book on parenting
Sep. 25th, 2007 12:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fleaI sorta quickie-skimmed this last night, but it was a book that does okay with sorta-quickie skimming.
Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason (2006).
First off, my mother dated Alfie Kohn briefly, when I was maybe 12, she was 35, and he was 27. They met through a personal ad when we lived outside of Boston. It's a little funny to see that he has kids who are now about 10 and 6, judging by the photo on the jacket, since my mother's kids are now 35, 32, and 29. Also, he looks about 25 still, and he's actually 50. I remember him a little - he was very nerdy and didn't know what to do with a 12 year old in the slightest, which is also why it's very amusing to me that he writes about parenting now. Kohn first got famous (to the extent that he is actually famous; I mean, not Jackie Collins famous, obviously) by writing a book called No Contest, arguing that competition is bad for society. This in 1986, Reagan Time in America! I haven't read it.
I am exceptionally rambly today. Anyway, this book I read. It's essentially in the vein of books like Haim Ginott's, Alice Miller's, and Playful Parenting - basically, nice touchy-feely psychology-influenced hippie-people parenting. He argues that punishing kids is bad, but the thing that probably would get people riled up in this book is that he argues that *praising* kids is bad, too - it has the potential to stifle their inner motivation, and make them do stuff just *because* you say, "Good job." That's pretty radical, I think. In some ways it makes sense to me - but in other ways I can't imagine how you would actually raise a child like that. I gather the Montessori method is supposed to do that - I should really read up on it more since Casper's school is supposedly using it - but I must say her classroom seems to be all about rules and some really traditional stuff. I can't imagine her teacher doesn't praise.
He makes some important points: it's really important to understand the developmental abilities of children, and not punish them for doing something they can't really control (he has lots of examples of things he's witnessed people saying in public). Like, Dillo is throwing rice on the floor not to be bad, but because he's 14 months old, and throwing rice is fun. (We do not yell at him for throwing rice, in case you were worrying. We do *limit* the amount of rice available within his reach.) He also argues that American culture, for all its "Think! Of the Children!" propaganda, is actually NOT child-friendly or child-centered. Mass culture tries to *sell* things to children, but it doesn't really accept or respect their needs or abilities. He suggests that when we say children are "good" we really mean "being quiet and under our control" and that's actually something that bothers me when people say it about my kids. "Oh, is he always this good?" He's *easy* to take care of, and doesn't tend to fuss in public, but that shouldn't be a moral judgment, and I don't expect it to determine much of what his ultimate moral place in life will be.
Fundamentally, Kohn is a proponent of the idea that a parent's main job is to guide a child into being himself, and not break him too much. I agree with that, but he doesn't give much coverage to the problem that sometimes you need to control your child for your own sanity.
I told my mother I was reading this book and she scoffed at the idea that Kohn might have anything to say about parenting, implying it was too hippie-impractical (and Just Like Me With All My Permissive Ways). Since she owns copies of Between Parent and Child, and Pictures of a Childhood, WTF? I guess she is now well into her bourgeois post-hippie phase.
Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason (2006).
First off, my mother dated Alfie Kohn briefly, when I was maybe 12, she was 35, and he was 27. They met through a personal ad when we lived outside of Boston. It's a little funny to see that he has kids who are now about 10 and 6, judging by the photo on the jacket, since my mother's kids are now 35, 32, and 29. Also, he looks about 25 still, and he's actually 50. I remember him a little - he was very nerdy and didn't know what to do with a 12 year old in the slightest, which is also why it's very amusing to me that he writes about parenting now. Kohn first got famous (to the extent that he is actually famous; I mean, not Jackie Collins famous, obviously) by writing a book called No Contest, arguing that competition is bad for society. This in 1986, Reagan Time in America! I haven't read it.
I am exceptionally rambly today. Anyway, this book I read. It's essentially in the vein of books like Haim Ginott's, Alice Miller's, and Playful Parenting - basically, nice touchy-feely psychology-influenced hippie-people parenting. He argues that punishing kids is bad, but the thing that probably would get people riled up in this book is that he argues that *praising* kids is bad, too - it has the potential to stifle their inner motivation, and make them do stuff just *because* you say, "Good job." That's pretty radical, I think. In some ways it makes sense to me - but in other ways I can't imagine how you would actually raise a child like that. I gather the Montessori method is supposed to do that - I should really read up on it more since Casper's school is supposedly using it - but I must say her classroom seems to be all about rules and some really traditional stuff. I can't imagine her teacher doesn't praise.
He makes some important points: it's really important to understand the developmental abilities of children, and not punish them for doing something they can't really control (he has lots of examples of things he's witnessed people saying in public). Like, Dillo is throwing rice on the floor not to be bad, but because he's 14 months old, and throwing rice is fun. (We do not yell at him for throwing rice, in case you were worrying. We do *limit* the amount of rice available within his reach.) He also argues that American culture, for all its "Think! Of the Children!" propaganda, is actually NOT child-friendly or child-centered. Mass culture tries to *sell* things to children, but it doesn't really accept or respect their needs or abilities. He suggests that when we say children are "good" we really mean "being quiet and under our control" and that's actually something that bothers me when people say it about my kids. "Oh, is he always this good?" He's *easy* to take care of, and doesn't tend to fuss in public, but that shouldn't be a moral judgment, and I don't expect it to determine much of what his ultimate moral place in life will be.
Fundamentally, Kohn is a proponent of the idea that a parent's main job is to guide a child into being himself, and not break him too much. I agree with that, but he doesn't give much coverage to the problem that sometimes you need to control your child for your own sanity.
I told my mother I was reading this book and she scoffed at the idea that Kohn might have anything to say about parenting, implying it was too hippie-impractical (and Just Like Me With All My Permissive Ways). Since she owns copies of Between Parent and Child, and Pictures of a Childhood, WTF? I guess she is now well into her bourgeois post-hippie phase.
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Date: 2007-09-25 06:04 pm (UTC)But relatedly, we never told LB "Be good!" Our joke was that he could be Chaotic Evil for all we cared, he just had to COOPERATE. He was probably the only two-year-old ever to say "I'll cooperate" when left with a babysitter. :-)
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Date: 2007-09-25 06:27 pm (UTC)2. Kohn came and talked at our highschool, after you graduated, to promote some book that comes after No Contest and before the one you just read. At this time, I remembered that he'd accompanied a bunch of neighborhood kids to see Ghostbusters -- which we all adored, being 6-10 years old, and which he didn't like. I discovered that it was weirdly possible to retain an antipathy towards an adult for his taste in movies despite remembering almost nothing else about him.
3. From your report of it, it sounds like Kohn isn't spouting total hooey, but like you I do wonder what he does when his kids try to stick their fingers into electrical sockets. Sometimes, being under a parent's control is a good thing!