Rethinking discipline with Alfie Kohn

Go here to read my column in Saturday's Ledger-Enquirer, which features a Q&A interview with parenting and education expert Alfie Kohn, whose book “Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason,” made me reconsider how I was using praise, and occasionally rewards, with Will.

Here’s a few extra questions and answers that didn't make it into the paper but are interesting nonetheless:


Do you have a favorite example of how you managed one of your own children’s less than exemplary behavior?

When my daughter Abigail was in preschool she took forever to get ready in the morning and I wasn’t pleased with this or with my own nagging. So in such cases, what do you do? Well I certainly didn’t threaten her with the loss of a privilege or promise her some goody when she got ready on time. I’m raising a child here, I’m not house-training a dog. But what I did was I sat down with her one evening when we were in a good mood and had plenty of time and laid out the problem for her after inviting her to imitate the way I sounded in the morning … and then put the question to her. She was 4 years old. “What do you think we can do to speed things up in the morning?” And she eventually decided that she took a lot of time each morning getting dressed so she should just wear her clothes to bed. And I said, “Why not?” and she continued to do that for years and it really helped. But what was more important than the solution she came up with was the fact that I asked her to participate. It was her solution, as opposed to what almost all discipline books are about, which is: ‘Here’s what you can do unilaterally to your children to make them comply.’ And when kids feel listened to, when they feel that their input matters, that helps them feel competent and confident in a way that all the patronizing pats on the head and ‘Good jobs’ can never do.

You say in your book “Unconditional Parenting”: “The dominant problem with parenting in our society isn’t permissiveness but the fear of permissiveness.” Can you talk about your view that we are micromanaging children?

It’s a fiction that the main problem in our society is lax discipline and permissive parents. I mean a trip to a shopping mall on Saturday is enough to convince us, if we’re honest, that everywhere we look we see parents who are bullying and threatening their children, overly restricting them and so on. I’m not advocating permissiveness either – fortunately we don’t have to choose between traditional punitive discipline on the one hand and anything-goes permissiveness on the other. The whole notion that permissiveness is the only other option is a lie perpetrated by the folks who would like to see us become even more controlling than we already are.


I’m sure there are many educators out there who scoff at your notion that it’s possible to manage a classroom without rewards and punishments and without a focus on grades as completely unrealistic. What do you say to them?


People who say you can’t do this without traditional reward-and-punishment type control are merely confessing their own lack of familiarity with the many places where it’s done successfully every day. That’s why somebody who’s appropriately humble would say, ‘Wow that’s fascinating, please tell me more. How does it work? What does the research say? Where are some examples? As opposed to folks who are tenaciously clinging to their own practices, unwilling to reconsider them and simply saying I don’t know how to do this, therefore it can’t work. But in classrooms as in families you have to start dealing with much larger issues rather than just looking for a new technique for “managing” children – a word that makes me uneasy. So for example when I was visiting classrooms all over the country specifically to see how terrific teachers dealt with obnoxious behavior, what I discovered again and again in these classrooms was there wasn’t much obnoxious behavior to observe. My first reaction was, ‘Darn! I came on the wrong day again,’ until it finally dawned on me that these teachers were doing something so there were fewer problems to have to deal with. So I went back to my notes to see what these teachers were doing and the first thing that I noticed was they weren’t making a fetish of classroom management. They weren’t thinking about how to control kids. What they were doing had a very specific pattern to it. First they were creating warm, loving relationships with each child, unconditionally supportive, as I would later put it. Second they were working hard on creating a caring community in the classroom so the kids really came to feel a sense of belonging and concern about one another. That in turn required not only doing some things but refraining from doing the things that kill community -- for example having contests in the classroom, which destroy any sense of concern children might have about one another. Third, these terrific teachers were bringing kids in on making decisions individually and collectively on a daily basis so many of the things that most teachers decide on their own -- like what goes up on the bulletin board, what book we’ll read next, where we’ll take our field trip, how the furniture will be arranged, how we’ll assess the learning from this last unit -- were typically decisions made by the kids and teachers together. And the fourth thing I noticed was that such teachers had a truly engaging meaningful curriculum where the kids were not memorizing forgettable facts for a quiz or practicing skills on worksheets; they were tackling problems and projects that really mattered to the kids themselves. When that happens you don’t get much acting out. If your classroom is basically just an extended period of standardized test preparation then you’re going to have a lot of behavior problems and be desperate for some management program to deal with the problem that your curriculum created.


My original question about rewards (the second question of the interview) included using sticker charts for potty training as one example, partly because it was a strategy I tried on Will with no long-term success. Here’s what Kohn said about that:

I would not put potty training at the top of my list of practices where rewards are particularly damaging because I don’t have a commitment to wanting to see kids develop a lifelong love of defecation. However, I happen to want kids to become generous people, which is why I get a lot more upset when people say “Good job!” when kids share. And I want kids to become lifelong readers, which is why reading incentive programs are so powerfully counterproductive. In other words the more you want kids to want to do something the more you should should avoid offering them goodies to make them do it.

Do you have experience as a classroom teacher. What led you down this career path?


I did teach for a number of years but it was a while ago and I’ve learned most of what I now know from watching teachers who are far more talented than I was in the classroom as well as from reading a bunch of research and the works of a lot of other very wise people…


Read more:


Here’s a list of some of Alfie Kohn’s books. Visit http://www.alfiekohn.org/index.html for more information and to read numerous articles he has written on education and parenting.


Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason; Beyond Discipline: From Compliance to Community; Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes; The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing; What Does it Mean to be Well Educated? And More Essays on Standards, Grading, and Other Follies; The Case Against Standardized Testing: Raising the Scores, Ruining the Schools; The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and "Tougher Standards"; What to look for in a classroom... And Other Essays;


(He also recommends “Learning to Trust: Transforming Difficult Elementary Classrooms Through Developmental Discipline,” by Marilyn Watson, who spent two years advising a teacher in an inner city about moving beyond punishments and rewards.)