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Unconditional Parenting

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MOVING FROM

REWARDS AND PUNISHMENTS

TO LOVE AND REASON

Alfie Kohn.

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Unconditional parenting , moving from rewards and punishments to love and reason I Alfie Kohn.

p.cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-7434-8747-8 (alk. paper)

1. Parenting 2. Parent and child. 3. Parental acceptance. 4. Child rearing . I. Title. HQ755.8.K65 2005

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INTRODUCTION

E ven before I had children, I knew that being a parent was going

to be challenging as well as rewarding. But I didn't really know.

I didn't know how exhausted it was possible to become, or how

clueless it was possible to feel, or how, each time I reached the end of

my rope, I would somehow have to find more rope.

I didn't understand that sometimes when your kids scream so loudly

that the neighbors are ready to call the Department of Child Services,

it's because you've served the wrong shape of pasta for dinner.

I didn't realize that those deep-breathing exercises mothers are

taught in natural-childbirth class don't really start to pay off until long

after the child is out.

I couldn't have predicted how relieved I'd be to learn that other

people's children struggle with the same issues, and act in some of the

same ways, that mine do. (Even more liberating is the recognition that

other parents, too, have dark moments when they catch themselves not

liking their own child, or wondering whether it's all worth it, or enter­

taining various other unspeakable thoughts.)

The bottom line is that raising kids is not for wimps. My wife says

it's 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 reas­

suring. Forget "rocket science" or "brain surgery": When we want to

make the point that something isn't really all that difficult, we ought

to say, "Hey, it's not parenting .... "

2 UNCONDITIONAL PARENTING

One consequence of this difficulty is that we may be tempted to focus our energies on overcoming children's resistance to our requests

and getting them to do what we tell them. If we're not careful, this can

become our primary goal. We may find ourselves joining all those peo­

ple around us who prize docility in children and value short-term obe­

dience above all. Several years ago, while on a lecture trip, I was sitting in an air­

plane that had just landed and taxied to its gate. As soon as the ding!

signaled that we were free to stand up and retrieve our carry-on bags, one of my fellow passengers leaned into the row ahead of us and con­

gratulated the parents of a young boy sitting there. "He was so good

during the flight!" my seatmate exclaimed. Consider for a moment the key word in that sentence. Good is an

adjective often laden with moral significance. It can be a synonym for

ethical or honorable or compassionate. However, where children are concerned, the word is just as likely to mean nothing more than quiet-or, perhaps, not a pain in the butt to me. Overhearing that com­ ment in the plane, I had a little ding! moment of my own. 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.

Over the last couple of generations, the strategies for trying to pro­

duce that result may well have changed. Where kids were once rou­

tinely subjected to harsh corporal punishment, they may now be

sentenced to time-outs or, perhaps, offered rewards when they obey

us. But don't mistake new means for new ends. The goal continues to

be control, even if we secure it with more modern methods. This isn't

because we don't care about our kids. It has more to do with being

overwhelmed by the countless prosaic pressures of family life, where

the need to get children into and out of the bed, bathtub, or car makes

it hard to step back and evaluate what we're doing.

One problem with just trying to get kids to do what we say is that

this may conflict with other, more ambitious, goals we have for them.

INTRODUCTION 3

This afternoon, your primary concern for your son may be for him

to stop raising a ruckus in the supermarket and accept the fact that

you're not going to buy a big, colorful box of candy disguised as

breakfast cereal. But it's worth digging a little deeper. In the workshops

I conduct for parents, I like to start off by asking, "What are your

long-term objectives for your children? What word or phrase comes

to mind to describe how you'd like them to turn out, what you want

them to be like once they're grown?"

Take a moment to think about how you would answer that ques­

tion. When I invite groups of parents to come up with the most impor­

tant long-term goals they have for their kids, I hear remarkably similar

responses across the country. The list produced by one audience was

typical: These parents said they wanted their children to be happy, bal­

anced, independent, fulfilled, productive, self-reliant, responsible,

functioning, kind, thoughtful, loving, inquisitive, and confident.

What's interesting about that collection of adjectives-and what's

useful about the process of reflecting on the question in the first

place-is that it challenges us to ask whether what we're doing is con­

sistent with what we really want. Are my everyday practices likely to

help my children grow into the kind of people I'd like them to be? Will

the things I just said to my child at the supermarket contribute in some

small way to her becoming happy and balanced and independent and

fulfilled and so on-or is it possible (gulp) that the way I tend to han­

dle such situations makes those outcomes less likely? If so, what

should I be doing instead?

If it's too daunting to imagine how your children will turn out

many years from now, think about what really matters to you today.

Picture yourself standing at a birthday party or in the hall of your

child's school. Around the corner are two other parents who don't

know you're there. You overhear them talking about ... your child!

Of all the things they might be saying, what would give you the most

pleasure?1 Again, pause for a moment to think of a word or sentence

that you would be especially delighted to hear. My guess-and my

hope-is that it wouldn't be, "Boy, that child does everything he's told

4 UNCONDITIONAL PARENTING

and you never hear a peep out of him." The crucial question, there­

fore, is whether we sometimes act as though that is what we care about

most.

Almost twenty-five years ago, a social psychologist named Elizabeth

Cagan reviewed a bushel of contemporary parenting books and con­

cluded that they mostly reflected a "blanket acceptance of parental

prerogative," with little "serious consideration of a child's needs, feel­

ings, or development." The dominant assumption, she added, seemed

to be that the parents' desires "are automatically legitimate," and thus

the only question open for discussion was how, exactly, kids could be

made to do whatever they're told.2

Sadly, not much has changed since then. More than a hundred par­

enting books are published in the United States every year,3 along with

countless articles in parenting magazines, and most of them are filled

with advice about how to get children to comply with our expecta­

tions, how to make them behave, how to train them as though they

were pets. Many such guides also offer a pep talk about the need to

stand up to kids and assert our power-in some cases explicitly writ­

ing off any misgivings we may have about doing so. This slant is

reflected even in the titles of recently published books: Don't Be Afraid

to Discipline; Parents in Charge; Parent in Control; Taking Charge;

Back in Control; Disciplining Your Preschooler-and Feeling Good

About It; 'Cause I'm the Mommy, That's Why; Laying Down the Law;

Guilt-Free Parenting; "The Answer Is No ,,

; and on and on.

Some of these books defensively stand up for old-fashioned values

and methods ("Your rear end is going to be mighty sore when your

father gets home"), while others make the case for newfangled tech­

niques ("Good job! You peed in the potty, honey! Now you can have

your sticker!"). But in neither case do they press us to be sure that what

we're asking of children is reasonable-or in their best interests.

It's also true, as you may have noticed, that many of these books

offer suggestions that turn out to be, shall we say, not terribly help-

INTRODUCTION 5

ful, even though they're sometimes followed by comically unrealistic

parent-child dialogues intended to show how well they work.4 But

while it can be frustrating to read about techniques that prove to be

ineffective, it's much more dangerous when books never even bother

to ask, "What do we mean by effective?" When we fail to examine

our objectives, we're left by default with practices that are intended

solely to get kids to do what they're told. That means we're focusing

only on what's most convenient for us, not on what they need.

Another thing about parenting guides: Most of them offer advice

based solely on what the author happens to think, with carefully cho­

sen anecdotes to support his or her point of view. There's rarely any

mention of what research has to say about the ideas in question.

Indeed, it's possible to make your way clear across the child-care shelf

of your local bookstore, one title at a time, without even realizing that

there's been a considerable amount of scientific investigation of vari­

ous approaches to parenting.

Some readers, I realize, are skeptical of claims that "studies show"

such-and-such to be true, and understandably so. For one thing, peo­

ple who toss that phrase around often don't tell you what studies

they're talking about, let alone how they were conducted or just how

significant their findings were. And then there's that pesky question

again: If a researcher claims to have proven that doing x with your

kids is more effective than doing y, we'd immediately want to ask,

"What exactly do you mean by effective? Are you suggesting that chil­

dren will be better off, psychologically speaking, as a result of x? Will

they become more concerned about the impact of their actions on

other people? Or is x just more likely to produce mindless obedience?"

Some experts, like some parents, seem to be interested only in that

last question. They define a successful strategy as anything that gets

kids to follow directions. The focus, in other words, is limited to how

children behave, regardless of how they feel about complying with a

given request, or, for that matter, how they come to regard the per­

son who succeeded in getting them to do so. This is a pretty dubious

way of measuring the value of parenting interventions. The evidence

6 UNCONDITIONAL PARENTING

suggests that even disciplinary techniques that seem to "work" often

turn out to be much less successful when judged by more meaningful

criteria. The child's commitment to a given behavior is often shallow

and the behavior is therefore short-lived.5

But that's not the end of the story. The problem isn't just that we

miss a lot by evaluating our strategies in terms of whether they get

kids to obey; it's that obedience itself isn't always desirable. There is

such a thing as being too well behaved. One study, for example, fol­

lowed toddlers in Washington, D.C., until they were five years old

and found that "frequent compliance [was] sometimes associated with

maladjustment." Conversely, "a certain level of resistance to parental

authority" can be a "positive sign." Another pair of psychologists,

writing in the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, described a dis­

turbing phenomenon they called "compulsive compliance," in which

children's fear of their parents leads them to do whatever they're told-immediately and unthinkingly. Many therapists, too, have com­ mented on the emotional consequences of an excessive need to please

and obey adults. They point out that amazingly well-behaved children

do what their parents want them to do, and become what their par­

ents want them to become, but often at the price of losing a sense of themselves.6

We might say that discipline doesn't always help kids to become

self-disciplined. But even that second objective isn't all it's cracked up

to be. It's not necessarily better to get children to internalize our wishes

and values so they'll do what we want even when we're not around.

