Unconditional Parenting: 2. Giving and Withholding Love

Unconditional Parenting:
Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason
by Alfie Kohn

2. Giving and Withholding Love

Parenting can be either harsh (yelling, threatening, hitting) or not - but even when it's not, less harsh methods are often used to gain power over a child, usually by withdrawing love or using postive reinforcement (reward/praise).

Withdrawing love might mean acting cold and withdrawn when a parent is displeased with a child. They may make a point of ignoring the child, relaying the message that attention is earned with obedience. The parent might verbalize, 'I don't love you, or want to be around you when you act like that.' Or they might put physical space between them by either walking away while the child begs them to come back, or by banishing the child to forced isolation (known as 'time-out'). This can be perceived as abandonment by the child, especially if they're too young to grasp the temporary nature of the separation.

When children are sent away to time-out/solitary confinement against their will, it's love withdrawal. But giving the child the option of cooling off in an inviting place, like his room, to spend time alone when the time limit is under his control, can be helpful. Kohn says that the term and concept of 'time-out' came from BF Skinner's lab experiments to control animal behavior (I've always thought it came from sports, where a player is benched for time-out to regroup or rest; I'm not sure I believe it came from Skinner.)

The problem with negative reinforcement is that it forces the child to think about how their actions affect themselves--'How can I avoid being punished?' But it's more important (and trickier) to get children to consider how their actions affect others. In fact, time-out might be more harmful than spanking because it lasts longer. When love withdrawal is used as a continual way to control children, those children may become anxious, afraid to express anger, and fear failure. They may fear attachment and be distant as adults, perhaps because they don't want to be abandoned again.

Children who are sent to time-out to think over their wrong-doings and repent are more likely to seethe and harbor resentful thoughts as they stew in time-out - which is hardly what most parents want to foster.

Rewards are also destructive. Rewards might gain immediate compliance, but will never motivate the child to make the action a permanent part of himself. Children who are rewarded for being nice think of themselves, not as nice people, but as people who only act nice for a price. Reading a book has its own reward; reading a book to get pizza can spoil the whole thing. "The more people are rewarded for doing something, the more likely they are to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward."

Verbal praise acts on motivation just like a reward. It makes a person less interested in the task itself. Do we want children to share in order to hear Mommy say, "good job sharing!" or to make their friend feel better, even if Mommy doesn't notice? Why/when do we praise our kids? When they make our lives more convenient, or when they show a really impressive trait? "Children's sense of their competence, and perhaps of their worth, may come to rise or fall as a result of our reaction." They look to us to see if we approve, like a toddler who falls and looks to his mother to see if he's hurt.

Everyone needs praise, but it's exploitive to use praise as a means of control. And the more we praise, the more we make a child crave praise, and the more we undermine their perception of their abilities.

Kohn goes into the concept of self-esteem - he disagrees with both groups, those who think high self-esteem is good, and those who think that focusing on "feel-good" self-esteem makes people unmotivated. He says that the key is how variable a person's self-esteem is - does a person feel worthwhile depending on how successful they are or what people think of them? People whose self-esteem fluctuates may feel worthless when their lives aren't going well, or defensive and aggressively protective of their esteem. They may have a competitive need to win. They may go to unhealthy lengths to look good, or succeed - because their self-worth as a person depends on it.

People who feel loved unconditionally spend less time thinking about their self-esteem, less time evaluating how good they are, and less time deliberately trying to feel good about themselves.