World Renowned author, speaker and thought leader Alfie Kohn is on the podcast. Author of such thought provoking (dare I say controversial) books as….
If you thought that telling your children “good job!” was a good thing, or if you ever offered reward to your kids… then you’ll enjoy this episode. Be ready to challenge you ideas about parenting and how you parent.
Alfie’s website
Alfie on Twitter
Outline:
How did you get started with all this?
– I’ve been writing about human behavior for some time.
– Punished by Rewards grew out of an earlier book I had written about the destructive effects of competition.
– Unconditional Parenting was my first major book just about the idea of raising kids, and that pulled with it the themes and challenges from my earlier books.
I was challenged by what you wrote in Unconditional Parenting. Can you unpack that book a bit?
– It’s not just about skills and behaviors you employ with your children, it’s about how we want our children to turn out in the long run.
– The shift from trying to get kids to do what you want them to do behaviorally, and shifting to the kind of people you want them to become.
– It’s a long term view, unlike other books for parents which offer gimmicks about how to get your kids to do what you want them to.
– I want parents to look beyond the short term and beneath behavior.
– The more you concentrate on behavior, the less you’re going to focus on the motivations behind the behaviors.
You talked about fears of being judged, how do you feel like that has changed with younger generations–with social media and fake perceptions of a perfect life?
– Let’s talk about that fear of being judged…people become worse parents in public. There’s also what our culture judges to be good parenting. It’s not what is supporting our kids and meeting our needs, but what keeps kids quiet and obedient. Our true problem in this culture isn’t the under controlling, it’s the bullying parent who over controls.
– We have to overcome our fears of being judged, and swim upstream against our culture’s ideas of good parenting.
– In our culture, the means of getting compliance has changed (you don’t hit anymore), but the goal of compliance has not.
– I’m asking people not to find a nicer method, but rather challenge our own need to win battles.
– I don’t think it’s hard to figure out what kids need, it’s rather pushing aside the question of kids need and saying “what do I want?”
– Kids want a sense of autonomy, love, connection, belongingness, get new skills. Those are basic human needs. Those needs are trampled on when people try to get us to do what they want.
– Then there are the needs of particular individuals. That’s why we need to be quiet and ask more
Why are parents acting that way?
– I don’t want to be so simplistic as to say we do this to our kids because of what was done to us. A lot of it just has to do with what’s easiest and pressures from the outside world. A lot of us don’t trust children; that if we leave them to make decisions on their own, they will be the wrong decision.
– The more you praise in a phoney way, like training a puppy with a verbal doggie biscuit, people become flustered at the idea of not doing that. It’s the fear that if you don’t praise them for being nice, that the kid will never do it again. That’s a very cynical view of human nature.
– Punishments and rewards are two things to do to kids instead of working with them.
The part of the book that focuses on rewards had a big impact on me.
– The process for me of thinking through rewards happened in two stages.
– The first stage was it doesn’t matter how motivated people are to do things, it’s the kind of motivation. Intrinsic motivation versus extrinsic motivation. It’s different for a child to read a book because he likes reading versus reading because he’ll get a reward. Research shows that extrinsic motivation corrodes intrinsic motivation. The more you reward people for doing something, the more they lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward. If you praise a child for being helpful, the more they’ll become selfish.
– The second stage I wrote about in Unconditional Parenting. It has to do with conditionality. When you praise someone, you are communicating that I am giving you this approval only with strings attached. I’m only going to show enthusiasm because of how you acted. If you stop acting that way, the care and attention will go away. That’s the last thing a kid needs. They need to be accepted unconditionally.
That’s the startling thing for me, reading the studies. How do you undo that damage?
– Once you see it through a different lens, you realize praise is just as manipulative and controlling as punishment, and all the “good job” feels like nails on a chalkboard.
– You and your co parent can keep each other in check. If the kid is old enough, you can even bring them into the conversation.
– If we want to shift from a doing to style of parenting to a working with style of parenting, that shift itself should not be done to children. You want to bring them in on the process and make it more respectful.