Trying to foster internalization-or self-discipline-may amount to an

attempt to direct children's behavior by remote control. It's just a more

powerful version of obedience. There's a big difference, after all,

between a child who does something because he or she believes it's the

right thing to do and one who does it out of a sense of compulsion.

Ensuring that children internalize our values isn't the same thing as

helping them to develop their own.7 And it's diametrically opposed to

the goal of having kids become independent thinkers. Most of us, I'm convinced, do indeed want our children to think

INTRODUCTION 7

for themselves, to be assertive and morally courageous ... when

they're with their friends. We hope they'll stand up to bullies and resist

peer pressure, particularly when sex and drugs are involved. But if it's

important to us that kids not be "victims of others' ideas," we have to

educate them "to think for themselves about all ideas, including those

of adults." 8 Or, to put it the other way around, if we place a premium

on obedience at home, we may end up producing kids who go along

with what they're told to do by people outside the home, too. Author

Barbara Coloroso remarks that she's often heard parents of teenagers

complain, "He was such a good kid, so well behaved, so well man­

nered, so well dressed. Now look at him!" To this, she replies:

From the time he was young, he dressed the way you told him

to dress; he acted the way you told him to act; he said the things

you told him to say. He's been listening to somebody else tell

him what to do .... He hasn't changed. He is still listening to

somebody else tell him what to do. The problem is, it isn't you

anymore; it's his peers.9

* * *

The more we ponder our long-term goals for our kids, the more com­

plicated things become. Any goal might prove to be objectionable if

we consider it in isolation: Few qualities are so important that we'd

be willing to sacrifice everything else to achieve them. (On the sub­

ject of happiness, for example, see p. 239n1. Maybe it's wiser to help

children strike a balance between opposing pairs of qualities, so that

they grow up to be self-reliant but also caring, or confident yet still

willing to acknowledge their limitations. Likewise, some parents may

insist that what matters most to them is helping their children to set

and meet their own goals. If that makes sense to us, then we have to

be prepared for the possibility that they'll make choices and embrace

values that aren't the same as ours.

Our thinking about long-term goals may lead us in any number

of directions, but the point I want to emphasize is that however we

8 UNCONDITIONAL PARENTING

think about those goals, we ought to think about them a lot. They

ought to be our touchstone, if only to keep us from being sucked into

the quicksand of daily life with its constant temptation to do whatever

it takes to get compliance. As the parent of two children, I am well

acquainted with the frustrations and challenges that come with the job.

There are times when my best strategies fall flat, when my patience

runs out, when I just want my kids to do what I tell them. It's hard to

keep the big picture in mind when one of my children is shrieking in

a restaurant. For that matter, it's sometimes hard to remember the kind

of people we want to be when we're in the middle of a hectic day, or

when we feel the pull of less noble impulses. It's hard, but it's still

worthwhile.

Some people rationalize what they're doing by dismissing the more

meaningful goals-such as trying to be, or to raise one's child to be, a

good person-as "idealistic." But that just means having ideals, with­

out which we're not worth a hell of a lot. It doesn't necessarily mean

"impractical." Indeed, there are pragmatic as well as moral reasons to

focus on long-term goals rather than on immediate compliance, to con­

sider what our children need rather than just what we're demanding,

and to see the whole child rather than just the behavior.

In this book, I'll be talking about why it makes good sense to shift

away from the usual strategies for doing things to kids, and toward ways

of working with them. It's true that plenty of people, adults as well as

children, are subjected to "doing to" tactics. But it won't do to respond,

"Well, that's just the way the world is" when presented with a case

against, say, using punishments and rewards to get people to fall into

line. The critical question is what kind of people we want our children

to be-and that includes whether we want them to be the kind who

accept things as they are or the kind who try to make things better.

This is subversive stuff-literally. It subverts the conventional

advice we receive about raising kids, and it challenges a shortsighted

quest to get them to jump through our hoops. For some of us, it may

call into question much of what we've been doing-and perhaps even

what was done to us when we were young.

INTRODUCTION 9

The subject of this book is not merely discipline but, more broadly,

the ways we act with our children, as well as how we think about them

and feel about them. Its purpose is to help reconnect you with your

own best instincts and to reaffirm what really matters-after the paja­

mas are on, after the homework is done, after the sibling squabbles

have finally been quieted. It asks you to reconsider your basic assump­

tions about parent-child relationships.

