Lost phrases - spoiled kids

"Don't give your kids that for free, you'd be spoiling them"

I remember when I was much younger hearing this phrase somewhat often. These days I can't remember the last time I heard this phrase, it would have been many years ago.

Now there's a lot of pressure being applied to parents to spend inordinate amounts of money on their children for things that simply aren't needed. This is of course supported by an enormous industry of marketing and advertising that has the explicit goal of having parents buy things that their kids really don't need. In the worst cases it goes as far as putting pressure on adults to get things that are actively harmful for their kids.

Not that long ago I was in the line at a supermarket and there was this obese family and almost all of what they were buying was junk food. Hundreds of cans of coke and a whole pile of chocolates and only a small amount of anything healthy. They filled the large part of the shopping cart with complete trash food and had the small bit at the top partially filled with things that were healthy. This was of course completely backwards. Once upon a time people might have said that they were "spoiling those kids" or perhaps even said they were harming them. These days this isn't a phrase you'd hear so often in a context like this. Some people might call this sort of thing "child abuse", but that's hardly a consensus opinion in 2025. Unfortunately this sort of behavior has become quite normalized, the parents being obese makes me wonder if their shopping and nutrition choices were just something they took for granted.

I was at a funeral lately and as happens at these events people reminisce about memories and things from the past. I noticed in a conversation between two guys in their 80s they were talking about childhood and what it was like living back then. One guy was saying that he had more than other kids at the time but far less than kids have now commenting that "I wasn't a spoiled child but I also wasn't the kid of a true Aussie battler". The phrase "Aussie battler" isn't one I hear so much anymore, its indicative of the fact that Australians have become exceedingly affluent as a group and have far more a tendency to spoil their kids than in times gone by. The material means are there to invest more into the kids and as mentioned before there's a whole industry hell bent on extracting as much money for themselves in that process, the kids be damned. This sort of sociopathic behavior is doing an incredible amount of damage, the kids of a nation are the nations future. To tolerate the manipulations of the family unit that destroy their health so that they wealth can be taken is to tolerate the extinction of ones national future.

Part of what got me thinking about this article is talking to an ex-colleague of mine from Canada who's been working in a family business for a while. Lately he's been having to deal with the grandkids of the company founders starting to do more work in the company. Previously they were absentee more often doing things like going on things like snow trips in Vancouver on company money. The issue of course is that these grandkids are working there only because they are family and not because its the best job for them to be doing. In any case they certainly are not the best people for the job either because they lack the skills and lack the loyalty that a family member can bring to a family business. I remember when these kids were younger and their parents were doing things like giving them sports cars at the age of 18. If you ever want to ruin a boy, give him a sports car he hasn't earned at the age of 18. Such an act is exceedingly damaging, for boys to become healthy men they need to learn how to earn things. Depriving someone of this experience is to do great harm to them, even if it looks like a nice gift in the short term. As with many things sometimes the kindest thing you can do for someone long term is not the same thing as the nicest thing you can do for them short term.