– The opposite of praise is not punishment, it’s unconditional acceptance without strings attached.
Why would people resort to the praise style of parenting, when it’s all around you, or feeling obligated to give a praise. It feels weird not doing that.
– Stopping with the tangible rewards is the hardest part. Sometimes we can do what we need to do just by saying what we saw. I’m not going to steal her pleasure by praising her and making it about my approval. I can instead just describe what I see. “There are toes on this animal. You weren’t drawing toes a few weeks ago.”
– That pulls her into the drawing. It doesn’t tell her how to feel about it.
– Praise is a judgement, which is rarely what they need. What we can do is ask questions. “How did you figure out how to draw toes? Why did you share your brownie with your friend?” that way she reflects on why she did what she did.
That shift is based on the assumption that we want kids to grow up to be autonomous, reflective, happy and fulfilled versus becoming obedient and submissive to what we want.
Transcription below (This may contain typos…)
[00:00:00] Mike: [00:00:00] Welcome to the two set dad podcast, where we interview dads to discuss their journeys of intentional fatherhood while doing work they care about and living a life of purpose. I’m your host, Mike Sudyk
Alfie: [00:00:19] when my daughter was quite young, she had a real facility for drawing, really enjoyed it, But I’m not gonna deal with her pleasure by saying, Oh, that’s so beautiful. What a lovely, colorful drawing. I really like your use of, with this is training her to be left, interested in drawing and to see drawing as a means to the end of getting my approval.
Mike: [00:00:46] Do you feel inadequate as a parent? Do you feel like others are judging you personally based on the behavior of your children? Do you fear that maybe you’ll baby your children too much. Of course you do. We all [00:01:00] do. And if you’re a normal well parents that you struggle with all these things. Alfie Cohen, the guest on today’s podcast episode is the leading expert in human behavior and parenting.
He’s authored several best-sellers, including punished by rewards and unconditional parenting among others. And I’m honored to be able to have him on the show today. And I look forward to him sharing his knowledge with you as he tackles some of these fears and some of these approaches to parenting. And he really dives into challenging why we do what we do as parents.
It’s definitely controversial, it’s thought provoking. real excited to share this with you guys. today is a very special episode. I am very honored to have Alfie Cohen on the show. Who’s a best selling author of multiple books. Two of which I recently read punished by rewards and unconditional parenting.
So alpha is a. Thought provoking, challenging, writer that talks about how do we raise our kids, to not only boost intrinsic motivation, but also [00:02:00] just to raise good people. And so he really goes against a lot of the, traditional schooling methods and very insightful guy, and I’m honored to have him on the show.
So thank you so much. All of you for taking the time.
Alfie: [00:02:12] I’m glad to be here.
Mike: [00:02:14] So one of the things I’m really curious about is how you got started in all this. take me back to the beginning and in the journey to get you to where you are today.
Alfie: [00:02:24] I guess that depends on how broadly you define where I am today.
I’ve been writing about issues having to do with human behavior, including education and parenting for some time now, punished by rewards. Which is a book that argues against the idea of dangling goodies in front of people to get them to do what we want at work at home or at school grew out of an earlier book.
I’d written about the destructive effects competition. And if you like, I can connect those dots for you if you want. but later I began to write books more specifically, either [00:03:00] about schooling or parents and unconditional parenting was my. My first and major book, just about the idea of raising kids.
And, of course it pulled with it, some of the themes and ideas and challenges that I had begun to raise in earlier books.
Mike: [00:03:19] Sure. Yeah, I know, I just finished up unconditional parenting and one of the lines that stuck with me in that book, as you say, in my experience, what distinguishes truly great parents is their willingness to confront troubling questions about what they’ve been doing and what has been done to them.
And, I was just challenged by that. And I, I don’t know if you could unpack that a little bit in how to approach that way of thinking, maybe for someone that hasn’t read the book.
Alfie: [00:03:45] Sure. good parenting is not just about a bunch of skills and certainly not about particular behaviors that you employ with your children.
