Unconditional Parenting Quotes

“The way kids learn to make good decisions is by making decisions, not by following directions.”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

“In short, with each of the thousand-and-one problems that present themselves in family life, our choice is between controlling and teaching, between creating an atmosphere of distrust and one of trust, between setting an example of power and helping children to learn responsibility, between quick-fix parenting and the kind that's focused on long-term goals.”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

“How we feel about our kids isn't as important as how they experience those feelings and how they regard the way we treat them.”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

“Even before i had children, I knew that being a parent was going to be challenging as well as rewarding. But I didn't really know.
I didn't know how exhausted it was possible to become, or how clueless it was possible to feel, or how, each time I reached the end of my rope, I would somehow have to find more rope.
I didn't understand that sometimes when your kids scream so loudly that the neighbors are ready to call the Department of Child Services, it's because you've served the wrong shape of pasta for dinner.
I didn't realize that those deep-breathing exercises mothers are taught in natural-childbirth class dont really start to pay off until long after the child is out.
I couldn't have predicted how relieved I'd be to learn that other peoples children struggle with the same issues, and act in some of the same ways, mine do. (Even more liberating is the recognition that other parents, too, have dark moments when they catch themselves not liking their own child, or wondering whether it's all worth it, or entertaining various other unspeakable thoughts).
The bottom line is that raising kids is not for whimps.”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

“Few parents have the courage and independence to care more for their children’s happiness than for their success.”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

“One explanation was offered by Alice Miller: “Many people continue to pass on the cruel deeds and attitudes to which they were subjected as children, so that they can continue to idealize their parents.”16 Her premise is that we have a powerful, unconscious need to believe that everything our parents did to us was really for our own good and was done out of love. It’s too threatening for many of us even to entertain the possibility that they weren’t entirely well-meaning—or competent. So, in order to erase any doubts, we do the same things to our own children that our parents did to us.”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

“Similarly, parents who want to teach the importance of honesty make it a practice never to lie to their children, even when it would be easier just to claim that there are no cookies left rather than to explain why they can’t have another one.”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

“I realized that this is what many people in our society seem to want most from children: not that they are caring or creative or curious, but simply that they are well behaved.”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

“Educators remind us that what counts in a classroom is not what the teacher teaches; it’s what the learner learns.”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

“Again, the most effective (and least destructive) way to help a child succeed—whether she’s writing or skiing, playing a trumpet or a computer game—is to 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.”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

“The dominant problem with parenting in our society isn't permissiveness, but the fear of permissiveness. We're so worried about spoiling kids that we often end up over controlling them.”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

“Think of your goal as giving your child a kind of inoculation, providing him with the unconditional love, respect, trust, and sense of perspective that will serve to immunize him against the most destructive effects of an overcontrolling environment or an unreasonable authority figure.”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

“Children aren’t helped to become caring members of a community, or ethical decision-makers, or critical thinkers, so much as they’re simply trained to follow directions.”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

“Thomas Gordon said it well: “Children sometimes know better than parents when they are sleepy or hungry; know better the qualities of their friends, their own aspirations and goals, how their various teachers treat them; know better the urges and needs within their bodies, whom they love and whom they don’t, what they value and what they don’t.”4 In any case, we can’t always assume that because we’re more mature we necessarily have more insight into our children than they have into themselves.”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

“From deep contentment comes the courage to achieve.”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

“They are not raising children so much as living résumés, and by the time high school arrives, the kids have learned to sign up for activities strictly to impress college admissions committees, ignoring (or, eventually, losing sight of) what they personally find interesting in the here-and-now. They have acquired the habit of asking teachers, “Do we need to know this?”—rather than, say, “What does this mean?”—as they grimly set about the business of trying to ratchet up their GPA or squeeze out another few points on the SAT.”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

“Besides, what best prepares children to deal with the challenges of the “real world” is to experience success and joy. People don’t get better at coping with unhappiness because they were deliberately made unhappy when they were young.”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

“My wife says [parenting] is a test of your capacity to deal with disorder and unpredictability -- a test you can't study for, and one whose results aren't always reassuring.”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

“How we feel about our kids isn’t as important as how they experience those feelings and how they regard the way we treat them.”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

“The more pressing question, of course, is how we can communicate our love after kids keep acting up even when we think they ought to know better. (We’ve certainly told them enough times!) Here it’s common to assume that they’re “testing limits.” This is a very popular phrase in the discipline field and it’s often used as a justification for parents to impose more, or tighter, limits. Sometimes the assumption that kids are testing us even becomes a rationalization for punishing them. But my suspicion is that, by misbehaving, children may be testing something else entirely—namely, the unconditionality of our love. Perhaps they’re acting in unacceptable ways to see if we’ll stop accepting them.”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

“Educators remind us that what counts in a classroom is not what the teacher teaches; it’s what the learner learns. And so it is in families. What matters is the message our kids receive, not the one we think we’re sending.”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

“As Thomas Gordon pointed out, 'Parents who find unacceptable a great many things that their children do or say will inevitably foster in these children a deep feeling that they are unacceptable as persons.' That doesn't change just because the parents remember to say soothingly, 'We love you, honey; we just hate almost everything you do.”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

“Unconditional parents want to know how to do something other than threaten and punish. They don't see their relationship with their children as adversarial, so their goal is to avoid battles, not win them.”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

“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.”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

“I realized that this is what many people in our society seem to want most from children: not that they are caring or creative or curious, but simply that they are well behaved. A “good” child—from infancy to adolescence—is one who isn’t too much trouble to us grown-ups.”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

“The first is spatial: I can imagine how you literally see the world, such that what’s on my right is on your left when we’re facing one another. In the second type, I can imagine how you think about things—for example, how you might have trouble solving a problem that’s easy for me, or how you might hold beliefs about, say, raising children that are different from mine. The third kind consists of imagining how you feel, how something could upset you even if it doesn’t have that effect on me. (This last type of perspective taking is sometimes confused with “empathy,” which means that I share your feelings. To empathize isn’t just to understand that you’re angry but actually to feel angry along with you.)”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

“While it may be possible to spoil kids with too many things, it isn't possible to spoil them with too much (unconditional) love. As one writer put it, the problem with children whom we would describe as spoiled is that they 'get too much of what they want and too little of what they need.' Therefore, give them affection (which they need) without limit, without reservations, and without excuse. Pay as much attention to them as you can, regardless of mood or circumstance. Let them know you're delighted to be with them, that you care about them no matter what happens.”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

“We ought to love children, as my friend Deborah says, 'for no good reason.' Furthermore, what counts is not that we believe we love them unconditionally, but that they feel loved in that way.”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

“Don’t say thank you because you’re afraid I’ll get mad at you if you don’t; that’s a terrible reason. Don’t say thank you because it’s polite; that’s not much of a reason at all. Say thank you because of its effect on the people you’re thanking.”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

“For starters, they’ve assumed that people who are raised to believe they’re basically competent have no reason to accomplish anything. I once heard someone defend that belief by declaring that “human nature is to do as little as necessary.” This prejudice is refuted not just by a few studies but by the entire branch of psychology dealing with motivation.16 Normally, it’s hard to stop happy, satisfied people from trying to learn more about themselves and the world, or from trying to do a job of which they can feel proud. The desire to do as little as possible is an aberration, a sign that something is wrong. It may suggest that someone feels threatened and therefore has fallen back on a strategy of damage control, or that rewards and punishments have caused that individual to lose interest in what he’s doing, or that he perceives a specific task—perhaps correctly—as pointless and dull.”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason