TOKENS PODCAST: S6E7
Are many parenting styles doing more harm than good?
Raising children is not for the faint of heart, as any parent or teacher knows. Most of us, I assume, would go to great lengths to ensure our kids turn out with humility, independence, and a sense of right and wrong.
To achieve such ends, much conventional wisdom suggests that we employ a system of rewarding good behavior and punishing bad behavior. But what if this proposed solution is actually creating a deeper problem?
“If you want to destroy children's love of reading, the best way to do that is to give them a prize for reading a book,” says Alfie Kohn, author of the widely-read and provocative "Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishment to Love and Reason."
I know, I know – it sounds over-the-top. And though I leave with maybe more questions than I had when I started, his arguments are not lightly considered.
“Punishments and rewards of any kind are neither necessary nor constructive,” he says. “What kids need to flourish is to be loved for who they are, not for what they did.” By punishing or rewarding a child for what they do, he argues, we’re placing the emphasis on controlling their behavior, instead of instilling a true sense of virtue. Instead, we should “work with” our kids to discern what they need to flourish.
Today, an interview in which, even listening to it after the fact, I find myself saying "but what about...?" all while continuing to think that Alfie has raised questions, observations, and research that, as both a parent and a professor, I think are worth a great deal of attention.
Whether you're a parent or a teacher, or someone who's been assessing and thinking on the ways your parents raised, disciplined, trained you, there's a great deal here you may not yet have ever considered. I encourage you to listen.
ABOUT THE GUEST
Alfie Kohn writes and speaks widely on human behavior, education, and parenting. The most recent of his 14 books are SCHOOLING BEYOND MEASURE…And Other Unorthodox Essays About Education (2015) and THE MYTH OF THE SPOILED CHILD: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom About Children and Parenting (2014). Of his earlier titles, the best known are PUNISHED BY REWARDS (1993), NO CONTEST: The Case Against Competition (1986), UNCONDITIONAL PARENTING (2005), and THE SCHOOLS OUR CHILDREN DESERVE (1999).
Kohn has been described in Time magazine as “perhaps the country’s most outspoken critic of education’s fixation on grades [and] test scores.” His criticisms of competition and rewards have helped to shape the thinking of educators — as well as parents and managers — across the country and abroad. Kohn has been featured on hundreds of TV and radio programs, including the “Today” show and two appearances on “Oprah”; he has been profiled in the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, while his work has been described and debated in many other leading publications.
Kohn lectures widely at universities and to school faculties, parent groups, and corporations. In addition to speaking at staff development seminars and keynoting national education conferences on a regular basis, he conducts workshops for teachers and administrators on various topics. Among them: “Motivation from the Inside Out: Rethinking Rewards, Assessment, and Learning” and “Beyond Bribes and Threats: Realistic Alternatives to Controlling Students’ Behavior.” The latter corresponds to his book BEYOND DISCIPLINE: From Compliance to Community (ASCD, 1996), which he describes as “a modest attempt to overthrow the entire field of classroom management.”
Kohn’s various books have been translated into more than two dozen languages. He has also contributed to publications ranging from the Journal of Education to Ladies Home Journal, and from the Nation to the Harvard Business Review (“Why Incentive Plans Cannot Work”). His efforts to make research in human behavior accessible to a general audience have also been published in the New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, Parents, and Psychology Today.
His many articles on education include a dozen widely reprinted essays in Phi Delta Kappan during the ’90s and ’00s. Among them: “Choices for Children: Why and How to Let Students Decide,” “How Not to Teach Values: A Critical Look at Character Education,” “Test Today, Privatize Tomorrow,” and “Why Self-Discipline is Overrated.”
Kohn, the father of two grown children, lives (actually) in the Boston area and (virtually) at www.alfiekohn.org.
ABOUT TOKENS SHOW & LEE C. CAMP
Tokens began in 2008. Our philosophical and theological variety shows and events hosted throughout the Nashville area imagine a world governed by hospitality, graciousness and joy; life marked by beauty, wonder and truthfulness; and social conditions ordered by justice, mercy and peace-making. We exhibit tokens of such a world in music-making, song-singing, and conversations about things that matter. We have fun, and we make fun: of religion, politics, and marketing. And ourselves. You might think of us as something like musicians without borders; or as poets, philosophers, theologians and humorists transgressing borders.
Lee is an Alabamian by birth, a Tennessean by choice, and has sojourned joyfully in Indiana, Texas, and Nairobi. He likes to think of himself as a radical conservative, or an orthodox liberal; loves teaching college and seminary students at Lipscomb University; delights in flying sailplanes; finds dark chocolate covered almonds with turbinado sea salt to be one of the finest confections of the human species; and gives great thanks for his lovely wife Laura, his three sons, and an abundance of family and friends, here in Music City and beyond. Besides teaching full-time, he hosts Nashville’s Tokens Show, and has authored three books. Lee has an Undergrad Degree in computer science (Lipscomb University, 1989); M.A. in theology and M.Div. (Abilene Christian University, 1993); M.A. and Ph.D. both in Christian Ethics (University of Notre Dame, 1999).
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