Oatmeal for Breakfast

I’ve been trying to read up a bit not just on newborn/infant care but on parenting in general. This book was suggested to me by a friend at work, who I will refer to as Q., because that is not his first initial. Q. related the following exchange:

Q. is reading Unconditional Parenting in bed
Q’s son: Daddy, why are you reading that book?
Q.: Well, because I want to be a better dad.
Q’s son: But you’re already a good dad! *hug*

The author’s basic assertion is that “conditional parenting”–that is, using behavioral controls such as rewards and punishments–is a poor way to raise a child, for many reasons. Among them–and keep in mind that nearly all of these have at least one study supporting them:

• Children who are punished may temporarily cease the offending behavior, but only to avoid the punishment, not because they understand or have internalized the problem with their behavior.
• Children who are rewarded learn to stop doing things for their intrinsic reward and begin doing them only if they receieve an extrinsic reward.
• Animals are trained to obey with conditional rewards and punishments. It is disrespectful to train children like animals when we can train them like people. 
• Most parents want to raise adults who are intellectually curious, kind, and want to make a difference in the world. Rewards and punishments designed to produce perfectly obedient children may be effective in the short term but they are not effective in the long term and do not help children develop into the kind of people we want them to be.
• Rewards and punishments teach children that a parents’ love is conditional on the parent’s judgment of the child.
• Children need unconditional love more than anything. The lavish praise heaped on children by modern parents is often a stream of conditional judgments, even though they are positive ones.
• Children learn to make decisions best by making decisions, not by having decisions imposed on them.
• Children who are respected and made part of the decision-making process feel less need to assert their independence and are therefore more likely to obey.

Since we haven’t actually had any parenting experience of our own, we’re not really qualified to review the philosophy presented in the book. However, I found the author’s viewpoint unnecessarily dichotomous.

On the one hand, the author’s motives are pure. He wants to place the relationship above the rules, the long-term goals above the short-term behavior, and love over everything.

However, I don’t think it’s impossible to use rewards and punishments–albeit sparingly–in a way that still communicates unconditional love and still communicates the reason behind the rules. When I was growing up, my parents had plenty of behavioral controls, but I never felt that their love was conditional. I’m sure that taking the easy way out and making a power play is a constant temptation, but that isn’t a problem unique to a reward-and-punishment approach. 

Finally, while the author spends a vast portion of the book demonizing conditional controls, he has relatively little to say on how one might go about raising a child without them.

Do any of you parents out there have thoughts on the matter?

I first learned about this book from my sister, Megan. I later read an exerpt from the book published as a magazine article, and I knew I’d need to read the rest.

Like a lot of popular science books (and as the reader is warned in the title itself), this volume is intended to shock you. It’s a survey of recent research that attacks some of the long-held assumptions forming the core of modern American parenting. Initially skeptical because of the somewhat alarmist tone of the book, I admit that I found the research numbers very convincing. There were at least two or three chapters that made us rethink the way we will raise Champ.

Here are some of the more surprising things I learned from the book, presented in no particular order. Since the thing that makes this book entertaining is the little shock you get when they lay down the counter-intuitive research punchline, skip this list if you plan to read the book yourself.

• The biggest factor influencing verbal development is not the number of words a child is exposed to or how much parents talk to the child. It’s the way parents respond when the child makes sounds.
• Frequently praising children for their innate qualities (e.g. intelligence) often leads to arrogance and poor performance, as children fear that failure will demonstrate their lack of these innate qualities. Children who are praised more sparingly and praised for effort perform better and feel better about their work.
• Children who are not taught about racial issues form their own conclusions and stereotypes about race, which are often wildly inappropriate by adult standards. Children cannot think abstractly enough to comprehend simplistic statements from parents like “everyone is equal no matter the color of their skin.”
• Too much emphasis is placed on early development and “giftedness”. There is extremely little correlation between a child’s early identification as “gifted” (e.g. in kindergarten) and the child’s later academic performance. Many children truly are late bloomers.
• Baby Einstein and other television programming for very young children have a negative effect on childrens’ development, because children don’t learn from them and they take time away from parental interaction, from which children do learn. This is due partly to the role response plays in learning and partly to children discerning word separation from the lip movement of the speaker; educational videos often use disembodied voices.
• Children often learn negative behavior from children’s books and television programming while missing the moral of the story.
• Very involved fathers often have children that are just as poorly behaved as children of fathers who play a more traditional role. This is largely due to inconsistent discipline–lack of punishment, differing punishments for the same crimes, caving at the wrong time, etc.
• The most healthy teen-parent relationships include arguing. The teens who respect their parents’ authority will argue with rules; the teens who do not respect their parents’ authority simply ignore rules.
• Improving one dimension of a child’s life–for instance, teaching the child to be more grateful–does not necessarily improve any other dimension. That is, adding positives to a child’s life does not remove or even necessarily counterbalance the negatives.
• One of the best skills a child in the early years of school can learn is that of self-evaluation. Students who learn to critique their own and others’ work do very well later.

… And that’s not everything. Highly recommended for parents-to-be, but take it with a grain of salt: while the research is convincing, some of it is quite new and therefore hasn’t been well-established or duplicated outside one group or setting.