I’ve been thinking a lot about conditions lately. It started while reading an article in the New York Times about conditional parenting vs. unconditional parenting: When a Parent’s ‘I Love You’ Means ‘Do as I Say’.
The American style of parenting, the article says, is based on conditions: spanking is an obvious example of negative conditional parenting, but so are time-outs, which deny children contact and affection from their parents while they’re forced to sit in a “naughty room” or a “naughty chair.”
On the other side of the coin is positive conditioning: parents using praise and rewards to encourage good behavior.
The use of both harkens back to the work of psychologist B. F. Skinner, who coined the term “operant conditioning” when studying how the behavior of rats is affected by punishment or incentives.
It’s easy to imagine the tragic consequences of this perception in a child’s mind: Kohn’s list includes “unhealthy feeling,” “internal compulsions,” “increased negative feelings about parents,” “deep feelings of anxiety,” and happiness frequently being accompanied by “guilt” or “shame.” Might as well start saving money for your kid’s psychotherapy, right?
But what’s the alternative? What method do we have for teaching children right from wrong? Kohn says, there’s no method, only “unconditional love and autonomy support,” which means “explaining reasons for requests, maximizing opportunities for the child to participate in making decisions, being encouraging without manipulating, and actively imagining how things look from the child’s point of view.”
I have to admit, this makes a lot of sense, and I am feeling intensely regretful for listening to the ill-informed, yet widely practiced parenting advice that’s so pervasive in our society. Instead, I should have listened to my heart. So many times, as I watched my daughters writhing on the floor, refusing to go into timeout, I had to literally drag them kicking and screaming into the “naughty” room as my voice grew louder and my temper grew shorter. In those awful moments, I knew, in my gut, that this was wrong; yet I did it anyway because my pediatrician, my mother, my friends, and the authors of all those parenting magazine articles said this is necessary to teach them right from wrong.
I should have known that, instead of isolating my young children during their tantrums, it would have been better to hold and console them. “Children are most in need of loving attention when they act least deserving of it,” writes Aletha Solter, PhD, another advocate of condition-free parenting. And, at the other end of the spectrum, how many times did I use praise to manipulate a desired behavior? And, during those instances, did my children infer that they only deserved love because they performed certain deeds? Po Bronson, in his soon-to-be-released book, NurtureShock, says only kids under the age of seven take praise at face value; after that, they learn that praise is only a sign that teachers and parents “are worried about you.” Praise, he claims, is doled out more for kids who are “struggling.”
Perhaps the best parenting advice comes from St. Augustine, who simply said this:
“Love, and do what you like.”
In other words, if we’re coming from a place of true, unconditional love, then we’ll always know how best to interact with our kids.
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Tragically, conditional thinking doesn’t stop with parenting. In my next blog post, I’ll write about how many adult relationships are harmed by a quid pro quo philosophy, which is often evident in the use of the words, “as long as,” as in…
“I will [fill in the blank] as long as you [fill in the blank].”
More about that next week.
