Alfie Kohn is an author and lecturer who has written 14 books on the topics of parenting and education. He is well known for his theories on “unconditional parenting” and moving away from rewards and punishments as tools to get children to do what we want. In his book, The Myth of the Spoiled Child, Kohn debunks theories that children these days are “entitled” or “coddled.” Here we talk to him about the book and ways parents can practice unconditional parenting with their own kids.
What prompted you to write The Myth of the Spoiled Child?
I’m always interested when our current practices are at odds with what good logic and research suggests. I’ve written a whole bunch of different books on topics that include competition, rewards, homework, parenting in which I invite people to look at what we’re doing and whether it makes sense according to what solid data shows. In this case, I was interested in the conservative assumptions about children and parenting that have become conventional wisdom in our society. The notion that kids get things too easily these days, that we praise them too much, give them trophies when they just show up, hand out A’s that they haven’t earned, and that kids have inflated self-esteem. The charges that parents are too permissive and indulgent on the one hand and yet are somehow over-parenting their children on the other hand and kids, as a result, grow up with a sense of entitlement and narcissism and are ill-prepared for the real world. So I subjected all of those claims to a pretty rigorous series of analyses, looked at the research and ended up debunking the whole mess.
I’m really fascinated by your findings that “rewards and punishments,” as parenting tools, do not work. So I’m wondering, do you believe in discipline?
That depends on how you define discipline. If you mean guiding kids, providing them with help and feedback, letting them know about the impact their actions have on other people, working with them to solve problems, then I’m all in favor of it. If you mean treating them like pets with rewards and attention when they please us or impress us and punishments where the point is to make them suffer when they do something we don’t like, then no.
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What do you suggest instead?
In various books I’ve written, particularly one called Unconditional Parenting, I lay out the fundamental difference between a “doing to” approach and a “working with” approach. And of course the “working with” approach isn’t a recipe because its application will depend on the people involved and the different situations at hand. But what we know is that rewards and punishments never work to get anything beyond temporary resentful compliance. So the more focused we are on long-term goals such as helping our kids grow into happy, caring, responsible people, the less we would offer a reward when they please us or use some sort of punitive consequence, which again research has shown for decades to be extremely destructive on all sorts of levels even though it makes us feel better, when our kids make us mad.
Can you tell me what it means to be an “unconditional parent” and how can parents promote unconditional self-esteem in their kids?
It’s not enough to love our children, we have to love them for who they are, not for what they do. That means that kids mustn’t feel that we care more about them when they’ve been well behaved or done something impressive. It’s more important, if anything, to make sure that kids feel loved and cared about even when they screw up or fall short, and we have to make that clear in all sorts of ways. The easiest way to start that process of moving from a conditional parent to an unconditional parent is to stop doing the things that are explicitly conditional, such as praising them when they jump through our hoops, or doing things like time-outs where we literally turn off our love and even separate them from us physically until they’ve earned their way into our good graces again. Conditional support for kids as they experience it, and their experience of it is far more important than our intention, tends to promote conditional self-esteem. When kids feel acknowledged and approved by us only when they act in particular ways they come to believe that they are acceptable and loveable only under those conditions. That’s the opposite of what promotes psychological health and fully-functioning human beings, which is not just high self-esteem but unconditional self-esteem; the belief that even when you do something bad or you don’t succeed you still have a core faith in yourself as a basically good and competent person.
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