Most important, it offers practical alternatives to the tactics we're

sometimes tempted to use to make our kids behave, or to push them

to succeed. I believe these alternatives have a reasonable chance of

helping our kids to grow up as good people-good, that is, in the

fullest sense of that word.

1

CONDITIONAL PARENTING

I have sometimes derived comfort from the idea that, despite all the

mistakes I've made (and will continue to make) as a parent, my chil­

dren will turn out just fine for the simple reason that I really love them.

After all, love heals all wounds. All you need is love. Love means never

having to say you're sorry about how you lost your temper this morn­

ing in the kitchen.

This reassuring notion is based on the idea that there exists a thing

called Parental Love, a single substance that you can supply to your

children in greater or lesser quantities. (Greater, of course, is better.)

But what if this assumption turns out to be fatally simplistic? What if

there actually are different ways of loving a child, and not all of them

are equally desirable? The psychoanalyst Alice Miller once observed

that it's possible to love a child "passionately-but not in the way he

needs to be loved." If she's right, the relevant question isn't just

whether-or even how much-we love our kids. It also matters how

we love them.

Once that's understood, we could pretty quickly come up with a

long list of different types of parental love, along with suggestions

about which are better. This book looks at one such distinction­

namely, between loving kids for what they do and loving them for who

they are. The first sort of love is conditional, which means children

10

CONDITIONAL PARENTING 11

must earn it by acting in ways we deem appropriate, or by perform­

ing up to our standards. The second sort of love is unconditional: It

doesn't hinge on how they act, whether they're successful or well behaved or anything else.

I want to defend the idea of unconditional parenting on the basis

of both a value judgment and a prediction. The value judgment is, very

simply, that children shouldn't have to earn our approval. We ought

to love them, as my friend Deborah says, "for no good reason." Fur­

thermore, what counts is not just that we believe we love them uncon­

ditionally, but that they feel loved in that way.

The prediction, meanwhile, is that loving children unconditionally

will have a positive effect. It's not only the right thing to do, morally

speaking, but also a smart thing to do. Children need to be loved as

they are, and for who they are. When that happens, they can accept

themselves as fundamentally good people, even when they screw up

or fall short. And with this basic need met, they're also freer to accept

(and help) other people. Unconditional love, in short, is what children

require in order to flourish. Nevertheless, we parents are often pulled in the direction of plac­

ing conditions on our approval. We're led to do so not only by what

we were raised to believe, but also by the way we were raised. You

might say we're conditioned to be conditional. The roots of this sen­

sibility have crept deep into the soil of American consciousness. In fact,

unconditional acceptance seems to be rare even as an ideal: An Inter­

net search for variants of the word unconditional mostly turns up dis­

cussions about religion or pets. Apparently, it's hard for many people

to imagine love among humans without strings attached.

For a child, some of those strings have to do with good behavior

and some have to do with achievement. This chapter and the follow­

ing three will explore the behavioral issues, and in particular the way

many popular discipline strategies cause children to feel they're

accepted only when they act the way we demand. Chapter 5 will then

consider how some children conclude that their parents' love depends

on their performance-for example, at school or in sports.

12 UNCONDITIONAL PARENTING

In the second half of the book, I'll offer concrete suggestions for

how we can move beyond this approach and offer something closer to

the kind of love our kids need. But first, I'd like to examine the broader

idea of conditional parenting: what assumptions underlie it (and dis­

tinguish it from the unconditional kind), and what effects it actually

has on children.

Two Ways to Raise Kids: Underlying Assumptions

My daughter, Abigail, went through a tough time a few months after

her fourth birthday, which may have been related to the arrival of a

rival. She became more resistant to requests, more likely to sound

nasty, scream, stamp her feet. Ordinary rituals and transitions quickly

escalated into a battle of wills. One evening, I remember, she promised

to get right into the bath after dinner. She failed to do so-and then,

when reminded of that promise, she shrieked loudly enough to wake

her baby brother. When asked to be quieter, she yelled again.

So here's the question: Once things calmed down, should my wife

and I have proceeded with the normal evening routine of snuggling

with her and reading a story together? The conditional approach to

parenting says no: We would be rewarding her unacceptable behav­

ior if we followed it with the usual pleasant activities. Those activi­

ties should be suspended, and she should be informed, gently but

firmly, why that "consequence" was being imposed.

This course of action feels reassuringly familiar to most of us and

consistent with what a lot of parenting books advise. What's more, I

have to admit that it would have been satisfying on some level for me

to lay down the law because I was seriously annoyed by Abigail's defi­

ance. It would have offered me the sense that I, the parent, was put­

ting my foot down, letting her know she wasn't allowed to act like

that. I'd be back in control .

