Unconditional Parenting
The author of Punished by Rewards and The Schools Our Children Deserve returns with a provocative challenge to the conventional ways of raising children. Kohn argues that all children have the need to be loved unconditionally, yet conventional approaches to parenting, such as punishment and reward, teach children that they are loved only when they please and impress parents. Kohn cites powerful research detailing the damage this can cause. Unconditional Parenting pushes parents to question their ideas of parenting and offers practical solutions to problems.
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- Playful Parenting; Raising sour Children, Raising Ourself; Unconditional Parenting.
Three books I feel I can recommend.
- Roughly yes, I think of punishment as intentional infliction of suffering in order to modify behavior. If there’s no behavior modification goal then of course it’s just abuse.
I agree with you that POV matters. Telling a young kid, “You can’t have dessert tonight since you’re puking” can easily be interpreted as punishment :D
Some of the things you talk about sound like what I could call “natural consequences,” like cleaning the wall. I don’t think there’s an unambiguous bright line between punishment and consequences. I’ve spent years trying to stay on one side of it, but I don’t think I’ve done it perfectly.
Going late to a birthday party because a kid is “being obnoxious” — I think we could view that several ways. Some parents would call backtalk or opposition or argument “being obnoxious,” and I think that’s entirely wrong — I want him to challenge me, and stick up for what he wants.
If the kid makes a clumsy mistake before the birthday party, maybe he can clean it up when we get back (e.g., spilling Lego, but not milk). If the kid deliberately makes a mess before a birthday party, I might delay and ask them to clean it up first. It’s not always possible for me to understand intent, so if he claims something was an accident I’m very likely to act as if I believe him. There’s less harm in that, I believe, than in attributing malice to an accident.
FWIW I try not to reward or praise him, either; those are both inappropriate uses of power. Those have fuzzy lines, too; “you’re so smart” is praise and I avoid it. “I admire how hard you worked” is talking about my own reaction to empirical facts, so I wouldn’t call it praise.
Paying him $10 for each A on a report card is reward, and I avoid it. Watching a movie on Thursday nights if we get the house cleaned in time seems like natural consequences to me, and I wouldn’t call it a reward.
My own parents provided me many excellent counter-examples and anti-patterns, so before I had a kid I knew I wanted to do it very differently but I didn’t know exactly how. Alfie Kohn’s book, “Unconditional Parenting” informed my thinking about this significantly.
- Interesting summary. Since fathers make unique contributions to the development of their children (eg language development [0] and social skills[1]), it makes sense that the children would also affect the fathers, if they're connected/"there" enough.
Since I'm guessing there will be a bunch of parents in this thread, let me make a humble book recommendation:
Unconditional Parenting by Alfie Kohn
The Myth of the Spoiled Child by Alfie Kohn
Kohn is an education researcher who's kind of an iconoclast. His research has focused heavily on what _helps_ children gain the knowledge, academic wherewithal, and social-emotional skills to be successful in life. His results have been pretty surprising: Homework doesn't do much for children. "Time outs" are harmful. And the list goes on.
I'm simultaneously reading Unconditional Parenting and The Myth of the Spoiled Child, which I'd recommend. The latter looks at American accepted wisdom about children (every generation thinks that their kids are dumber, lazier, and more mollycoddled than _they_ were) and makes some pretty interesting juxtapositions between what we say we want for our kids and how we treat them.
0 - https://fpg.unc.edu/sites/fpg.unc.edu/files/resources/snapsh... 1 - https://www.researchgate.net/profile/C_Lewis2/publication/22...
- I've recently found the work of Alfie Kohn and his books (Unconditional Parenting, Punished by Rewards - these I've read) it's heavily evidence-based (lot's of cited research).
It challenges the status-quo but I really enjoy his perspective.
The books aren't really about dealing with very small babies , but you might enjoy his teachings.
There's a DVD (about 2 hour long) "Unconditional Parenting" which is a great summary of the book with the same name.
Best of luck in that adventure!
- You will resonate with Aktie Kohn’s Unconditional Parenting which cites a lot of research confirming the long term futility and harm of extrinsic pressures encoded in common parenting practices and educational institutions.
- Unconditional Parenting by Alfie Kohn has a great perspective on the reward/punishment question. Doesn't check all your boxes but worth checking out alongside other options.
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