Mistakes in Upbringing Lead to Developmental Disorders
The topic of upbringing is a vast universe. Professional fields have been dealing with it for many decades. Due to social change, countless variables have emerged — and what was considered right yesterday is often viewed as wrong today.
Numerous books, lectures and opinions from experts such as educators, teachers, child psychologists, parents, parents-in-law, grandparents, friends and acquaintances differ widely in experience and perspective.
You are given countless tips, you read in-depth approaches in books… and after many books, reports, pieces of advice, criticism and my own experiences, I arrive at one conclusion:
Theory and practice.
It sounds simplistic — but that is how it is.
There is no single truth, because every human being has a brain that is programmed differently.
Terms such as resilience and vulnerability are often mentioned in this context. Experts debate how much is genetics and how much is upbringing. In my view, the way information is processed is largely genetically determined. I draw on an example from my immediate environment: two brothers grow up in the same household, where violence and criminal behaviour are part of everyday life. One brother later becomes a criminal himself, seeing violence as a means to an end. The other becomes a police officer and a yoga teacher.
From this simple example alone, it is already clear that different impulses lead to different outcomes. One person needs praise in order to feel motivated; another needs setbacks.
When I worked as a trainer in a gym, I learned that I could motivate men more effectively by saying things like: “You’ve put on a bit of weight and lost some muscle — it’s time to get back into it.” I would never have said something like that to a woman. Not only for reasons of etiquette, but because I already knew that different groups require different forms of communication.
The group I am writing about today, however, is children. Here, too, a form of “selling” takes place — in other words, manipulation (Josef Kirschner: “Manipulating, but properly”). We simply call it “upbringing”. We sell our own interests to our children — and in doing so, we make many mistakes …
Mistakes in Child Upbringing
In the following text, I paraphrase, among others, the child psychologist Dr med Michael Winterhoff, the brain researcher and neurobiologist Gerald E. Hüther, the psychologist and social pedagogue Robert Betz — and my parents. Special thanks also go to Anja von Both, an upper secondary school teacher.
By way of introduction, I need to briefly explain my professional activities in the social sector, which I left again in 2019. As a migration support worker in an initial reception centre with a medical focus, I eventually became head of a so-called MAT programme and coached a low-threshold clientele with significant barriers to entering the primary labour market. Put plainly: 17–23-year-old welfare recipients with rather bleak prospects. The success rate was very low, and when someone did occasionally “stumble into employment” (as my client sarcastically put it), they would quit the (auxiliary) job again after just a few weeks. The contracting authority was the Jobcentre. My task soon became clear: to relieve the Jobcentre’s administrative workload for six months — without the cases actually disappearing from their filing cabinets.
“Administration” creates many jobs within Germany’s middle class and is therefore, to a certain extent, also a strategy. Questions of proportionality, meaning and nonsense of such “deals” financed by taxpayers’ money are for others to debate. After this role, I had the opportunity to work once more as a coach and supervisor in a boot-camp-like institution for difficult-to-educate and also delinquent adolescents aged between 12 and 18. Not all requirements were fulfilled there, but youth welfare offices and even judges often turned a blind eye — because, in the end, they were simply relieved to have the clientele placed somewhere, somehow. In such boot camps, new forms of conditioning are enforced and instilled in young people by so-called “respect trainers”, sometimes involving physical consequences.
After several years — and an abandoned degree in Social Work at the Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences — I left the social sector again. This background information about my person is important for what follows. It explains my perspectives and lived experiences.
I would like to address four fundamental topics here:
- Nutrition
- Physical activity
- Media consumption
- Upbringing
There are countless books on each of these topics, many of them hundreds of pages long. My aim is to break these four themes down in such a way that they can be read and understood within a good 15–20 minutes.
Mistakes in Upbringing: Nutrition
The topic of ADHD is highly controversial. The prevailing tendency often swings towards either “ADHD doesn’t exist” or “ADHD consists of symptoms that can be brought under control through dietary changes”. Based on my experience, both positions are — at the same time — right and wrong. There are indeed more so-called “hyperactive children” (including girls) than in the past. When you start to look at what used to be different, you inevitably come closer to the causes. This is not straightforward — but it is not incorrect either. Through careful exclusion diagnostics, many factors can in fact be brought to light.