It’s about much bigger questions about how we want our choice and to [00:04:00] turn out in the long run and that shift from how do I get my kid into the bathtub or out of the bathtub or into, or out of the car or the bed had a. Put out fires, so to speak and get kids to do what we want them to do right now. Yeah.
And shift it to a much bigger, deeper set of issues having to do with the kind of people we’d like them to become. That takes a sense of perspective and ability to look beyond the compliance and to look beyond the short run. And that’s very hard to do because the value majority of books for parents and other resources for them are really based on the question, how do we get kids to do whatever we want them to do?
And they offer a whole bunch of, of techniques basically of gimmicks. Some of them are more thoughtful than others. Some of them are kinder than others, but they’re all basically [00:05:00] about. Control. And what I tried to do and unconditional parenting is to encourage parents to look beyond the short term and beneath behavior.
In fact, at one point I even said that you can, evaluate the usefulness. Of any parenting resource in inverse proportion to the number of times, the word behavior appears, the more focus there is on just the actions that you can see and measure the less likely it is that we’re going to get to the needs, the values, the motives that underlie and inform behaviors.
And so this is a book about moving from a doing to approach. To being with children, which is focused on compliance to a working with approach in which we help them to grow into decent, responsible, ethical, happy people. [00:06:00] Yeah.
Mike: [00:06:00] And I think that’s, that was, that obviously the core message in the book, that, for someone that hadn’t read the book and, I know that these are skeptics that might say the things that would go against that.
and you hit on that a little bit in the fear section, when you talk about what’s maybe the motivating factor behind the popular way to go about parenting, which is that control. you talk about. P parental inadequacy or fear of being judged, which I know are huge, that I’ve seen in my own life.
you don’t want to be looked at as a bad parent. If your kid isn’t, standing right in line and behaving, perfectly. I just wondered if you. in conversations you’ve had with people, how you feel like that has changed with, younger generations with social media and this kind of fake perception of a perfect life.
And that’s how that’s maybe played into some of the themes that you have in your book. Does that make sense?
Alfie: [00:06:53] let’s start by looking at it, that question of the fear of being judged and fought inadequate as a [00:07:00] parent. there’s two things going on there. I think one is just our fear of being judged and it’s no wonder that people become worse parents in public, because there are more people, even though they’re strangers who are looking watching potentially right.
Tasking their tongues. But the other feature of that is not just our fear of being judged, but what our culture judges to be good parenting. And there, it’s rather disturbing to report that good parenting consists not of what is supporting our kids and meeting their needs, but what keeps kids quiet and obedient, we’re much more likely to be judged negatively.
Bye folks. Sometimes folks we know our own parents or in-laws for example, But also by complete strangers on the street, we’re likely to be judged negatively, for under controlling kids then for over [00:08:00] controlling them, even though the true problem in this culture is not kids running wild who were spoiled.
That’s the. Dominant conservative narrative. The real problem is the number of parents who basically we bully their children into doing whatever the parent unilaterally wants, irrespective of whether that’s really in the child’s best interest. So hypothetically, you could imagine that. A culture in which we are afraid of being judged by strangers or being insufficiently attentive to our children and what they need, that would still be fear of driving it.
But that would be a mirror image. an alternate universe here, a good child. Is a child who isn’t a pain in the ass to everyone else sits there quietly and does whatever he or she is told, regardless of whether it was reasonable to expect the child to do [00:09:00] that. So we have to overcome not only our own fears, we have to swim upstream, to challenge the dominant approach to parenting in our culture.
Now that has not really changed as far as I can tell. To answer the latter part of your question, with social media or with slight changes in techniques. So for example, these days, at least in many subcultures of North America, it is less common until it just wail off. Often hit a kid smack them dishes, especially in public that’s often frowned on, but while the techniques for getting compliance have changed, the goal compliance sadly has not.
And that’s what I was trying to do. And unconditional parenting has encouraged people to ask, not just what method should we use. Can we find a groovier one, a [00:10:00] jazzier one, a nicer one. But can we challenge our own need to win battles, to get kids, to obey us and instead look past that, to more substantive and humane objectives for our kids.
