Alfie Kohn > Quotes

“In a word, learning is decontextualized. We break ideas down into tiny pieces that bear no relation to the whole. We give students a brick of information, followed by another brick, followed by another brick, until they are graduated, at which point we assume they have a house. What they have is a pile of bricks, and they don't have it for long.”
― Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise and Other Bribes

“Some who support [more] coercive strategies assume that children will run wild if they are not controlled. However, the children for whom this is true typically turn out to be those accustomed to being controlled— those who are not trusted, given explanations, encouraged to think for themselves, helped to develop and internalize good values, and so on. Control breeds the need for more control, which is used to justify the use of control.”
― Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise and Other Bribes

“The way kids learn to make good decisions is by making decisions, not by following directions.”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

“In short, with each of the thousand-and-one problems that present themselves in family life, our choice is between controlling and teaching, between creating an atmosphere of distrust and one of trust, between setting an example of power and helping children to learn responsibility, between quick-fix parenting and the kind that's focused on long-term goals.”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

“People will typically be more enthusiastic where they feel a sense of belonging and see themselves as part of a community than they will in a workplace in which each person is left to his own devices”
― Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise and Other Bribes

“How we feel about our kids isn't as important as how they experience those feelings and how they regard the way we treat them.”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

“Even before i had children, I knew that being a parent was going to be challenging as well as rewarding. But I didn't really know.
I didn't know how exhausted it was possible to become, or how clueless it was possible to feel, or how, each time I reached the end of my rope, I would somehow have to find more rope.
I didn't understand that sometimes when your kids scream so loudly that the neighbors are ready to call the Department of Child Services, it's because you've served the wrong shape of pasta for dinner.
I didn't realize that those deep-breathing exercises mothers are taught in natural-childbirth class dont really start to pay off until long after the child is out.
I couldn't have predicted how relieved I'd be to learn that other peoples children struggle with the same issues, and act in some of the same ways, mine do. (Even more liberating is the recognition that other parents, too, have dark moments when they catch themselves not liking their own child, or wondering whether it's all worth it, or entertaining various other unspeakable thoughts).
The bottom line is that raising kids is not for whimps.”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

“Few parents have the courage and independence to care more for their children’s happiness than for their success.”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

“One explanation was offered by Alice Miller: “Many people continue to pass on the cruel deeds and attitudes to which they were subjected as children, so that they can continue to idealize their parents.”16 Her premise is that we have a powerful, unconscious need to believe that everything our parents did to us was really for our own good and was done out of love. It’s too threatening for many of us even to entertain the possibility that they weren’t entirely well-meaning—or competent. So, in order to erase any doubts, we do the same things to our own children that our parents did to us.”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

“Children don’t just need to be loved; they need to know that nothing they do will change the fact that they’re loved.”
― Alfie Kohn, The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom About Children and Parenting

“The more we want our children to be (1) lifelong learners, genuinely excited about words and numbers and ideas, (2) avoid sticking with what’s easy and safe, and (3) become sophisticated thinkers, the more we should do everything possible to help them forget about grades.”
― Alfie Kohn

“Let me note, finally, that most of the research for this book was done in the libraries of Harvard University, the size of whose holdings is matched only by the school's determination to restrict access to them. I am delighted to have been able to use these resources, and it hardly matters that I was afforded this privilege only because the school thought I was someone else.”
― Alfie Kohn, No Contest: The Case Against Competition: Why We Lose in Our Race to Win

“Similarly, parents who want to teach the importance of honesty make it a practice never to lie to their children, even when it would be easier just to claim that there are no cookies left rather than to explain why they can’t have another one.”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

“Many of our elected officials have virtually handed the keys to our schools over to corporate interests. Presidential commissions on education are commonly chaired by the executives of large companies.”
― Alfie Kohn, The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and "Tougher Standards" – A Research-Based Argument for Child-Centered Learning

“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.”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

“Far from helping students to develop into mature, self-reliant, self-motivated individuals, schools seem to do everything they can to keep youngsters in a state of chronic, almost infantile, dependency. The pervasive atmosphere of distrust, together with rules covering the most minute aspects of existence, teach students every day that they are not people of worth, and certainly not individuals capable of regulating their own behavior.”
― Alfie Kohn, Punished By Rewards: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes

“Educators remind us that what counts in a classroom is not what the teacher teaches; it’s what the learner learns.”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

“When we set children against one another in contests—from spelling bees to awards assemblies to science “fairs” (that are really contests), from dodge ball to honor rolls to prizes for the best painting or the most books read—we teach them to confuse excellence with winning, as if the only way to do something well is to outdo others.”
― Alfie Kohn, The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom About Children and Parenting

“What rewards and punishments do is induce compliance, and this they do very well indeed. If your objective is to get people to obey an order, to show up on time and do what they’re told, then bribing or threatening them may be sensible strategies. But if your objective is to get long-term quality in the workplace, to help students become careful thinkers and self-directed learners, or to support children in developing good values, then rewards, like punishments, are absolutely useless. In fact, as we are beginning to see, they are worse than useless—they are actually counterproductive.”
― Alfie Kohn, Punished By Rewards: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes

“Most children seem eager, even desperate, to please those in authority, reluctant to rock the boat even when the boat clearly needs rocking. In a way, an occasional roll-your-eyes story of excess in the other direction marks the exception that proves the rule. And the rule is a silent epidemic of obedience. For every kid who is slapped with the label “Oppositional Defiant Disorder,” hundreds suffer from what one educator has mischievously called Compliance Acquiescent Disorder. The symptoms of CAD, he explained, include the following: “defers to authority,” “actively obeys rules,” “fails to argue back,” “knuckles under instead of mobilizing others in support,” and “stays restrained when outrage is warranted.”
― Alfie Kohn, The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom About Children and Parenting

“John Dewey reminded us that the value of what students do 'resides in its connection with a stimulation of greater thoughtfulness, not in the greater strain it imposes.”
― Alfie Kohn

“They're arguing for giving homework and tests to all young children, or separating them into winners and losers, because these tykes need to get used to such things -- as if exposure itself will inoculate them against the negative effects they would otherwise experience later. If we were interested in helping children to anticipate and deal with unpleasant experiences, it might make sense to discuss the details with them and perhaps guide them through role-playing exercises. But why would we subject kids to those experiences? After all, to teach children how to handle a fire emergency, we talk to them about the dangers of smoke inhalation and advise them where to go when the alarm sounds. We don't actually set them on fire. But the key point is this: From a developmental perspective, BGUTI [Better-Get-Used-To-It worldview] is flat-out wrong. People don't get better at coping with unhappiness because they were because they were deliberately made unhappy when they were young On the contrary, what best prepares children to deal with the challenges of the real world is to experience success and joy, to feel supported and respected, to receive loving guidance and unconditional care and the chance to have some say about what happens to them.”
― Alfie Kohn, The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Coddled Kids, Helicopter Parents, and Other Phony Crises

“Independence is useful, but caring attitudes and behaviors shrivel up in a culture where each person is responsible only for himself.”
― Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise and Other Bribes

“Again, the most effective (and least destructive) way to help a child succeed—whether she’s writing or skiing, playing a trumpet or a computer game—is to do everything possible to help her fall in love with what she’s doing, to pay less attention to how successful she was (or is likely to be) and show more interest in the task. That’s just another way of saying that we need to encourage more, judge less, and love always.”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

“I think our challenge as parents is to rise above that preference for the child of least resistance and to think beyond short-term success as a criterion—particularly if success is defined by conventional and insipid standards. Don’t we want our kids to be inspiring rather than spend their lives just collecting tokens (grades, money, approval)? Don’t we want them to think in the plural rather than focusing only on what will benefit them personally? Don’t we want them to appraise traditions with fresh eyes and raise questions about what seems silly or self-defeating or oppressive, rather than doing what has always been done just because it’s always been done?”
― Alfie Kohn, The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom About Children and Parenting

“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.”
― Alfie Kohn, Punished By Rewards: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes

“The dominant problem with parenting in our society isn't permissiveness, but the fear of permissiveness. We're so worried about spoiling kids that we often end up over controlling them.”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

“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.”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

“Children aren’t helped to become caring members of a community, or ethical decision-makers, or critical thinkers, so much as they’re simply trained to follow directions.”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

“Like any other tool for facilitating the completion of a questionable task, rewards offer a "how" answer to what is really a "why" question.”
― Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise and Other Bribes