Nutrition plays a major role in this context. For some, the topic may sound trivial, yet for large parts of society it represents a serious problem. Many parents are not fully aware of what is contained in certain foods, in what quantities, and what effects this has. Even less so of the long-term effects. When changes occur slowly enough, they often become invisible. Many adults live in a way that suggests they would rather die slowly than take on changes that are difficult to implement. As long as it happens gradually. Otherwise, it would be hard to explain twenty cigarettes a day, lack of physical activity, and a daily intake of 5,000 calories — largely through sugar and saturated fats.
The amount of sugar our children consume today is many times higher than it was in earlier decades (in my case, the 1980s and parts of the 1990s). Parents tend to view this level of sugar consumption as normal and place their trust in the food industry, assuming it produces children’s food responsibly. This is a misconception. The industry follows capitalist principles — and this requires consumers who are addicted to sugar. On YouTube alone, entering the term “sugar as a drug” yields countless documentaries. In short: sugar affects the frontal cortex (the reward centre) at the synapses where various drugs also dock. There is not a great deal of difference between cocaine and sugar — at least when it comes to the pathways in the brain.
Unfortunately, sweeteners do not help much either, because they do not change the fact that children are conditioned towards the taste “sweet”. That children like sweet flavours is also rooted in evolution and serves an important protective function. In nature, sweet often means “edible”, whereas poisonous plants are usually bitter. The food industry exploits this shamelessly.
In addition to sugar, there is a whole range of other substances that have neurological effects. Various sweeteners, such as aspartame (which is still in use), are frequently linked to cancer in online discussions. Everyone must decide for themselves, after doing their own research, whether they wish to believe this or not.
Phosphates — and especially glutamates — are ingredients that affect our nervous system. Glutamate is a neurotransmitter that the body produces itself. It is necessary to ensure the transmission of stimuli between axons. Today, however, we — or rather our children — consume this substance, now often labelled as “yeast extract” or similar, in almost all industrially processed foods. Given the current levels of sugar and glutamate consumption, it should come as no surprise that the “nervous system of our bodies” becomes overstimulated.
Nevertheless… bringing ADHD fully under control through a complete change in diet has, in my experience, met with varying degrees of success. It does not always work — even with strict dietary measures. A child with ADHD can demand an enormous amount of mental energy from their environment. Based on everything I have seen, I cannot categorically reject medication. As sobering as it may sound, it is sometimes a good solution — and for everyone involved, including the child, often the best one.
In addition to nutrition, which I have unfortunately only been able to touch on briefly here, the second major topic is “physical activity”.
Mistakes in Upbringing: Physical Activity
What is different today compared to the past? I believe that, on this point, almost everyone would give the same answer.
The question, then, is how we can create incentives for children to move more again. Children learn best — and largely — through imitation. But are we adults, especially parents, good role models when it comes to physical activity? Anyone who goes to the swimming pool merely to cool off in the water, then spends the rest of the time lying in the sun and defines this as sport (swimming), should not be surprised if children are unable to swim even three lengths without stopping. Cycling to the nearest ice cream parlour is not a sporting activity either. Parents drive their children five kilometres to football training, even though the children could easily cycle there themselves. We live in an age in which people strap “trackers” to their wrists that count their daily steps. As a result, ordinary walking is already being redefined as a form of sporting activity.
This is known as dissonance reduction. People invent ways and mechanisms to talk things up and make them look better than they are. They reinterpret reality in order to feel more comfortable with themselves. Unfortunately, adults model this behaviour for their children. Physical activity and motor skills are vitally important for development, as they are a fundamental part of outdoor play. Anyone who lacks these skills will struggle to “run around” and play outside properly. And those who cannot run around cannot adequately release pent-up energy. Children, in particular, possess a great deal of surplus physical energy. Sports clubs in Germany are dying out due to a lack of participation. While youth football teams in the D and C age groups are still kept alive by initial enthusiasm, this motivation often fades by the time players reach the B or A youth levels. What happens to these children as they grow into adolescents and then into adults? In addition to poor role models, a third factor gradually emerges over time — beginning as early as primary school age:
Mistakes in Upbringing: Media Consumption.
Here, too, the question arises: what is different today compared to back then? And once you ask that, you are already close to the answer.
Born in 1978, I already watched an average of around two hours of television a day in the late 1980s and early 1990s, thanks to channels such as Tele5. After school there were cartoons, then at some point homework — or sometimes not. At weekends, Saturday mornings started around 8:00 with The Smurfs, Saber Rider, Star Sheriffs, The Raccoons… and continued in the afternoon with The A-Team, Airwolf, and the talking car K.I.T.T.
