The desire to make children enjoy this stage of life to the full can lead to child overprotection with astounding ease .

What at first may seem simple help and emotional support, is sometimes magnified and floods almost all areas of the lives of children, making them unable to develop the personal skills necessary to achieve autonomy little by little.

If overprotection is so damaging, it is partly because it is not always easy to distinguish it from the natural kindness that adults show to younger people. That is why it is very important to recognize the signs that a child is being deprived of the possibility of developing psychologically as it should through basic learning.

Educational failures and child overprotection

Below you can see many of the frequent mistakes that are behind the appearance of spoiled and overprotected children .

Assume that education is a matter for the school

Some parents assume that the only challenges facing the youngest in the house are those of the school. That is, the only place where they should make an effort to do things is within the walls of the school, and that outside the school the parents or guardians should offer all possible facilities as “compensation” .

But it doesn’t work like that; the main intellectual and emotional skills are learned outside of school, and that means that you have to make an effort to progress after school.

2. Avoiding conflict at all costs

Some parents and teachers prefer to avoid problems by giving up the possibility of negotiating with children when a conflict of interest arises. The idea behind this strategy is that the child himself or herself will spontaneously realize that he or she has acted capriciously .

The results of this, of course, are not as positive as one might expect from this logic. In fact, such a naive strategy translates into something very simple: the little ones always get their way… at least in the short term, because always doing what you want is the shortest path to overprotection and lack of autonomy.

3. The belief that frustration is bad

The sight of a child who feels discomfort or a certain degree of frustration can become almost unbearable for some adults, who will quickly come forward to offer their help and protection.

However, it is advisable to lose the fear of the possibility that someone who is going through childhood may experience frustration , if it appears on time.

Frustration is something that children must be able to foresee and learn to manage, otherwise, when no one can help them, everything will become a ball and they will have to try to learn at a fast pace what to do, without having any previous experience in the matter.

4. Blindly trusting in vicarious learning

Some parents and educators believe that simply by solving a problem in front of a child’s eyes he or she learns the lesson and can repeat that strategy in the future.

It is true that learning through what we see others doing, or vicarious learning (a concept developed by psychologist Albert Bandura), is one of the mechanisms by which we adapt to the challenges that life presents to us, both in childhood and during the other stages of life. However, in itself it is not enough, and it cannot be the only way of learning.

In order to master a competition well, one must participate in the problems in which it must be applied. Anyone who has tried to teach someone about computers will know this: taking control of the mouse and showing him the sequence of clicks needed to perform an operation means that the poor trainee will immediately forget about it if he is not familiar with the program.

5. The basic error of priorities

Another frequent error that produces little overprotected children is to assume that the objective of education is to make the child like you, that a strong emotional bond is established.

This emotional bond is very important, but it is not in itself the goal of teaching. For this reason, it is harmful to reward lack of initiative and inaction , and it is necessary to pose reasonable and assimilable challenges that the children can carry out. This will not only make them learn, but it will also make them feel good to notice a sense of conquest every time something goes well for them and, of course, it will be beneficial for their self-esteem.

6. The mime competition

In order to educate, it is necessary to self-examine and reflect on the reasons that lead us to treat the little ones as we do.

And, included in this task of analysing one’s own motivations, it is essential that we stop to think about whether we are spoiling a child too much simply because of the social image that comes from educating someone who is always with all his or her needs covered (who is not necessarily happy).

Especially in the case of parents, this competition for affection that leads to comparing the treatment offered to one’s own children with that which friends and neighbors seek for theirs can be a very great temptation that must be avoided; in the end, each person has an unreliable and unrealistic image of how he or she is brought up in someone else’s home.