What Softness Hardens

Researchers surveyed 720 college students about how they were raised and cross-referenced their answers with measures of the Dark Triad: narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism. The parenting styles associated with the worst outcomes weren't the cruel ones. They were the indulgent ones — parents who overvalued their children, set few limits, and provided them with nearly everything they wanted.

High parental indulgence predicted higher narcissistic antagonism, psychopathic meanness, and impulsivity in adulthood.

Before the defensive response arrives — the one about just trying to give your kids what you never had — the study found something that complicates the simple takeaway. High parental praise predicted the opposite. Lower hostile and impulsive traits. Greater social confidence and agency.

Indulgence and praise are not the same thing. This is the confusion.

Indulgence is material: desires met before they're felt as desires, discomforts preemptively removed, limits never established because limits feel like withholding. Praise is relational: I'm watching you do something real, and I'm naming what I see in you. One treats the child as a need-generator to be satisfied. The other treats the child as a person developing toward competence.

The uncomfortable math: a parent who indulges has found a shortcut past a harder form of attention. Giving a child everything they want requires money or time, but it doesn't require the specific effort of watching them fail at something and staying in the room while they figure it out. Indulgence is efficient. Presence is not.

Jennifer Vonk, one of the researchers, put it plainly: "The fact that high indulgence and low praise seem to predict higher levels of pathological traits and lower levels of the more positive traits points to the importance of providing children with affirming feedback without engaging in over-indulgence."

Academic language for: we've been confusing generosity with presence.

The confusion isn't incidental. Indulgence is legible as love — it has receipts. The birthday haul, the vacations, the roster of activities. Praise requires something harder to document: sustained attention to a person who is still becoming. You have to be in the room for the messy middle, not just the arrival.

What the study suggests is that children aren't fooled by the substitution — not consciously, but in the way that leaves marks. The parents in this study who raised kids toward the worse outcomes weren't cruel. They were, by most measures, generous. That's the part worth sitting with.