Unconditional Parenting by Alfie Kohn

I have had every intention of writing about my new Gospel of Child Rearing but it hasn’t happened and I think I know why.

1. I’m not a writer
2. Anything I write that may be wise, clever, or funny is wholly accidental
3. I could never do the book justice
4. Just go read the book for yourself

This book is amazing. It will contradict everything you ever thought you knew about raising children. In the past three days my patience has doubled (wait a minute that might not be saying much) and I find my self reasoning (or trying to!) with my children instead of ordering them about. Coincidentally I also stopped eating sugar, again, three days ago. Yet…the book. It’s insightful. It’s enlightening. It’s…just read it already. In fact, read all of his books. I am. .

I’ll leave you with my favorite idea from the book. “…if they do something we don’t like, we’ll make them suffer in order to change their behavior. The only remaining question is how we’ll make them suffer: by causing physical pain through hitting or by causing emotional pain through enforced isolation. And both are based on getting kids to focus on the consequences of their action to themselves, which is, of course, very different from raising children to think about how their actions will effect other people.”

“When we punish, in other words, we lead children to ask, “What do they (the grown-ups with the power) want me to do, and what will happen to me if I don’t do it?” Notice that this is a mirror image of the question evoked in a home or classroom in which children are promised a reward for being good: “What do they want me to do, and what will I get for doing it?” Both questions are entirely about self-interest. And both are completely different from what we’d like kids to ask themselves – for example, “What kind of person do I want to be?”

What kind of person do you want your child to be?