Want your child to grow up happy, independent, and confident? Traditional parenting tactics—the ones focused on rewards for good behavior and punishments for bad—might actually be working against you.
In Unconditional Parenting, Alfie Kohn argues that these conditional techniques send children a damaging message: that your love depends on their compliance. Kohn proposes a different approach: unconditional parenting, which prioritizes the parent-child relationship over short-term obedience and treats children as partners in solving problems rather than subjects to be controlled. This guide explores why traditional parenting fails, what harm it causes, and how you can shift toward an unconditional approach that supports your long-term goals for your child.
Table of Contents
Why We Need to Rethink Parenting
In his book Unconditional Parenting, Alfie Kohn notes that most parents have similar long-term goals for their children: They want them to be happy, independent, confident, and creative. But he cautions that it’s easy to forget about these goals in the short term and shift your focus to whether or not the child is being “good” (doing what you want them to do) or “bad” (doing something else) at any given moment.
This concept of “good” and “bad” behavior, and the system of rewards and punishments that springs up to reinforce it, entangles both parents and children so deeply that it can be hard to see alternatives. Kohn identifies several problems with these disciplinary systems, but the central one is that rewards and punishments make children feel that their parents’ love, approval, and affection are contingent on their behaving well.
(Shortform note: While Kohn’s methods are similar to those of other gentle parenting advocates, his emphasis on unconditional love over behavior change strategies sets him apart from most others. This underlying attitude of unconditional support does seem to be important. For example, research shows that both negative and positive “parental conditional regard” have negative effects on children, especially in terms of how they learn to cope with difficult emotions. The opposite of conditional regard—autonomy support—has positive effects.)
According to Kohn, mainstream parenting advice focuses almost exclusively on discipline: how to use rewards to encourage good behavior and punishments to discourage bad behavior. He argues that even seemingly progressive parenting advice (for example, doling out attention, affection, and praise when you catch your child behaving well or putting a misbehaving child in a time-out) still buys into an overall parenting framework built around rewards and punishments. This framework, he says, is outdated, and it may even be damaging your children.
Parents are often advised to tweak these strategies to make them less damaging, for example by ignoring bad behavior rather than actively punishing it or by praising effort, not ability. But Kohn says this misses the point—he encourages parents to break free of the old framework entirely.
We’ll look at Kohn’s broad argument for change: how traditional parenting techniques work, why you shouldn’t use them, and how you can shift your priorities so they align with an unconditional approach.
| It’s Not Just Parenting: School Grades as Rewards and Punishments The bulk of Unconditional Parenting focuses on parent-child interactions, but Kohn also takes on the education system. He argues that good and bad grades constitute systems of reward and punishment, and as such, they get in the way of children’s natural desire to learn and negatively affect their relationships with their teachers. He also notes in Unconditional Parenting that when parents reward their children for good grades and punish them for bad ones, this multiplies the damage caused. Kohn isn’t the first person to suggest alternatives to grades. In most Montessori schools, for example, teachers hand out progress reports rather than grades for the same reasons. These progress reports include sections on broader areas of development, such as inquisitiveness, desire to explore, and spirit of cooperation, and teachers rate the degree to which children have mastered particular academic skills (for example, beginning, in progress, or fully mastered). Receiving progress reports doesn’t seem to hurt these kids’ academic prospects—Montessori students typically score better on standardized tests than students from mainstream schools, as well as write more creatively and have better social skills, possibly lending weight to Kohn’s claim that grades do more harm than good. |
The Problems With Conditional Parenting
Kohn argues that any system of rewards and punishments (and their close relatives, bribes, and threats) is ultimately destined to fail both parent and child. Specifically, parents should stop using these techniques for six reasons:
1. They’re rooted in behaviorism, an outdated psychological theory that’s inappropriate to use with human children. Kohn traces conditional parenting techniques (including the time-out) back to the work of 1950s behaviorists, most of whom experimented on pigeons, rats, and chimpanzees.
2. They send children the wrong message. Conditional parenting techniques teach children that:
- You only love them when they behave well.
- Compliance is more important than independent thinking.
- Their parents’ approval is more important than their own desires.
3. They make children self-interested. Rewards, punishments, threats, and bribes make kids selfish because these techniques cause them to focus on the consequences to themselves rather than on the consequences to others.
4. They’re manipulative and disrespectful. Rewards and punishments are designed to control children. They trivialize kids’ own desires and points of view in a way that you’d never consider doing with another adult.
