Continued from here, where we've been talking about spoiling ...

As older parents, and specifically older adoptive parents, we all, I suspect, teeter on the brink of over-indulgence with our kids. Many of us come to parenting late after years of longing ... a recipe for spoiling if ever there was one. Plus, it's said by many that we have more patience than we did when younger, and that may translate to putting up with a lot more guff than we should.

Easily convinced that the sun really does rise and set on the heads of our adorable children, who wants to deny heartfelt desires? Given the circumstances of our kids' birth, isn't there something karmatic about pampering someone whose very continuing existence seems a sort of miracle?

And then there's the time angle. After all, seeing how far behind the game we were when we finally signed up for this parenting gig, who knows how much time we'll end up having with our kids? Shouldn't we pour every ounce of everything we can get our mitts on into every minute of every day while we can?

And what about their emotional well-being? With the cornucopia of issues arrayed before us as adoptive parents, tending to wants and needs is tied to everything from the ability to attach to every ounce of self-worth our children will depend on for a lifetime of interpersonal interactions.

Where does building self-esteem make the jump over the chasm of middle ground to the creating-a-contemptible-creep column?

Here's a result of doing it correctly:

"We live in a society that emphasizes the power of the individual," notes Zach Samson, a senior studying journalism at Northwestern University near Chicago. "So it is very easy to see why my generation would be considered so narcissistic." Growing up, he was told he was "special," he says, and that he could accomplish anything he worked for (and he ended up interning with Oxfam, the antihunger group, last year in Thailand).

"But my parents were not emphasizing that I was this grand person who was better than everyone else," Mr. Samson says, "just that I was unique, as was every other person."

As much as anything else, our legacy to the world will be as much what our children will accomplish in their lifetimes as what we ourselves have done in ours.

How's that for pointing out yet another pressure to parenting?

You're welcome.