I liked the ideas in this book, though I felt like Kohn kept repeating himself to try to drill home people’s understanding of why to do it. I’d bought in pretty early on so I was ready for application advice way before he gave it. One of the things I appreciated most about this book was Kohn’s insistence on seeing a child as a whole person with needs of his or her own, needs that are not or should not be secondary just because of being a child. Unconditional Parenting offers many logical and loving parenting and discipline strategies to help meet a whole family’s needs. It just took awhile to get there. The concept of unconditional parenting appeals to me, the idea that we love our kids unconditionally: whether they behave, throw a tantrum, do (or don’t do) well in school. Kohn debunks many popular discipline strategies including time-outs, positive reinforcement and praise, reward systems, and punishment. Instead he offers thirteen parenting techniques that help parents to honor their kids and to treat them as if they like them rather than are in charge of them. He also challenges parents to consider how they would feel if they were receiving the treatment they’re giving their kids. Are we helping our children feel loved and accepted even when their behavior is not acceptable? He warns against the unspoken message, “We love you honey; we just hate almost everything you do” (143) and offers strategies for dealing with problematic behavior. Our culture has borne a generation of "praise junkies" - children whose behavior is motivated not by intrinsic goals, but by rewards or the avoidance of punishment. True, Classical Conditioning is a proven method for behavior modification...but do we really want to treat our children like Pavlov's dogs?

What Is Unconditional Parenting? - Think Positive Check

Expect lots of unsolicited pieces of advice and off-hand comments, even from strangers who think you’re doing a poor job of raising your kids. They may even suggest you read a parenting book or two. Thankfully, there are positive ways to handle judgments without being reactive. I recommend reading this article to learn what to do when other parents judge your parenting. Bottom LineShowing unconditional support means you need to spend less time instructing, leading, commanding, correcting, and talking and more time asking clarifying questions to help you understand how best to help your child. You also avoid making basic assumptions. Discussion rather than punishment. Telling a child to go to their room after they hit someone isn’t going to magically make them realise that they hurt another person especially if they’re very young when this event occurs. By discussing what happened you can help children to learn that their actions do have consequences but that those consequences are not going to their room or getting grounded, they are that other people will be affected, they may get hurt and upset etc. No one is perfect. Please don’t pretend to be because of your children. Your job as a parent is to help your children to learn, discover and explore the world. Show them that people do make mistakes, they are sad sometimes, nobody knows everything and everyone needs help some of the time. If a child sees everyone else as perfect but knows that they are not, what will the repercussions be to their self-confidence, self-love, self-worth and the way they view the world. Think resentment, regret, hatred etc. It’s not good basically.

Unconditional Parenting | Book by Alfie Kohn | Official

The front cover of this book describes it as "A Provocative Challenge to the Conventional Wisdom about Discipline." Uh, YEAH. It's brutal. But I understand that Kohn feels he needs to convince his readers of the evidence against rewards and punishments for children. His case seems strong to a layman like me, though I can imagine a lot of convincing is needed for many parents or parents-to-be. The point was fully belabored. It’s no exaggeration to say I would be a dramatically different parent had I not been introduced to Kohn’s ideas right before getting pregnant with my son (thanks Dais). It’s actually terrifying thinking about how antithetical his approach is to our cultural norms, when it all makes such perfect sense. I listen to them when they give reasons of why they didn't hand in their homework, but I make it clear that I expect their behavior to change anyway. I don't listen to their excuses when the “missing homework” behavior continues. I don't listen to explanations when they are really just justifications (see Dan Ariely's work about the false attributions people consistently give for their own motivations/behaviors in my behavioral economics reading list.). Results matter. Intent doesn't always matter. This is life. To shield children from this basic cognitive/behavioral reality is to warp their perspective and set them up for real-world disappointments.Parenting gets better when you see the world from your child’s perspective, and this is a crucial aspect of unconditionality when it comes to this parenting style. The overall goal is to make children live more authentically and feel supported in their decisions as you become a better parent. Everything I’ve said in this article about unconditional parenting can be summed up in one short sentence: never stop loving your kids, no matter what! One basic need all children have, Kohn argues, is to be loved unconditionally, to know that they will be accepted even if they screw up or fall short. Yet conventional approaches to parenting such as punishments (including "time-outs"), rewards (including positive reinforcement), and other forms of control teach children that they are loved only when they please us or impress us. Kohn cites a body of powerful, and largely unknown, research detailing the damage caused by leading children to believe they must earn our approval. That's precisely the message children derive from common discipline techniques, even though it's not the message most parents intend to send. Do everything possible to help her fall in love with what she’s doing, to pay less attention to how successful she was (or is likely to be) and show more interest in the task. That’s just another way of saying that we need to encourage more, judge less, and love always.”