5. They don’t work. Rewards, punishments, bribes, and threats might “work” to achieve compliance in the short term, but in the long term they’re ineffective and often backfire. In fact, children whose parents don’t offer rewards and punishments are more likely to comply when their parents do ask them to do something. This effect even seems to kick in instantly—in one study, 3- and 4-year-old children whose mothers were told not to control their play during a short play session were more likely to comply with their mothers’ instructions immediately afterward. And even if a technique does elicit compliance in the short term, Kohn encourages you to question whether the short-term win is worth the damage you might have done to the relationship.
6. They have damaging long-term effects. Kohn cites studies showing that children whose parents use “control techniques” end up with poor self-esteem and depression and may even be more likely to commit crimes.
| Conditional Parenting Techniques: Are They as Damaging as Kohn Thinks? Unconditional Parenting came out in 2005, when there wasn’t a lot of hard evidence for or against rewards and punishments as disciplinary techniques. Some research that’s been published in the interim does seem to support Kohn’s case—for example, there’s now evidence that unpredictable and severe parental discipline alters the structure of children’s brains and that positive parenting improves children’s emotional and behavioral control. However, the research on parental discipline is plagued by bias and unreliable methods. One problem is the near impossibility of doing randomized controlled trials in parenting research (most parents would, understandably, object to having to change how they interact with their kids just because they’re assigned randomly to an experimental group). This means that most of the studies rely on correlations, making it hard to be sure about causality. For example, it’s entirely possible that parents might behave more punitively with children who act out constantly and more sensitively with children who are kind to them. There may be other factors, too—for example, aggression may have genetic components, and even seemingly unrelated things like language competence change how parents respond to their kids. Kohn draws a lot on his own parenting experience throughout the book, and it could be that this approach worked with his children because they were already less inclined to act out. It does seem that kids who are more difficult for adults to deal with (for example, those who’ve been diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder) comply more if they’re given clear instructions, time-outs, and other even stronger disciplinary measures. But this, of course, doesn’t answer Kohn’s question about whether gains in short-term compliance are worth potentially damaging the relationship in the long term. |
The Solution: Unconditional Parenting
To replace ineffective and damaging conditional parenting tactics, Kohn proposes “unconditional parenting.” This means making it absolutely clear to your child that your love doesn’t depend on their compliance.
Unconditional parenting:
1. Prioritizes the relationship over the behavior. Kohn argues that people who use rewards and punishments treat the parent-child relationship as transactional. But while transactional relationships are common for adults, they’re not appropriate within families. Parental love and affection shouldn’t have to be earned.
2. Prioritizes long-term goals over short-term ones. Conditional parenting techniques might make a child comply right now, but they don’t help her to develop empathy, autonomy, and healthy self-esteem in the long run.
3. Prioritizes the child’s developmental needs over the adult’s convenience. Let’s be honest—parents often demand that a child do something because it makes the parent’s life easier, not because they have his best interests at heart. Unconditional parenting is putting the child first. To do this, you’ll need to be patient, flexible, and scrupulously honest about your motivations.
4. Sees the child as an active, rather than a passive, participant. Kohn recommends “working with” children rather than “doing to” them, which means seeing difficult behavior as a problem to be solved together, rather than as a trigger for criticism or punishment.
(Shortform note: Kohn doesn’t discuss the science behind this readjustment of priorities, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that kids’ brains benefit from a close, supportive relationship with their caregivers, that caregivers who focus on long-term goals behave in a more nurturing way and are better at explaining their reasoning, and that children who see discipline as fair are more likely to comply. And one interesting joint problem-solving method—though Kohn likely wouldn’t endorse this approach—is asking kids to come up with their own punishments. Kids are often surprisingly fair in determining punishments, and may even go too far, turning into barbaric “little Stalins.”)
Kohn notes that unconditional parenting is much more demanding than falling back on rewards and punishments. Parents who want to move toward unconditional parenting have to be patient, self-aware, and scrupulously honest with themselves and their kids. They also have to battle the tendency to pass conditional parenting from generation to generation. (Shortform note: Though conditional parenting does seem in part to be generational, there’s also evidence that parenting in many societies is becoming more sensitive and affectionate across the board. This could partly be due to increasing education levels, which seem to be associated with a more sensitive approach.)
Learn More About Traditional vs. Modern Parenting
Want to learn more about traditional vs. modern parenting methods? Check out our full guide to Unconditional Parenting.