The unconditional approach, however, says this is a temptation to

be resisted, and that we should indeed snuggle and read a story as

CONDITIONAL PARENTING 13

usual. But that doesn't mean we ought to just ignore what happened.

Unconditional parenting isn't a fancy term for letting kids do what­

ever they want. It's very important (once the storm has passed) to

teach, to reflect together-which is exactly what we did with our

daughter after we read her a story. Whatever lesson we hoped to

impart was far more likely to be learned if she knew that our love for

her was undimmed by how she had acted.

Whether we've thought about them or not, each of these two styles

of parenting rests on a distinctive set of beliefs about psychology,

about children, even about human nature. To begin with, the condi­

tional approach is closely related to a school of thought known as

behaviorism, which is commonly associated with the late B. F. Skin­

ner. Its most striking characteristic, as the name suggests, is its exclu­

sive focus on behaviors. All that matters about people, in this view, is

what you can see and measure. You can't see a desire or a fear, so you

might as well just concentrate on what people do.

Furthermore, all behaviors are believed to start and stop, wax and

wane, solely on the basis of whether they are "reinforced." Behavior­

ists assume that everything we do can be explained in terms of whether

it produces some kind of reward, either one that's deliberately offered

or one that occurs naturally. If a child is affectionate with his parent,

or shares his dessert with a friend, it's said to be purely because this

has led to pleasurable responses in the past.

In short: External forces, such as what someone has previously

been rewarded (or punished) for doing, account for how we act-and

how we act is the sum total of who we are. Even people who have

never read any of Skinner's books seem to have accepted his assump­

tions. When parents and teachers constantly talk about a child's

"behavior," they're acting as though nothing matters except the stuff

on the surface. It's not a question of who kids are, what they think or

feel or need. Forget motives and values: The idea is just to change what

they do. This, of course, is an invitation to rely on discipline techniques

whose only purpose is to make kids act-or stop acting-in a partic­

ular way.

14 UNCONDITIONAL PARENTING

A more specific example of everyday behaviorism: Perhaps you've

met parents who force their children to apologize after doing some­

thing hurtful or mean. ("Can you say you're sorry?") Now, what's

going on here? Do the parents assume that making children speak this

sentence will magically produce in them the feeling of being sorry,

despite all evidence to the contrary? Or, worse, do they not even care

whether the child really is sorry, because sincerity is irrelevant and all

that matters is the act of uttering the appropriate words? Compulsory

apologies mostly train children to say things they don't mean-that is,

to lie.

But this is not just an isolated parental practice that ought to be

reconsidered. It's one of many possible examples of how Skinnerian

thinking-caring only about behaviors-has narrowed our under­

standing of children and ·warped the way we deal with them. We see

it also in programs that are intended to train little kids to go to sleep

on their own or to start using the potty. From the perspective of these

programs, why a child may be sobbing in the dark is irrelevant. It

could be terror or boredom or loneliness or hunger or some other rea­

son. Similarly, it doesn't matter what reason a toddler may have for

not wanting to pee in the toilet when his parent asks him to do so.

Experts who offer step-by-step recipes for "teaching" children to sleep

in a room by themselves, or who urge us to offer gold stars, M&Ms,

or praise for tinkling in the toilet, are concerned not with the thoughts

and feelings and intentions that give rise to a behavior, only with the

behavior itself. (While I haven't done the actual counting that would

be necessary to test this, I would tentatively propose the following rule

of thumb: The value of a parenting book is inversely proportional to

the number of times it contains the word behavior.)

Let's come back to Abigail. Conditional parenting assumes that

reading her a book and otherwise expressing our continued love for

her will only encourage her to throw another fit. She will have learned

that it's okay to wake the baby and refuse to get in the bath because

she will interpret our affection as reinforcement for whatever she had

just been doing.

CONDITIONAL PARENTING 15

Unconditional parenting looks at this situation-and, indeed, at

human beings-very differently. For starters, it asks us to consider that

the reasons for what Abigail has done may be more "inside" than

"outside." Her actions can't necessarily be explained, in mechanical

fashion, by looking at external forces like positive responses to her

previous behavior. Perhaps she is overwhelmed by fears that she can't

name, or by frustrations that she doesn't know how to express.

Unconditional parenting assumes that behaviors are just the out­

ward expression of feelings and thoughts, needs and intentions. In a

nutshell, it's the child who engages in a behavior, not just the behav­

ior itself, that matters. Children are not pets to be trained, nor are they

computers, programmed to respond predictably to an input. They act

this way rather than that way for many different reasons, some of

which may be hard to tease apart. But we can't just ignore those rea­

sons and respond only to the effects (that is, the behaviors). Indeed,

each of those reasons probably calls for a completely different course

of action. If, for example, it turned out that Abigail was really being

defiant because she's worried about the implications of our pay ing so

much attention to her baby brother, then we're going to have deal with

that, not merely try to stamp out the way she's expressing her fear.

