When I was growing up, one of the worst insults that could be hurled at a child (or his parents) was that he was a spoiled brat. It was a phrase that wasn’t used very often, but when it was, it stung. No one wanted to hear the perception that a child was spoiled.
Now, we hardly hear the phrase, but maybe it’s because so many children are spoiled. Has the phrase decreased as the problem increased?
Out of curiosity, I looked up the meaning of “spoil.” Here, it means “to harm the character of a child by being too lenient or indulgent.”