I also met up with friends to watch together. In the early 1990s, the Commodore 64 with its floppy disks found its way into children’s bedrooms; by the mid-1990s this was followed by the Amiga 500 and later the Nintendo 64.
All in all, we probably spent around 10–15 hours a week watching television. Later, this shifted to an average of perhaps eight hours of TV and eight hours of computer games per week.
It sounds like a lot, and even back then alarm bells were already ringing, warning that the rise of computer games as “time-wasters” was not good for children and young people. But… in order to communicate with others, we met up in person — we played, hung out, and did sports together. With the arrival of mobile phones in the late 1990s and the ability to make calls anytime and anywhere, we began to send short messages. The internet did not truly establish itself until around the turn of the millennium and was largely limited to email and the computer. Mobile internet access only really emerged from around 2006 onwards, accompanied by changes in screen technology (the iPhone).
Now, let us take a look at how much time is spent today using mobile phones and computers:
- To communicate with others, we no longer need to meet in person. We hardly even make phone calls anymore.
- We act and react “on the side” — alongside our work, and even while sitting with other people in cafés or restaurants.
- We are “online” throughout the entire day. In contrast to the 10–15 hours per week back then, we now spend a very real 20–25 hours per week using media — with the smartphone at the forefront.
Where there used to be time to learn an instrument, practise sport, or even work, that time is now spent communicating via social networks.
One major problem I see is that written communication lacks tone. Selective perception becomes much stronger here, because facial expressions, gestures and tone of voice are highly meaningful cues that shape how we interpret messages. As a result, the child remains locked into their own perspective of things.
When children increasingly grow up with this type of communication (Facebook and the like), they neither learn to read nor to use facial expressions, gestures or tone of voice. When watching television, a child does not need to speak. But speaking is learned… by speaking. Many children are already in the third year of primary school and still speak in the simplest SVO sentences (subject–verb–object), whereas in the past they would already have been writing short essays. They are unable to express themselves adequately; they lack vocabulary, sentence structures, and the ability to paraphrase. Put bluntly: some of them are partly unable to answer questions — because they cannot speak in an age-appropriate way. When watching television, there is no dialogue — only watching and listening. There is no direct exchange of emotions and reactions; the child does not need to react (and certainly not spontaneously). As a result, there is no immediate feedback — or rather, the brain receives no feedback. The brain conditions itself through constant comparison, through actio et reactio. This process is missing when children merely watch television.
What are the consequences? Children later struggle to respond appropriately to emotions, which leads to conflict. They are unable to argue their point or put their feelings into words. As young adults, they complain and sulk like small children. The result of excessive media consumption is a lack of — or insufficient — consequences for one’s behaviour or spoken words. Television provides no feedback. Neither does a games console. A smartphone does so only to a limited extent — and even then, as mentioned, tone of voice, facial expressions and gestures are missing. This reinforces selective perception, trapping the individual within their own interpretation. As a result, the ability to develop self-criticism and to accept insight or feedback is poorly learned. One consequence of this is the inability to apologise.
Mistakes in Upbringing: Upbringing Itself.
From the three points mentioned above, the need for proper upbringing naturally follows. We have now, in fast-forward, defined the problems and the mistakes — and from this, the necessary form of compensation becomes clear. Now try telling parents who are around 40 kilos overweight that their child needs more physical activity. They will not manage it. Or tell a single mother who is at odds with herself and her life, who keeps herself mentally “afloat” through dissonance reduction, that her child should not watch so much television or play so many video games… she will not manage it either.
In today’s society, we not only have far more single-parent households, but also far fewer multi-generational households. This means that grandparents are often no longer close by. Since the prevailing trend over the past 30 years has been towards anti-authoritarian parenting — based on the belief that allowing children to “co-decide”, or even decide for themselves as early as possible, would strengthen their free will — problems have emerged that I would now like to explain.
To do so, one must understand the brain and its different stages of development. When I worked as a social coach within the MAT programme, I dealt primarily with people whose emotional and psychological development was, in some cases, severely delayed. You may now ask how one can recognise whether a 20-year-old is, mentally, still 13. It becomes even more difficult to determine whether a 10-year-old is still functioning at the level of a six- or even five-year-old. This is because maturity does not necessarily correlate directly with intelligence — even though there is some correlation.
Mistakes in Upbringing Lead to Developmental Disorders
The child and adolescent psychiatrist Michael Winterhoff from Bonn also sees the cause in increasingly stressed parents: “Parents feel under greater pressure today,” says Winterhoff. Because they want their children to have a better life, children are given more and more. This does not make them eager to learn or willing to perform. “For example, they are not able to postpone their own needs,” Winterhoff explains. These are not happy children.
