Unconditional Parenting

Atria Books

Chapter One

I have sometimes derived comfort from the idea that, despite all the mistakes I've made (and will continue to make) as a parent, my children will turn out just fine for the simple reason that I really love them. After all, love heals all wounds. All you need is love. Love means never having to say you're sorry about how you lost your temper this morning in the kitchen.

This reassuring notion is based on the idea that there exists a thing called Parental Love, a single substance that you can supply to your children in greater or lesser quantities. (Greater, of course, is better.) But what if this assumption turns out to be fatally simplistic? What if there actually are different ways of loving a child, and not all of them are equally desirable? The psychoanalyst Alice Miller once observed that it's possible to love a child "passionately-but not in the way he needs to be loved." If she's right, the relevant question isn't just whether-or even how much-we love our kids. It also matters how we love them.

Once that's understood, we could pretty quickly come up with a long list of different types of parental love, along with suggestions about which are better. This book looks at one such distinction-namely, between loving kids for what they do and loving them for who they are. The first sort of love is conditional, which means children must earn it by acting in ways we deem appropriate, or by performing up to our standards. The second sort of love is unconditional: It doesn't hinge on how they act, whether they're successful or well behaved or anything else.

I want to defend the idea of unconditional parenting on the basis of both a value judgment and a prediction. The value judgment is, very simply, that children shouldn't have to earn our approval. We ought to love them, as my friend Deborah says, "for no good reason." Furthermore, what counts is not just that we believe we love them unconditionally, but that they feel loved in that way.

The prediction, meanwhile, is that loving children unconditionally will have a positive effect. It's not only the right thing to do, morally speaking, but also a smart thing to do. Children need to be loved as they are, and for who they are. When that happens, they can accept themselves as fundamentally good people, even when they screw up or fall short. And with this basic need met, they're also freer to accept (and help) other people. Unconditional love, in short, is what children require in order to flourish.

Nevertheless, we parents are often pulled in the direction of placing conditions on our approval. We're led to do so not only by what we were raised to believe, but also by the way we were raised. You might say we're conditioned to be conditional. The roots of this sensibility have crept deep into the soil of American consciousness. In fact, unconditional acceptance seems to be rare even as an ideal: An Internet search for variants of the word unconditional mostly turns up discussions about religion or pets. Apparently, it's hard for many people to imagine love among humans without strings attached.

For a child, some of those strings have to do with good behavior and some have to do with achievement. This chapter and the following three will explore the behavioral issues, and in particular the way many popular discipline strategies cause children to feel they're accepted only when they act the way we demand. Chapter 5 will then consider how some children conclude that their parents' love depends on their performance-for example, at school or in sports.

In the second half of the book, I'll offer concrete suggestions for how we can move beyond this approach and offer something closer to the kind of love our kids need. But first, I'd like to examine the broader idea of conditional parenting: what assumptions underlie it (and distinguish it from the unconditional kind), and what effects it actually has on children.

Two Ways to Raise Kids: Underlying Assumptions

My daughter, Abigail, went through a tough time a few months after her fourth birthday, which may have been related to the arrival of a rival. She became more resistant to requests, more likely to sound nasty, scream, stamp her feet. Ordinary rituals and transitions quickly escalated into a battle of wills. One evening, I remember, she promised to get right into the bath after dinner. She failed to do so-and then, when reminded of that promise, she shrieked loudly enough to wake her baby brother. When asked to be quieter, she yelled again.

So here's the question: Once things calmed down, should my wife and I have proceeded with the normal evening routine of snuggling with her and reading a story together? The conditional approach to parenting says no: We would be rewarding her unacceptable behavior if we followed it with the usual pleasant activities. Those activities should be suspended, and she should be informed, gently but firmly, why that "consequence" was being imposed.

This course of action feels reassuringly familiar to most of us and consistent with what a lot of parenting books advise. What's more, I have to admit that it would have been satisfying on some level for me to lay down the law because I was seriously annoyed by Abigail's defiance. It would have offered me the sense that I, the parent, was putting my foot down, letting her know she wasn't allowed to act like that. I'd be back in control.

The unconditional approach, however, says this is a temptation to be resisted, and that we should indeed snuggle and read a story as usual. But that doesn't mean we ought to just ignore what happened. Unconditional parenting isn't a fancy term for letting kids do whatever they want. It's very important (once the storm has passed) to teach, to reflect together-which is exactly what we did with our daughter after we read her a story. Whatever lesson we hoped to impart was far more likely to be learned if she knew that our love for her was undimmed by how she had acted.

Whether we've thought about them or not, each of these two styles of parenting rests on a distinctive set of beliefs about psychology, about children, even about human nature. To begin with, the conditional approach is closely related to a school of thought known as behaviorism, which is commonly associated with the late B. F. Skinner. Its most striking characteristic, as the name suggests, is its exclusive focus on behaviors. All that matters about people, in this view, is what you can see and measure. You can't see a desire or a fear, so you might as well just concentrate on what people do.

Furthermore, all behaviors are believed to start and stop, wax and wane, solely on the basis of whether they are "reinforced." Behaviorists assume that everything we do can be explained in terms of whether it produces some kind of reward, either one that's deliberately offered or one that occurs naturally. If a child is affectionate with his parent, or shares his dessert with a friend, it's said to be purely because this has led to pleasurable responses in the past.