Alongside our efforts to understand and address specific reasons

for specific actions, there is one overriding imperative: She needs to

know we love her, come what may. In fact, it's especially important

tonight for her to be able to snuggle with us, to see from our actions

that our love for her is unshakable. That's what will help her get

through this bad patch.

In any case, imposing what amounts to a punishment isn't likely

to be constructive. It probably will start her crying all over again. And

even if it did succeed in shutting her up temporarily -or in preventing

her from expressing whatever she's feeling tomorrow night for fear

of making us pull away from her-its overall impact is unlikely to be

positive. This is true, first, because it doesn't address what's going on

in her head, and, second, because what we see as teaching her a les­

son will likely appear to her as though we're withholding our love.

16 UNCONDITIONAL PARENTING

In a general sense, this will make her more unhappy, perhaps cause her

to feel alone and unsupported. In a specific sense, it will teach her that

she is loved-and lovable-only when she acts the way we want. The

available research, which I'll review shortly, strongly suggests that this

will just make things worse.

As I've thought about these issues over the years, I've come to believe

that conditional parenting can't be completely explained by behavior­

ism. Something else is going on here. Once again, imagine the situa­

tion: A child is yelling, obviously upset, and when she quiets down her

daddy lies in bed with his arm around her and reads her a Frog and

Toad story. In response, the proponent of conditional parenting

exclaims, "No, no, no, you're just reinforcing her bad behavior! You're

teaching her that it's alhight to be naughty!"

This interpretation doesn't merely reflect an assumption about

what kids learn in a given situation, or even how they learn. It reflects

an awfully sour view of children-and, by extension, of human nature.

It assumes that, given half a chance, kids will take advantage of us.

Give 'em an inch, they'll take a mile. They will draw the worst possi­

ble lesson from an ambiguous situation (not "I'm loved anyway" but

"Yay! It's okay to make trouble!"). Acceptance without strings

attached will just be interpreted as permission to act in a way that's

selfish, demanding, greedy, or inconsiderate. At least in part, then, con­

ditional parenting is based on the deeply cynical belief that accepting

kids for who they are just frees them to be bad because, well, that's

who they are.1

By contrast, the unconditional approach to parenting begins with

the reminder that Abigail's goal is not to make me miserable. She's not

being malicious. She's telling me in the only way she knows how that

something is wrong. It may be something that just happened, or it may

reveal undercurrents that have been there for a while. This approach

offers a vote of confidence in children, a challenge to the assumption

that they'll derive the wrong lesson from affection, or that they'd

CONDITIONAL PARENTING 17

always want to act badly if they thought they could get away with it.

Such a perspective is not romantic or unrealistic, a denial of the

fact that kids (and adults) sometimes do rotten things. Kids need to be

guided and helped, yes, but they're not little monsters who must be

tamed or brought to heel. They have the capacity to be compassion­

ate or aggressive, altruistic or selfish, cooperative or competitive. A

great deal depends on how they're raised-including, among other

things, whether they feel loved unconditionally. And when young chil­

dren pitch a fit, or refuse to get in the tub as they said they would, this

can often be understood in terms of their age-that is, their inability

to understand the source of their unease, to express their feelings in

more appropriate ways, to remember and keep their promises. In

important ways, then, the choice between conditional and uncondi­

tional parenting is a choice between radically different views of human

nature.

But there's one more set of assumptions that we should lay bare.

In our society, we are taught that good things must always be earned,

never given away. Indeed, many people become infuriated at the pos­

sibility that this precept has been violated. Notice, for example, the

hostility many people feel toward welfare and those who rely on it. Or

the rampant use of pay-for-performance schemes in the workplace. Or

the number of teachers who define anything enjoyable (like recess) as

a treat, a kind of payment for living up to the teacher's expectations.

Ultimately, conditional parenting reflects a tendency to see almost

every human interaction, even among family members, as a kind of eco­

nomic transaction. The laws of the marketplace-supply and demand,

tit for tat-have assumed the status of universal and absolute princi­

ples, as though everything in our lives, including what we do with our

children, is analogous to buying a car or renting an apartment.

One parenting author-a behaviorist, not coincidentally-put it

this way: "If I wish to take my child for a ride or even if I wish to hug

and kiss her, I must first be certain that she has earned it. "2 Before you

dismiss this as the view of a lone extremist, consider that the eminent

psychologist Diana Baumrind (see pp. 104-5) made a similar argument

18 UNCONDITIONAL PARENTING

against unconditional parenting, declaring that "the rule of reciproc­

ity, of paying for value received, is a law of life that applies to us all. "3

Even many writers and therapists who don't address the issue

explicitly nevertheless seem to rely on some sort of economic model.

