Quotes from Alfie Kohn

Unconditional parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason.

Independence is useful, but caring attitudes and behaviors shrivel up in a culture where each person is responsible only for himself.

To feel controlled is to lose interest.

From deep contentment comes the courage to achieve.

The story of declining school quality across the twentieth century is, for the most part, a fable," says social scientist Richard Rothstein, whose book The Way We Were? cites a series of similar attacks on American education, moving backward one decade at a time.3 Each generation invokes the good old days, during which, we discover, people had been doing exactly the same thing.

My wife says [parenting] is a test of your capacity to deal with disorder and unpredictability -- a test you can't study for, and one whose results aren't always reassuring.

Educators remind us that what counts in a classroom is not what the teacher teaches; it's what the learner learns. And so it is in families. What matters is the message our kids receive, not the one we think we're sending.

Students get the message bout what adults want. When 4th graders in a variety of classroomswere asked what their teachers most wanted them to do, they didn't say, "Ask thoughtful questions" or "Make responsible decisions" or Help others." They said, "Be quiet, don't fool around, and get our work done on time.

How well you do things should be incidental, not integral, to the way you regard yourself.

Besides, what best prepares children to deal with the challenges of the "real world" is to experience success and joy. People don't get better at coping with unhappiness because they were deliberately made unhappy when they were young.

All rewards have the same effect," one writer declares. "They dilute the pure joy that comes from success itself.

Few readers will be shocked by the news that extrinsic motivators are a poor substitute for genuine interest in what one is doing. What is likely to be far more surprising and disturbing is the further point that rewards, like punishments, actually undermine the intrinsic motivation that promotes optimal performance.

Unconditional parents want to know how to do something other than threaten and punish. They don't see their relationship with their children as adversarial, so their goal is to avoid battles, not win them.

Many mothers and father return each evening from their paid jobs only to serve as homework monitors, a position for which they never applied.

As Thomas Gordon pointed out, 'Parents who find unacceptable a great many things that their children do or say will inevitably foster in these children a deep feeling that they are unacceptable as persons.' That doesn't change just because the parents remember to say soothingly, 'We love you, honey; we just hate almost everything you do.

A society in which no one is willing to risk being called a troublemaker is a place where power is certain to be abused.

What provokes particular outrage and ridicule is the idea that children might feel good about themselves in the absence of impressive accomplishments, even though, as I'll show, studies find that unconditional self-esteem is a key component of psychological health.

Hence a report from Harvard's own "Committee on Raising the Standard": "Grades A and B are sometimes given too readily—Grade A for work of not very high merit, and Grade B for work not far above mediocrity. . . . One of the chief obstacles to raising the standards of the degree is the readiness with which insincere students gain passable grades by sham work." Except that report was written in—you saw this coming, didn't you?—1894.

How we feel about our kids isn't as important as how they experience those feelings and how they regard the way we treat them.

Suppose you want your child to grow into someone who is (a) ethical, (b) able to sustain healthy relationships, (c) intellectually curious, and (d) fundamentally content with him- or herself. Anything you do with your children on a regular basis, then, should be evaluated in light of your ultimate goals.

We ought to love children, as my friend Deborah says, 'for no good reason.' Furthermore, what counts is not that we believe we love them unconditionally, but that they feel loved in that way.

S. Neill put it, promising a reward for an activity is "tantamount to declaring that the activity is not worth doing for its own sake."26 Thus, a parent who says to a child, "If you finish your math homework, you may watch an hour of TV" is teaching the child to think of math as something that isn't much fun.

the question is not whether more flies can be caught with honey than with vinegar, but why the flies are being caught in either case—and how this feels to the fly.

I realized that this is what many people in our society seem to want most from children: not that they are caring or creative or curious, but simply that they are well behaved. A "good" child—from infancy to adolescence—is one who isn't too much trouble to us grown-ups.