In short: External forces, such as what someone has previously been rewarded (or punished) for doing, account for how we act-and how we act is the sum total of who we are. Even people who have never read any of Skinner's books seem to have accepted his assumptions. When parents and teachers constantly talk about a child's "behavior," they're acting as though nothing matters except the stuff on the surface. It's not a question of who kids are, what they think or feel or need. Forget motives and values: The idea is just to change what they do. This, of course, is an invitation to rely on discipline techniques whose only purpose is to make kids act-or stop acting-in a particular way.

A more specific example of everyday behaviorism: Perhaps you've met parents who force their children to apologize after doing something hurtful or mean. ("Can you say you're sorry?") Now, what's going on here? Do the parents assume that making children speak this sentence will magically produce in them the feeling of being sorry, despite all evidence to the contrary? Or, worse, do they not even care whether the child really is sorry, because sincerity is irrelevant and all that matters is the act of uttering the appropriate words? Compulsory apologies mostly train children to say things they don't mean-that is, to lie.

But this is not just an isolated parental practice that ought to be reconsidered. It's one of many possible examples of how Skinnerian thinking-caring only about behaviors-has narrowed our understanding of children and warped the way we deal with them. We see it also in programs that are intended to train little kids to go to sleep on their own or to start using the potty. From the perspective of these programs, why a child may be sobbing in the dark is irrelevant. It could be terror or boredom or loneliness or hunger or some other reason. Similarly, it doesn't matter what reason a toddler may have for not wanting to pee in the toilet when his parent asks him to do so. Experts who offer step-by-step recipes for "teaching" children to sleep in a room by themselves, or who urge us to offer gold stars, M&Ms, or praise for tinkling in the toilet, are concerned not with the thoughts and feelings and intentions that give rise to a behavior, only with the behavior itself. (While I haven't done the actual counting that would be necessary to test this, I would tentatively propose the following rule of thumb: The value of a parenting book is inversely proportional to the number of times it contains the word behavior.)

Let's come back to Abigail. Conditional parenting assumes that reading her a book and otherwise expressing our continued love for her will only encourage her to throw another fit. She will have learned that it's okay to wake the baby and refuse to get in the bath because she will interpret our affection as reinforcement for whatever she had just been doing.

Unconditional parenting looks at this situation-and, indeed, at human beings-very differently. For starters, it asks us to consider that the reasons for what Abigail has done may be more "inside" than "outside." Her actions can't necessarily be explained, in mechanical fashion, by looking at external forces like positive responses to her previous behavior. Perhaps she is overwhelmed by fears that she can't name, or by frustrations that she doesn't know how to express.

Unconditional parenting assumes that behaviors are just the outward expression of feelings and thoughts, needs and intentions. In a nutshell, it's the child who engages in a behavior, not just the behavior itself, that matters. Children are not pets to be trained, nor are they computers, programmed to respond predictably to an input. They act this way rather than that way for many different reasons, some of which may be hard to tease apart. But we can't just ignore those reasons and respond only to the effects (that is, the behaviors). Indeed, each of those reasons probably calls for a completely different course of action. If, for example, it turned out that Abigail was really being defiant because she's worried about the implications of our paying so much attention to her baby brother, then we're going to have deal with that, not merely try to stamp out the way she's expressing her fear.

Alongside our efforts to understand and address specific reasons for specific actions, there is one overriding imperative: She needs to know we love her, come what may. In fact, it's especially important tonight for her to be able to snuggle with us, to see from our actions that our love for her is unshakable. That's what will help her get through this bad patch.

In any case, imposing what amounts to a punishment isn't likely to be constructive. It probably will start her crying all over again. And even if it did succeed in shutting her up temporarily-or in preventing her from expressing whatever she's feeling tomorrow night for fear of making us pull away from her-its overall impact is unlikely to be positive. This is true, first, because it doesn't address what's going on in her head, and, second, because what we see as teaching her a lesson will likely appear to her as though we're withholding our love. In a general sense, this will make her more unhappy, perhaps cause her to feel alone and unsupported. In a specific sense, it will teach her that she is loved-and lovable-only when she acts the way we want. The available research, which I'll review shortly, strongly suggests that this will just make things worse.

As I've thought about these issues over the years, I've come to believe that conditional parenting can't be completely explained by behaviorism. Something else is going on here. Once again, imagine the situation: A child is yelling, obviously upset, and when she quiets down her daddy lies in bed with his arm around her and reads her a Frog and Toad story. In response, the proponent of conditional parenting exclaims, "No, no, no, you're just reinforcing her bad behavior! You're teaching her that it's all right to be naughty!"

This interpretation doesn't merely reflect an assumption about what kids learn in a given situation, or even how they learn. It reflects an awfully sour view of children-and, by extension, of human nature. It assumes that, given half a chance, kids will take advantage of us. Give 'em an inch, they'll take a mile. They will draw the worst possible lesson from an ambiguous situation (not "I'm loved anyway" but "Yay! It's okay to make trouble!"). Acceptance without strings attached will just be interpreted as permission to act in a way that's selfish, demanding, greedy, or inconsiderate. At least in part, then, conditional parenting is based on the deeply cynical belief that accepting kids for who they are just frees them to be bad because, well, that's who they are.

By contrast, the unconditional approach to parenting begins with the reminder that Abigail's goal is not to make me miserable. She's not being malicious. She's telling me in the only way she knows how that something is wrong. It may be something that just happened, or it may reveal undercurrents that have been there for a while. This approach offers a vote of confidence in children, a challenge to the assumption that they'll derive the wrong lesson from affection, or that they'd always want to act badly if they thought they could get away with it.



Continues...
Excerpted from Unconditional Parentingby Alfie Kohn Copyright © 2005 by Alfie Kohn. Excerpted by permission.
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