Discipline and Unconditional Parenting
Hi and thanks for reading!
Get your daily dose of A Child Grows sent to your inbox free! Subscribe to our newsletter (email: achildgrows@aweber.com).
I have just started the book "Unconditional Parenting" by Alfie Kohn. The book was recommended to me by a Waldorf teacher. I am only on page 7. However I found the below thought of his very interesting in the introduction. He is making his point that many discipline methods focus only on how to get a child to be obedient rather than teaching a child to decide how to behave.
We might say that discipline doesn’t always help kids to become self-disciplined. But even that second objective isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It’s not necessarily better to get children to internalize our wishes and values so they’ll do what we want even when we’re not arounnd. Trying to foster internalization-or self-discipline-may amount to an attempt to direct children’s behavior by remote control. It’s just a more powerful version of obedience. There’s a big difference, after all, between a child who does something because he or she believes it’s the right thing to do and one who does it out of a sense of compulsion. Ensuring that children internalize our values isn’t the same thing as helping them to develop their own. And it’s diametrically opposed to the goal of having kids become independent thinkers.
Author Barbara Coloroso remarks
From the time he was young, he dressed the way you told him to dress; he acted the way you told him to act; he said the things you told him to say. He’s been listening to somebody else tell him what to do….He hasn’t changed. He is still listening to somebody else tell him what to do. The problem is, it isn’t you anymore; it’s his peers.
Yes. So hard. If parents could just learn to have more self-control when things arent going the way they wish, much would be better. More often than not, its the parents elevating the situation when it doesnt need to be. I often see parents disciplining the kids based on what they think the people around them at the time expect. Pick your battles based on what really matters. Otherwise the kid feels like she’s in jail and will rebel against all. Also, i think since many parents think theyre always right, they also think “my kid should thin the way i think since i’m right”. They need to allow for some self-discovery and independent thinking. Theres a lot of this in the city where the parents THINK they’re laidback post-hard knocks hipsters, but really theyre insecure obsessive-compulsive stubborn nerds. The problem is that theyre not the ones reading this blog!
I loved this post, especially the last quote, but the balance is so delicate. You need to help foster independent thinking but also the understanding that you live in society (and a family) and they need to think outside of themselves. It is the hateful balance of fostering independence and socialization through appropriate discipline at the same time. It is HARD being a parent!