Moving from rewards and punishment to love and reason

I can’t believe how many different forms of discipline I’ve witnessed during my many years. For five years of my youth I went to a boys-only school in South Africa run by the Catholic order of Marist Brothers where, I’m afraid to say, my behaviour netted me more than a few canings.

I can’t believe how many different forms of discipline I’ve witnessed during my many years. For five years of my youth I went to a boys-only school in South Africa run by the Catholic order of Marist Brothers where, I’m afraid to say, my behaviour netted me more than a few canings. It wasn’t that long ago that physical punishment took place in Canadian schools – the boarding school I attended in Quebec didn’t allow any physical punishment when I got there, but that change took until the late 1960s to develop.
The days of violent discipline are, for the most part, behind us here in Canada, which is definitely a good thing. That doesn’t mean that parents don’t wrestle with how exactly they should discipline their children. We’ve all seen and probably tried the "time-out" process. Losing privileges (TV is always a good one, isn’t it?) seems to provide some sense of deterrence, too. Lots of families I know provide rewards for good behaviour.
Alfie Kohn thinks that we’ve all got it wrong. "Conventional approaches to parenting such as punishments … rewards … and other forms of control teach children that they are loved only when they please or impress us," he writes in his book Unconditional Parenting. Rather than try to control our kids, we need to work with them. His approach suggests that as parents we need to ask ourselves what our long-term objectives are for our children. Often we think of “good” children as being quiet and submissive – you know, the ones you compliment on an airplane when they haven’t driven you up the wall during the flight. While a quiet child might make for an easy travel companion, keeping quiet a decade later when we’re trying to have a conversation at the dinner table isn’t what we’d like at that point in their lives.
Keeping the long-term perspective in mind, then, Kohn suggests that parents stick to certain principles. It all starts by loving "unconditionally" – our children need to know that they will be "accepted even if they screw up or fall short." Instead of asking yourself what you can do to get your child to do what you want, try to think about what it is they need and what you can do to meet those needs. We need to be reflective when it comes to dealing with our children. We need to reconsider what we’re asking and keep thinking of the long-term goals we have for our kids.
We also need to "talk less [and] ask more" with our children, Kohn says. "Dictating to kids (even in a nice way) is far less productive than eliciting ideas and objections and feelings from them … To be a great parent is more a function of listening than of explaining."
Unconditional Parenting provides lots of practical strategies that will help you work with your children rather than fight them every step of the way. It’s a book full of thought-provoking suggestions that will help you raise happy and balanced children. And hopefully you’ll find yourself yelling a lot less. I sure wish some of my old teachers had read this book. They would have realized that all that caning didn’t achieve the result they wanted – I lost all respect for them at the time and have even less now.