Mike: [00:10:18] Yeah. And I think a lot of people don’t know what those needs are. so the easy way is to go just to, with the obedience. it’s great. It’s
Alfie: [00:10:26] such fun. I don’t think it’s that hard to figure out what kids need. I don’t see evidence of people struggling with that. I see people instead of pushing aside the question of what kids need and instead asking the question, good, what do I want?
on one level, what kids need, what all human beings need. We can describe as some psychologists have. We want a chance to have some impact on our own lives, a sense of autonomy, where we’re not merely controlled by others. We [00:11:00] also so want the sense of connection. Love belongingness. relationship with others.
And, we want to sense to feel competent to acquire new skills, and capabilities. those are basic human needs. and they are often trampled when somebody else in a family, in a school or in a workplace is simply trying to get what they want us to do to jump through hoops, beyond those.
Widely shared human needs. There are also needs and wants of particular individuals. And we have to be quiet and elicit and listen. As I like to say, a lot of parenting advice can be summarized in. Good parenting advice in four words, talk less, ask more. And there are different ways of asking figuratively.
Speaking for children who may be too young to articulate. But if we [00:12:00] tune in to even an infant, we can find out what this particular child needs on this particular day. And then the question becomes. Are we willing to try to make that happen? The best parents are asking the question, what does my kid need and how can I meet those needs?
Unfortunately, most parenting books are answering the question. How do I get my kid to do whatever I want?
Mike: [00:12:26] And is that just because they haven’t had those needs met with them? that’s a continuous cycle. Is that why? Or is it just a convenience factor? It’s just pure selfishness
Alfie: [00:12:34] or. it could be all of those and more, I don’t want to be so simple stick as to say that we do it to our own kids, just because of what was done to us.
That’s a little Pat, a little facile. although I think if we continue to overlook and run rough shot over our children’s needs, at some point you have to think about. The emotional [00:13:00] makeup and the psychological history of the person doing that. But yeah, a lot of it just has to do with what’s easiest and with, pressures from the yeah.
Outside world, the expectations and assumptions of the folks around us. and yeah, the fears that I discussed in the chapter, you mentioned before, a lot of us really don’t trust children and we feel that if they’re. if we’re, if we leave them, To make decisions on their own. they will always be bad decisions that kids have to be socialized, meaning having good values crammed down their throats, that they have to be trained to adapt.
And underneath that, it’s not just a certain implicit view of children, but if the nature, and by the way, this plays out, not just in a harsh, punitive parenting. But in the more modern form of parenting with rewards and praise. Good job. I really like the way you often and the more the voice gets all.
[00:14:00] Squeaky, in sacrad like that, the darker, the view with human nature, for example, take people who think, of course, if a child does something nice, you have to praise her for doing it. I really liked the way you shared your crayons with Janie. and if you say to people, this is problematic, first of all, it’s appallingly, manipulative, and phony.
You’re trying to train the child as if you are healthy. Training a puppy. You’re not raising a child. When you talk this way, offering a verbal doggy biscuit for doing something that impressed or pleased you. But if people become very flustered at the possibility of not doing that, and then you want to push that and say, why.
And at some level for many people, it’s the belief that if I don’t praise them or reward them for being nice, it will never happen again. It was a fluke. That’s why you have to offer the article official inducement, the verbal doggy biscuit of your approval. Okay. To get [00:15:00] kids to be nice another time. there’s a very dark cynical view of children and human nature that underlies not just.
Punishing them, but rewarding them. And of course, as I try to play out in the book, punishments and rewards, bribes and threats are not opposite strategies. They’re two sides of the same coin. They’re both ways of doing things to kids instead of working with them.
Mike: [00:15:26] Yeah, no, I think that was, another key point for me when I was reading the book, it was like, Oh yeah, you did.
Do you think of them so often as opposites and you, if you’re trying to do the praise thing all the time, you’re often running away from the punishments. you don’t want to do punishments because praise is so much better. Let dad, as we hear, but in reality, it’s the same thing. And that was.
