The Legacy of Behaviorism: Do this and you’ll get that.
How well you do things should be incidental, not integral, to the way you regard yourself.
Few readers will be shocked by the news that extrinsic motivators are a poor substitute for genuine interest in what one is doing. What is likely to be far more surprising and disturbing is the further point that rewards, like punishments, actually undermine the intrinsic motivation that promotes optimal performance.
Besides, what best prepares children to deal with the challenges of the “real world” is to experience success and joy. People don’t get better at coping with unhappiness because they were deliberately made unhappy when they were young.
From deep contentment comes the courage to achieve.
Think of your goal as giving your child a kind of inoculation, providing him with the unconditional love, respect, trust, and sense of perspective that will serve to immunize him against the most destructive effects of an overcontrolling environment or an unreasonable authority figure.
Educators remind us that what counts in a classroom is not what the teacher teaches; it’s what the learner learns. And so it is in families. What matters is the message our kids receive, not the one we think we’re sending.
S. Neill put it, promising a reward for an activity is “tantamount to declaring that the activity is not worth doing for its own sake.”26 Thus, a parent who says to a child, “If you finish your math homework, you may watch an hour of TV” is teaching the child to think of math as something that isn’t much fun.
We tell them how good they are and they light up, eager to please, and try to please us some more. These are the children we should really worry about.
A willingness to question the way things are paradoxically affirms a vision of the way things ought to be.
Unconditional parents want to know how to do something other than threaten and punish. They don’t see their relationship with their children as adversarial, so their goal is to avoid battles, not win them.
As Thomas Gordon pointed out, ‘Parents who find unacceptable a great many things that their children do or say will inevitably foster in these children a deep feeling that they are unacceptable as persons.’ That doesn’t change just because the parents remember to say soothingly, ‘We love you, honey; we just hate almost everything you do.
After all, if we want a child to grow into a genuinely compassionate person, then it’s not enough to know whether he just did something helpful. We’d want to know why.
We complain loudly about such things as the sagging productivity of our workplaces, the crisis of our schools, and the warped values of our children. But the very strategy we use to solve those problems – dangling rewards like incentive plans and grades and candy bars in front of people – is partly responsible for the fix we’re in. We are a society of loyal Skinnerians, unable to think our way out of the box we have reinforced ourselves into.
A society in which no one is willing to risk being called a troublemaker is a place where power is certain to be abused.
We ought to love children, as my friend Deborah says, ‘for no good reason.’ Furthermore, what counts is not that we believe we love them unconditionally, but that they feel loved in that way.
All rewards have the same effect,” one writer declares. “They dilute the pure joy that comes from success itself.
I realized that this is what many people in our society seem to want most from children: not that they are caring or creative or curious, but simply that they are well behaved. A “good” child – from infancy to adolescence – is one who isn’t too much trouble to us grown-ups.
What provokes particular outrage and ridicule is the idea that children might feel good about themselves in the absence of impressive accomplishments, even though, as I’ll show, studies find that unconditional self-esteem is a key component of psychological health.
In my view, there are two fundamentally different ways one can respond to a child who does something wrong. One is to impose a punitive consequence. Another is to see the situation as a “teachable moment,” an opportunity to educate or to solve a problem together. The response here is not “You’ve misbehaved; now here’s what I’m going to do to you” but “Something has gone wrong; what can we do about it?
Many mothers and father return each evening from their paid jobs only to serve as homework monitors, a position for which they never applied.