Whenever this [normal tenderness of parents is not manifested to a proper degree] occurs serious consequences for the development of the child ensue. The child’s attitude becomes so fixed that he cannot recognize love nor make the proper use of it, because his instincts for tenderness have never been developed. It will be difficult to mobilize a child who has grown up in a family where there has never been a proper development of the feeling of tenderness. His whole attitude in life will be a gesture of escape, an evasion of all love and all tenderness. The identical effect may be produced by unthinking parents, educator or other adults, who teach children that love and tenderness are improper, ridiculous, or unmanly. […] This is specially the case among those children who have often been ridiculed. Such children are veritably afraid of showing emotions or feelings because they feel their tendency to show love toward tenderness as though it were an instrument to enslave or degrade them. [this happens to people] whose social tendencies can never be stretched to include more than one human being. […] and therefore [the adult] wandered up and down through life trying to find the warmth and affection which he had missed from earliest childhood. Education accompanied by too much tenderness is as pernicious as education which proceeds without it. […] The result is that a petted child binds himself to one or more persons and refuses to allow himself to be detached. The value of tenderness becomes so accentuated by various mistaken experiences that the child concludes that his own love enforces certain implicit responsibilities on his grown-ups. This is easily accomplished: the child says to his parents, “because I love you, you must do this or that. […] No sooner does the child recognize a tendency like this on the part of others than he increases his own tenderness in order to make them more dependent upon him. In: “Understanding Human Nature”, Alfred Adler.