I really was impacted by that, in the book. So
Alfie: [00:15:49] I’m good. I appreciate that. for me, that process of thinking through what’s wrong with rewards. Including verbal rewards, but also, [00:16:00] stickers and, food and money and grades and all the rest. It happened in two stages. The first stage, is in an earlier book, you mentioned called punished by rules, wards.
And there, the basic argument went like this. It doesn’t matter how motivated people are to do things, including children, rather, what matters is the kind of motivation and psychologists distinguish between intrinsic motivation, which is where you do something because you get some gratification just from doing it.
And extrinsic motivation, which means you get something outside the task, extrinsic to the task, like a reward for doing it. So for example, it’s very different for a child to read a book because he likes reading or he likes this author, or he likes this topic. And on the other hand to read a book because somebody is going to give them a prize or a grade or praise for reading it, it turns out.
That lots and lots of research shows that rewards aren’t [00:17:00] just inferior to intrinsic motivation. They actually corrode. Or destroy intrinsic motivation. The more you reward people for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward. So if you give a child a good grade in school research overwhelmingly shows.
Those children are likely to lose interest in the learning itself, compared to kids lucky enough to go to schools where they don’t have grades, they have other better ways of informing parents. What’s going on. If you praise a child for being helpful, children actually become more selfish because you’ve taught them.
That the reason to help is not how you make that other kid feel. Instead, you are going to get something for it, even if it’s just recognition, rewards, undermine the intrinsic motivation we’re trying to promote justice punishments do [00:18:00] so that was. That was in another book a while ago, the first case against rewards and praise.
But later I began to realize the news with rewards, including praise was even worse. And that’s what unconditional parenting was about as the title reflects. There’s another problem which has to do with conditionality. When you praise somebody, you are basically communicating. I’m giving you this attention, this acknowledgement, this approval, this love only with strings attached.
Only when you jump through my hoops. When I say good job to you, I’m saying I’m going to show enthusiasm because of how you acted. So if you stop acting that way, the acknowledgement, the approval. The attention, the care will go away. And that is the last thing [00:19:00] that children need for healthy development to say to kids in effect.
I’m I love you because of what you do. Is the opposite of what they need yeah. Is to be loved and accepted unconditional personally, just for who they are. So rewards turn out to be really, to provide a double whammy. They undermine intrinsic motivation and they communicate conditional care.
Mike: [00:19:28] Yeah, I think that I agree with what you’re saying a hundred percent. I think that is the undermining and corroding of intrinsic motivation. Is to me the startling thing that as you read that and you see the studies and it’s wow, you don’t realize the impact that has that’s longterm.
that’s hard to reverse. If you are doing these practices from birth up to, my kids are six years old and it’s like, those things are hard to undo it as far as I could. I can assume, and. that’s [00:20:00] scary,
Alfie: [00:20:02] but it’s not impossible. Yeah. It helps. Once the light bulb goes off and you realize, you look at it through a different lens to switch metaphors and realize praising kids is not, a lot of people are just.
Or encouraged to do that, don’t punish your kids, reward them. don’t use a stick, use a carrot, catch them, do something, doing something right. And then give them a doggy does get for doing and to realize that’s just as manipulative and controlling and. It turns out to be counterproductive and bad and other sorts of ways that leads a lot of people to gulp.
But when you see it that way, then suddenly when you hear a good shop all around, you it’s suddenly becomes like nails. Scratching down a Blackboard. It’s impossible to just not hear it anymore. And if you’re lucky enough to have a co-parent, who hopefully [00:21:00] there’s this understanding and this desire to work with kids, instead of doing things to them.
then you can check each other. you can converse. And in fact, even if you’ve been doing this to your kid for a while, if the kid’s old enough, you can bring the child in on a conversation by having a really thoughtful dialogue about, here’s something I read or heard. I wonder if, what do you think about this?
that, sometimes for example, if you. If you praise people, kids for doing something, it makes them a little resentful, or makes them, they act, they do what they do, what you’re telling them to get the praise. But then when there’s nobody to praise a reward, they’re much less likely to do it than they were to start with.
