Is Your Child Getting Enough Vitamin N?

If you're a parent, or plan to be one, it might be more important to your child's growth than all other vitamins combined. And only you, a parent, can provide it. 

I call it Vitamin N. The word "No."

More and more children, I find, are suffering from Vitamin N deficiency. And they, their parents, and our entire culture are paying the price.

Let me illustrate my point with a story that's quite typical. A father, I'll call him Bill, gave his son, age five, pretty much everything the little boy asked for.  Like most parents, Bill wanted more than anything for his son to be happy.  But he wasn't.  Instead he was petulant, moody, and often sullen.  He was also having problems getting along with other children.  In addition, he was very demanding and rarely if ever expressed any appreciation, let alone gratitude, for all the things Bill and his wife were giving him.  Was his son depressed, Bill wanted to know?  Did he need therapy?  His son, I told him, was suffering the predictable ill effects of being over-indulged.  What he needed was a healthy and steady dose of Vitamin N. 

Over-indulgence–a deficiency of Vitamin N—leads to its own form of addiction.  When the point of diminishing returns is passed (and it's passed fairly early on), the receiving of things begins to generate nothing but want for more things.  One terrible effect of this is that our children are becoming accustomed to a material standard that's out of kilter with what they can ever hope to achieve as adults.  Consider also that many, if not most, children attain this level of affluence not by working, sacrificing, or doing their best, but by whining, demanding, and manipulating.  So in the process of inflating their material expectations, we also teach children that something can be had for next to nothing.  Not only is that a falsehood, it's also one of the most dangerous, destructive attitudes a person can acquire.

This may go a long way toward explaining why the mental health of children in the 1950s — when kids got a lot less — was significantly better than the mental health of today's kids.  Since the '50s, and especially in the last few decades, as indulgence has become the parenting norm, the rates of child and teen depression have skyrocketed. 

Children who grow up believing in the something-for-nothing fairy tale are likely to become emotionally stunted, self-centered adults.  Then, when they themselves become parents, they're likely to overdose their children with material things – the piles of toys, plushies, and gadgets one finds scattered around most households.  In that way, over indulgence — a deficiency of Vitamin N — becomes an inherited disease, an addiction passed from one generation to the next.

This also explains why children who get too much of what they want rarely take proper care of anything they have.  Why should they?  After all, experience tells them that more is always on the way.