If we read between the lines, their advice appears to be based on the

belief that when children don't act the way we want, the things they

like ought to be withheld from them. After all, people shouldn't get

something for nothing . Not even happiness. Or love.

How many times have you heard it said-emphatically, defiantly­

that something or other is "a privilege, not a right"? Sometimes I fan­

tasize about conducting a research study to determine what personality

characteristics are generally found in people who take this stance.

Imagine someone who insists that everything from ice cream to atten­

tion should be made conditional on how children act, that these things

should never simply be given away. Can you picture this person? W hat

facial expression do you see? How happy is this person? Does he or

she really enjoy being with children? Would you want this person as

a friend?

Also, when I hear the "privilege, not a right" line, I always find

myself wondering what the speaker would regard as a right. Is there

anything to which human beings are simply entitled? Are there no rela­

tionships we would want to exempt from economic laws? It's true that

adults expect to be compensated for their work; just as they expect to

pay for food and other things. But the question is whether, or under

what circumstances, a similar "rule of reciprocity" applies to our deal­

ings with friends and family. Social psychologists have noticed that

there are indeed some people with whom we have what might be called

an exchange relationship: I do something for you only if you do some­

thing for me (or give something to me). But they quickly add that this

is not true, nor would we want it to be true, of all our relationships,

some of which are based on caring rather than on reciprocity. In fact,

one study found that people who see their relationships with their

spouses in terms of exchange, taking care to get as much as they give,

tend to have marriages that are less satisfying .4

CONDITIONAL PARENTING 19

When our kids grow up, there will be plenty of occasions for them to take their places as economic actors, as consumers and workers, where self-interest rules and the terms of each exchange can be pre­ cisely calculated. But unconditional parenting insists that the family ought to be a haven, a refuge, from such transactions. In particular, love from one's parents does not have to be paid for in any sense. It

is purely and simply a gift. It is something to which all children are entitled.

If that makes sense to you, and if any of the other underlying assumptions of unconditional parenting ring true as well-that we ought to be looking at the whole child, not just at behaviors; that we shouldn't assume the worst about children's inclinations; and so on­ then we need to call into question all the conventional discipline tech­ niques that are based o'n the opposites of these assumptions. Those practices that define conditional parenting tend to be ways of doing things to children to produce obedience. By contrast, the suggestions offered in the latter half of this book, which flow naturally from the idea of unconditional parenting, are variations on the theme of work­ ing with children to help them grow into decent people and good decision-makers.

Thus, we might summarize the differences between these two approaches as follows:

UNCONDITIONAL CONDITIONAL

Focus Whole child (including Behavior reasons, thoughts, feelings)

View of Human Nature Positive or balanced Negative

View of Parental Love A gift A privilege to be earned

Strategies "Working with" "Doing to" (Problem solving) (Control via rewards and

punishments)

20 UNCONDITIONAL PARENTING

The Effects of Conditional Parenting

Just as it's possible for our practices to be at odds with the long-term goals

we hold for our children (see Introduction), so there might be an incon­

sistency between the methods associated with conditional parenting and

our most basic beliefs. In both instances, it may make sense to reconsider

what we're doing with our kids. But the case against conditional parent­

ing doesn't end with its connection to values and assumptions that many

of us will find troubling. That case becomes even stronger once we inves­

tigate the real-world effects such parenting has on children.

Nearly half a century ago, the pioneering psychologist Carl Rogers

offered an answer to the question "What happens when a parent's love

depends on what children do?" He explained that those on the receiv­

ing end of such love come to disown the parts of themselves that aren't

valued. Eventually they regard themselves as worthy only when they

act (or think or feel) in specific ways.5 This is basically a recipe for neu­

rosis-or worse. A publication by the Irish Department of Health and

Children (which has been circulated and adopted by other organiza­

tions all over the world) offers ten examples to illustrate the concept

of "emotional abuse." Number two on the list, right after "persistent

criticism, sarcasm, hostility, or blaming," is "conditional parenting, in

which the level of care shown to a child is made contingent on his or

her behaviours or actions. " 6

Most parents, if asked, would insist that of course they love their

children unconditionally, and that this is true despite their use of the

strategies that I (and other writers) have identified as problematic.

Some parents might even say that they discipline their children in this

way because they love them. But I want to return to an observation

that so far I've made only in passing. 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. 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.

CONDITIONAL PARENTING 21

Researchers trying to study the effects of different styles of disci­

pline have not had an easy time trying to figure out how to identify

and measure what actually goes on in people's homes. It's not always

possible to observe the relevant interactions firsthand ( or even to

videotape them), so some experiments have been done in laboratories,

where a parent and a child are asked to do something together. Some­

times parents are interviewed, or asked to fill out a questionnaire,

about their usual parenting styles. If the children are old enough, they may be asked what their parents do-or, if they're grown, what their

parents used to do.