Does that make sense to you? And you can bring a child in on it after all. If we want to shift from a doing to style of parenting, to a working with style of parenting, that shift itself should not be done [00:22:00] to children. You see what I mean? So first you rewarded them and now you’re. Doing the abolition of rewards to them rather, if the child’s old enough, you want to bring them in on the process that make it more respected.
That’s cool. and by the way, the opposite of praise. Is not criticism nor is it fallen. Silence. The opposite of praise, which is a verbal reward is unconditional acceptance. It means hugs and smiles and support and encouragement without strings attached. that’s a shift in itself. That’s settling, but enormously liberating.
Mike: [00:22:42] Yeah. And I think the, I was trying to think in my head, what are the other barriers or why do people resort to that? The behavior that style other than it’s, all around you, just unpacking that. I think for my own life, it’s understanding, okay, why am I doing it this way?
When I catch myself doing those things, the [00:23:00] quick punishments are. Feeling like obligated to give a praise. It’s it feels weird not doing it,
Alfie: [00:23:05] Yeah. Of all this stuff that I write about. I think the praise part is the hardest. It’s harder than the 10th. Stop stopping with the tangible rewards stickers and gold stars and candy bars and it’s harder than getting away from punishment.
So it, you got to start by introspecting, what’s my goal here. And I think with praise or verbal comments, there’s a gray area here too. I’m not saying, we never say anything that expresses delight with kids and of course we want to join them in celebrating, stuff when they’re successful, but sometimes we can do it just by, saying what we saw, when my daughter was, It was quite young.
She had a real facility for drawing really enjoyed it, but I’m not sure steal her pleasure by saying, Oh, that’s so beautiful. What a lovely, colorful drawing. I really like your use of, with this is [00:24:00] training her to be less interested in drawing and to see drawing as a means to the end of getting my approval.
But that doesn’t mean I have to just. Stand there like a statue. one thing I can do is simply describe what I see. Oh, their toes on this animal. You weren’t drawing toes a few weeks ago on when you did bears. And that pulls her into the drawing she made, instead of pulling her out of the drawing and into my face to see whether I liked it.
And the second thing besides just, and when my daughter, by the way, when she was, I don’t know, Like a year and a half old and managed to get up the stairs on our own. For the first time she turned around and looked at me and I said, you did it. And that’s all I said, I didn’t tell her how to feel. Oh, you’re such a good Walker.
Hold on. I’m so proud of you. Good job. I want to do her that, the courtesy either pay her the respect of letting her decide how to feel about what she did, but to know I’m there. And I noticed, and the [00:25:00] other thing you can do instead of. Offering, judgments. That’s what praise is by the way, praise is a judgment.
It happens to be a positive judgment, but that’s not, what’s important. What’s important is that we’re judging, evaluating kids, which is rarely what they need. But the other thing we can do is ask questions, like how did you figure out how to draw toes? Or why did you share your brownie?
with Jacqueline, because I know you, I really love brownies and you gave some of them away. So I’m not telling her how much I approve of what she did. I’m in these cases, asking her to reflect on how she did what she did or why she did what she did. I’m not going to do that every time. Sometimes it’s you don’t have to say anything, just shut up, watch be there.
But sometimes those questions are very useful for promoting reflection and connection, and you never have to treat kids like pets with the tip of [00:26:00] that again, though, to come back to where we started half an hour ago. Yeah. That shift is based on the assumption. That we want kids to grow up, to be autonomous, to be reflective people, to be compassionate people, to be happy, fulfilled, as opposed to wanting them to do whatever we tell them to do and be obedient.
So you’re not going to shift any of the methods. Unless you’re damn sure that you’re ready to shift the goal.
Mike: [00:26:30] Yeah, no, I think that’s critical. that’s where that’s what ties it all together. It was understanding that. Yeah. And thanks for listening to the show. You can find out more about us and sign up to receive updates at dot com.
If you liked what you heard or just want to say hi, you can shoot me an email at Mike at dot com. We usually review on iTunes. If you liked the show, it helps us to get the word out to the most people possible. And the show is made possible through the support of VC group international [00:27:00] building software teams since 1999.
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