothing wrong to give our child a sense of independence and freedom. We just need to ensure that all the things we do are meant for their betterment.

Share

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.