Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments
to Love and Reason
By Alfie Kohn
At the core
of his book, Unconditional Parenting, Alfie Kohn,
an educator, author and parenting expert, poses the question,
“What do kids need and how can we meet those needs?” What
logically follows from this concept is the idea of parents
working with children rather than doing to
children. He states that a fundamental need all children have is
to experience unconditional love, regardless of their behavior,
even in the face of their shortcomings and mistakes.
Kohn
acknowledges while all parents love their children, many
mainstream parenting approaches support techniques that entail
what he calls “love withdrawal.” Kohn views these approaches as
forms of control, where the message being given to children is
that they are loved conditionally, only when they are behaving
the ways the adults around them deem appropriate. Kohn includes
punishments (spanking, yelling, isolating) and rewards (stars,
food, things) as forms of control. They are all variations of
the age-old concepts of bribes and threats. Rewards and
punishments provide either temporary obedience or fuel rebellion
because their goal is to manipulate behavior. Kohn argues that
this approach does not empower children to reflect on the kind
of people they want to be, nor cause them to take responsibility
for their actions.
Throughout
Unconditional Parenting, Kohn uses an enormous body
of evidence from decades of research to detail the damage caused
to children by leading them to believe that their parent’s love
is contingent upon their behavior. According to Kohn, common
outcomes of this conditional love are: fear of abandonment,
anxiety, and fear of failure.
Many
parenting books available today, concentrate on the promise to
provide parents with the tools to ensure their children
“behave.” Their techniques are designed to help parents make
children do what they want them to do by exercising their
parental “power of authority” over them. Moreover, it is implied
that the parent’s job is to control their children’s behavior or
their children will grow up to be selfish, rude, and
out-of-control. These notions carry with them the implication
that there is something inherently bad in children’s behavior
and that behavior must change through use of punishment or
discipline techniques.
Kohn
presents a paradigm shift that helps parents begin to understand
how they came to be the parents they are today and to question
their most basic assumptions about addressing the roots and
causes of “mis”-behavior. Unconditional Parenting
offers its readers a wealth of techniques and ideas for
exploring their parenting histories as well as learning to
decode children’s behavior.
Unconditional
Parenting
is a groundbreaking example of forward-thinking and aware
parenting techniques. Some readers may take exception with the
concept of working with children. Some parents may fear
losing their sense of parental power over their children and
prefer to remain in the “comfort zone” of the more authoritarian
parenting techniques that include time-outs, threats, physical
and/or emotional abuse, and bribes. This may not be a book all
parents will embrace with the vigor because of its potential
threat to their established parenting values and beliefs.
However, for parents willing to honestly examine the “why’s” of
their parenting choices, make changes based on unconditional
love and respect, and who are committed to raising self-assured,
secure human beings, this book could change their lives.
Unconditional
Parenting
is a book I recommend to every parent I work with, because it
challenges him or her to parent from a depth few have ever even
known to consider. All parents have the ability to be better
parents, and with the help of resources like Unconditional
Parenting, parents can embark on a journey to be the
very best parents they can be.
Published by
Atria Books (A division of Simon and Shuster, Inc.)Copyright
2005
ISBN: 13: 978-0-7434-8747-4
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