45 - Indulging children with candy, toys and stuff

Even at a young age, my mother believed in indulging me with books, stationary and practical electronics. When I was a baby, she never gave me delicious baby food and she fed me tasteless congee and nutritional baby milk instead. When we went out, she would take me to the bookstore or the library, rather than the toy store. She led me by example by eating her vegetables in front of me and I love vegetables in addition to meat. Why is it so hard for some kids to do that?

This style of bringing me up has affected me greatly and she taught me that the finer things in life don't necessarily come in the form of a PlayStation. I learned that having what all the other kids had wasn't the healthy way to look at things and that I had to learn that what other children liked wasn't necessarily better.

She believed that those kids were the ones that would grow up never wanting to eat their vegetables. They're the teenagers that will never pick up a book. They're the students that will find learning at school boring. The kids that have always played with toy cars will become adults that'll want to spend extravagant sums of money buying fancy cars when they grow older. They're the kids that will never mature.

And I look at my teenage friends, and I see the truth in what she believed. The ones that I deem to be immature are the ones that like the chocolate-flavored/sweet foods. They're the ones that get extremely excited by the thought of holidays coming up even though they've spent their entire school year doing nothing productive in class or at home. They're the ones that don't do so good academically, the ones that never pay attention in class, the ones that never appreciate tasteful food or art or literature or do anything that's significantly beneficial for their future and indulge themselves with computer games, expensive electronics and trivial knowledge instead.

I see this happening with my younger cousins as well. They have trouble at school because they're not accustomed to reading or thinking about deeper things. It's the way my aunts and uncles have chosen to bring them up, though, and I can't change their parenting style or my cousins' likes and dislikes. I'm not saying that a good treat serves no good purpose at all. I'm saying overindulging children with treats can lead to spoiled children that will never learn that there are more useful things to spend one's time and money on. I'm saying that these are the kids that will never grow up.