Each of these techniques has its drawbacks, and the choice of

method can affect a study's results. When parents and children are

asked separately to describe what's going on, for example, they may

offer very different accounts.7 Interestingly, when there is some objec­

tive way to get at the truth, children's perceptions of their parents'

behaviors prove to be every bit as accurate as the parents' reports of

their own behaviors. 8

But the important question is not who's right, which, where feel­

ings are concerned, is usually unanswerable. Rather, what matters is

whose perspective is associated with various consequences to the chil­

dren. Consider one study that investigated a version of conditional

parenting. Kids whose parents said they used this approach weren't in

any worse shape than kids whose parents said they didn't. But when

the researcher separated the kids on the basis of whether they felt their

parents used this technique, the difference was striking. On average,

children who said they experienced conditional affection from their

parents weren't doing as well as children who didn't report receiving

conditional affection.9 The details of this study will be discussed later;

my point here is simply that what we think we're doing (or would

swear we're not doing) doesn't matter as much, in terms of the impact

on our kids, as their experience of what we're doing.

There has been a small surge in research on conditional parenting

over the last few years, and one of the most remarkable examples was

just published in 2004. In that study, information was collected from

22 U NCON DITI ONAL PARENTI NG

more than a hundred college students, each of whom was asked

whether the love offered by his or her parents tended to vary depend­

ing on any of four possible conditions: whether the student as a child

had (1) succeeded in school, (2) practiced hard for sports, (3) been con­

siderate toward others, or ( 4) suppressed negative emotions such as

fear. The students were also asked several other questions, including

whether they did, in fact, tend to act in those ways (that is, hide their

feelings, study hard for tests, and so on) and how they got along with

their parents.

It turned out that the use of conditional love seemed to be at least

somewhat successful at producing the desired behaviors. Children who

received approval from their parents only if they acted in a particular

way were a bit more likely to act that way-even in college. But the

cost of this strategy was substantial. For starters, the students who

thought their parents loved them conditionally were much more likely

to feel rejected and, as a result, to resent and dislike their parents.

You can easily imagine that, had they been asked, each of those

parents would have declared, "I don't know where my son gets that

idea! I love him no matter what!" Only because the researchers

thought to interview the (now grown) children directly did they hear

a very different-and very disturbing-story. Many of the students felt

they had consistently received less affection whenever they failed to

impress or obey their parents-and it was precisely these students

whose relationships with their parents were likely to be strained.

To drive home the point, the researchers conducted a second study,

this one with more than a hundred mothers of grown children. With

this generation, too, conditional love proved damaging. Those moth­

ers who, as children, sensed that they were loved only when they lived

up to their parents' expectations now felt less worthy as adults.

Remarkably, though, they tended to use the identical approach once

they became parents. The mothers used conditional affection "with

their own children in spite of the strategy['s] having had negative

effects on them." 10

Although this is the first study (as far as I know) to show that con-

CON D IT I O NA L PAR E NT I NG 23

ditional parenting styles can be passed on to one's children, other psy­

chologists have found similar evidence about its effects. Some of these

are discussed in the following chapter, which describes two specific

ways in which conditional parenting is put into practice. Even in gen­

eral terms, though, the results are fairly damning. For example, a

group of researchers at the University of Denver has shown that

teenagers who feel they have to fulfill certain conditions in order to

win their parents' approval may end up not liking themselves. That,

in turn, may lead a given adolescent to construct a "false self"-in

other words, to pretend to be the kind of person whom his or her par­

ents will love. This desperate strategy to gain acceptance is often asso­

ciated with depression, a sense of hopelessness, and a tendency to lose

touch with one's true self. At some point, such teenagers may not even

know who they really are because they've had to work so hard to

become something they're not. 11

Over many years, researchers have found that "the more condi­

tional the support [one receives], the lower one's perceptions of over­

all worth as a person." When children receive affection with strings

attached, they tend to accept themselves only with strings attached.

By contrast, those who feel they're accepted unconditionally-by their

parents or, according to other research, even by a teacher-are likely

to feel better about themselves, 12 exactly as Carl Rogers predicted.

And that brings us to the ultimate purpose of this book, the cen­

tral question I invite you to ponder. In the questionnaires that are used

to study conditional parenting, a teenager or young adult is typically

asked to indicate "strong agreement," "agreement," "neutral feel­

ings," "disagreement," or "strong disagreement" in response to sen­

tences such as "My mother maintained a sense of loving connection

with me even during our worst conflicts" or "When my dad disagrees

with me, I know that he still loves me."13 So, how would you like your

children to answer that sort of question in five or ten or fifteen years­

and how do you think they will answer it?