Unconditional Parenting - Booktopia

What I found interesting about this book also is the fact that so many of its proposed ideas seem unbelievable at first but after some time you start to think about it and relate your own childhood and it changes you completely. Rewards and punishments turn children’s attention onto themselves; ‘what will happen to me if I (share, hit him, say thank you etc)’ rather than ‘what will happen to him and how will he feel if I (you get the point)’ This was something that Alfie put into words so well. Read the book just for this point (I don’t have specific quotes but it’s a recurring theme). What kind of people do you look up to, want to know and be friends with? People who are considerate, kind and look out for you or people who only do stuff for you if there is something in it for them. Parenting is not a clear cut way or choice of one style or the other, one of them being good and one being bad, of categorizing parents as either 'conditional'(=bad) or 'unconditional' (=good). I think parents will at some points be practicing one form, at other times the other, and that many many more factors play into how children turn out, that just this one way of categorizing parenting techniques. Parenting and childrearing is a messy business, and parents and children change and vary and different things have different effects on different people. No matter how much research Alfie cited, research itself is a flawed business that can be easily manipulated (just by selectation) and not a reflection of Truth. Just as much research exist to prove a point for behavioristic methods as for Alfies more romantic approaches. Both can be used and misused, and neither approach does well on its own. Readers who are interested in raising moral and compassionate children will be challenged and inspired by Unconditional Parenting.”

Give your children the benefit of the doubt, attribute the best possible motive consistent with the facts. Too theoretical, with not enough practical advice. I love the idea of showing our children that we love them unconditionally. I would have just liked this book to give some more examples of how to show that love while still guiding the children to behave appropriately. The author asserts that we should literally never praise our children, because the kids will start to think that we love them only when they are doing something well. I think that is insane. How is a child supposed to know he accomplished something worthwhile if nobody is there to tell him "Way to go! You did it!" Your kid does something good, it's okay to encourage it, but somehow (and this is the hard part) make it clear that your love is in no way due to the thing they just did.

Unconditional Parenting by Alfie Kohn | Waterstones

In general I guess I have a problem with things, people, views, methods that are either too extremist or too generalizing, or both. Parenting is a journey and while this book equips the reader with some tools to navigate parenthood but it doesn’t promise an easy journey nonetheless. Bottom line: listen to your child, not just with your ears but with your heart, too! 5. Be Flexible While I accept some of Kohn's premises (respect children's ability to make decisions, expect age-appropriate, ability-appropriate behavior), I disagree with his disregard of parents' emotions and feelings. Kohn expects the parent to be ever self-sacrificing, ever-searching for pure motivations behind their children's behavior. Bottom line: never let your child think you’ll only support them if they behave the way you want. Ensure your child understands they can always count on your love and support, no matter what. 4. Ask More, Instruct LessUn îndrumător exceptional pentru cei ce doresc sa cunoasca si/sau aplice parentingul neconditionat bazat pe multa afectiune, rabdare, cooperare, si intelegere a copilului. However, you don’t have to make every single decision for your child. Let your child participate in decision-making, even if their input means very little. Easier said than done. It takes vigilance and practice and most of us will probably never get even close to as good at it as we'd like. But as Kohn explains (and I'm paraphrasing big-time), just the fact that you're trying means you're doing the right thing.