Unconditional Parenting

A new book by Alfie Kohn

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I’d hate to be accused of sending out SPAM – that is, Self-Promotional Author Materials – but I did want to let you know about the publication of UNCONDITIONAL PARENTING: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason. It’s the first book I’ve written that’s primarily about raising children, as opposed to teaching them. I figured it was time to move on to a different topic now that the whole education mess has finally been sorted out to everyone’s satisfaction.

Perhaps you won’t be surprised to hear that, in the new book as well as in presentations I’ve been doing for parent groups, I challenge the conventional wisdom about discipline and child development. Unconditional Parenting is a work of social criticism, then, but it’s also intended to be an accessible, if somewhat subversive, guide for parents. (It contains more suggestions about what to do, as opposed to what not to do, than any of my previous books.) If you’ve spent any time browsing the Child Care shelf in a bookstore, you know that most of what’s available consists of techniques for getting kids to do whatever they’re told. My position, by contrast, is that compliance shouldn’t be our primary goal and control shouldn’t be our primary method.

The book also makes the case that children of all ages need to be loved for who they are, not for what they do. Unfortunately, when parents praise kids for being well-behaved, or resort to time-outs and other love-withdrawal techniques, children get the message that they’re accepted (and acceptable) only under certain conditions. That amounts to conditional parenting, the opposite of what promotes healthy development.

If parenting issues aren’t of interest to you, please accept my apology for this intrusion. But if you’d like to know more about the book, just click on www.unconditionalparenting.com. And, while you’re there, consider posting a comment (about anything related to raising kids) on the brand-new message board.

Thanks!
Alfie Kohn