The most recent of his 14 books are SCHOOLING BEYOND MEASURE…And Other Unorthodox Essays About Education (2015) and THE MYTH OF THE SPOILED CHILD: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom About Children and Parenting (2014). I encourage you to listen.Īlfie Kohn writes and speaks widely on human behavior, education, and parenting. Whether you're a parent or a teacher, or someone who's been assessing and thinking on the ways your parents raised, disciplined, trained you, there's a great deal here you may not yet have ever considered. Today, an interview in which, even listening to it after the fact, I find myself saying "but what about.?" all while continuing to think that Alfie has raised questions, observations, and research that, as both a parent and a professor, I think are worth a great deal of attention. Instead, we should “work with” our kids to discern what they need to flourish. “What kids need to flourish is to be loved for who they are, not for what they did.” By punishing or rewarding a child for what they do, he argues, we’re placing the emphasis on controlling their behavior, instead of instilling a true sense of virtue. “Punishments and rewards of any kind are neither necessary nor constructive,” he says.
And though I leave with maybe more questions than I had when I started, his arguments are not lightly considered. “If you want to destroy children's love of reading, the best way to do that is to give them a prize for reading a book,” says Alfie Kohn, author of the widely-read and provocative "Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishment to Love and Reason." But what if this proposed solution is actually creating a deeper problem?
To achieve such ends, much conventional wisdom suggests that we employ a system of rewarding good behavior and punishing bad behavior. Most of us, I assume, would go to great lengths to ensure our kids turn out with humility, independence, and a sense of right and wrong. Raising children is not for the faint of heart, as any parent or teacher knows. Are many parenting styles doing more harm than good?
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