A young child initially perceives only itself and its own needs and strives to satisfy them. It lives in the “I”. This is first intensified during the autonomy phase (around the age of three, plus or minus 6–12 months). Through conflicts and feedback — especially through consequences — the brain constantly recalibrates. The child learns. The autonomy phase is extremely demanding for parents, but it is an essential part of upbringing. Being firm — without withdrawing love — is indispensable here, even though it is very difficult, especially for single parents, where giving in often feels like the only option to avoid burnout or emotional collapse.
The child’s brain is also not cognitively developed enough to anticipate subtle or long-term consequences. It can only assess the here and now. An example: the child has not eaten breakfast and has no appetite at lunchtime. You know that you will be out for the entire afternoon and that the child will not be able to eat properly. You tell the child that it will take a long time before there is food again — that there will be nothing to eat for several hours and that it will feel hungry. The result: the child still does not eat. It lives in the here and now — and right now, it is not hungry.
Instead of allowing the child to experience hunger in order to learn consequences, parents then take food with them after all. The child learns something entirely different: it can continue to live in the here and now. It does not learn to anticipate consequences; it remains within the so-called “pleasure principle”.
These examples can be extended endlessly — to appointments and time management, homework, clothing, nutrition, sport… and later to relationships and work.
Child Upbringing: The Narcissistic Toddler
As a social coach, I tried to secure internships for young adults — which I sometimes managed to do… but then, by the third day, they had already stopped showing up because the work “wasn’t fun” and they “didn’t feel like it”. German industry can sing a lament about its apprentices. We didn’t feel like doing homework back then either, and we didn’t enjoy getting up in the morning to go to school — but we did it nonetheless, as best we could.
When, for example, a single mother, helicopter parents or so-called “snowplough parents” (who remove every obstacle and conflict from their children’s path) involve children too early in decision-making processes, the children learn that they are allowed to decide. Now guess how a child who lives in the here and now — and cannot anticipate consequences — will decide? According to the pleasure principle.
How does a (still narcissistic) child react when it does not get what it wants? It will complain, sulk, feel offended, withdraw, become angry… It is not yet capable of compromise. It cannot be. It cannot yet discuss things or put itself in someone else’s position. In most cases, the child also tries to withdraw or hide when conflicts arise.
A young child is often overwhelmed by decisions. Toddlers are asked what they want to wear, what they would like to eat in a restaurant; at primary school age they are asked where they would like to go on holiday. They will always decide according to their own sense of enjoyment and immediate desire.
Just as in sales later in professional life, one should offer alternative questions — for example, in a restaurant: Do you want spaghetti or pizza? The child may choose between these two options. Nothing more. This limited choice makes it easier for children to develop. Granting “freedom” in decision-making processes does not foster mature, responsible citizens, but rather thinking and acting according to the pleasure principle.
The education system is not immune to such parenting mistakes either — take, for example, the partially implemented new spelling strategies, where children are allowed to write words however they want, justified by the idea that they should not lose their enjoyment of writing. Later on, these ingrained mistakes then have to be corrected again. I have a word for this: nonsense. Children are now even allowed to decide how they spell words. This toddler-like behaviour — above all the avoidance of conflict — is not reduced by such approaches, but conditioned. The result is people with limited capacity for relationships, who struggle to integrate into groups (such as workplace teams) and who only perform when they enjoy the task or receive something in return.
The child remains stuck in the developmental stage of the narcissistic toddler; emotional maturity is therefore delayed. Even if the child is already eight or nine years old, they still behave like a toddler in situations where things do not go their way. And if a 20-year-old still behaves in this manner, one can reasonably assume that their maturity development has been delayed.
What is also crucial here is leading by example — specifically, modelling consistency without becoming angry. Shouting, hitting, ignoring… children will imitate this behaviour. Keep that in mind.
From the four topics discussed — which, as stated several times, have only been touched on very briefly here — the need for appropriate upbringing naturally follows.
Anyone who feels overwhelmed by their situation as a caregiver and is in need of advice is welcome to contact me. In all of these areas, there is far more to be said than could be covered here.
I am here for you.
Warm regards,
Gregor
Tags: upbringing, child upbringing, ADHD, toddler, autonomy phase, children, Gregor Schäfer, parenting counselling, parenting support Bad Hersfeld
