Joey & Carla Link
August 5, 2026
Can you love your child too much? The obvious answer is NO! But can parents love their kids so much that they give them things that can hinder them from learning to mature and provide for themselves? The quick answer is definitely yes!
We know of loving parents who continue waking their teenagers up throughout their high school years out of love, so that they never learned to get up to their own alarm. Those same teenagers were often late or slept through classes when they started college because they didn’t know how to wake up to their alarms.
When one of our kids was in their 3rd year of college, their roommate’s parents drove 90 minutes each week to bring them fresh laundry including towels and sheets, partly to see their adult child, but also because they never taught this 20-year-old how to do laundry for themselves. Their love ended up neglecting teaching their child basic “need-to-know” lessons for him to grow into maturity and learn to be responsible.
What we are really talking about is called child-centered parenting. It’s where parents prioritize a child’s individual needs, interests, and emotional well-being over their need for maturity and owning their responsibilities.
Many parents fall naturally into this syndrome by giving their kids whatever they want to please them. It starts naturally with young children because parents have to give children whatever they need. The problem comes when parents miss the transition of stepping back when a child can do something on their own and teaching them how to do it for themselves.
Think of it as a parent who feeds their toddler food with a spoon, until the child can master the skill of holding a spoon and feeding themselves. The parent then turns the responsibility of feeding themselves over to this child.
What are you currently doing for your kids that they can and should be doing for themselves, so that they can grow and mature to become responsible for their own actions? Want to know more? Click here to listen to the podcast, “Can You Love Your Kids to Much?”
“But solid food is for the mature,
who by constant use have trained themselves
to distinguish good from evil.”
Hebrews 5:14
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