Yes, You Can Spoil a Child . . . In the truest sense of the word, spoiling has to do with dependency and indulgence. As we discussed earlier, children who are securely attached, by nature, begin to explore and become more independent at about age two. This is the first major push toward autonomy. As painful as it may be for securely attached caregivers to slowly begin the lifelong process of letting go of their child emotionally and physically, it is vital to the child's emotional development that we do so.
Clingy caregivers are a detrerment to a child.
While working in a psychiatric teaching hospital, one valuable lesson I learned in assessing the problems of children referred to the center was to observe the parent's reaction to leaving the child in the morning and picking them up in the afternoon. As caregivers we have to separate our emotional needs from those of the child. We must not become dependent on our children to meet our emotional needs. While parenting and caregiving naturally meet some of our most basic needs, a child's purpose is not to meet our needs, but to learn to meet their own. On the other hand, some of the parents we worked with were quite willing to leave their child and reluctant to pick them up at the end of the day.