The Problem with Conditional Love

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Alfie Kohn: “…(It may be that) the problem with praise isn’t that it is done the wrong way — or handed out too easily, as social conservatives insist. Rather, it might be just another method of control, analogous to punishment. The primary message of all types of conditional parenting is that children must earn a parent’s love. A steady diet of that, (therapist Carl) Rogers warned, and children might eventually need a therapist to provide the unconditional acceptance they didn’t get when it counted.

But was Rogers right? Before we toss out mainstream discipline, it would be nice to have some evidence. And now we do.

In 2004, two Israeli researchers, Avi Assor and Guy Roth, joined Edward L. Deci, a leading American expert on the psychology of motivation, in asking more than 100 college students whether the love they had received from their parents had seemed to depend on whether they had succeeded in school, practiced hard for sports, been considerate toward others or suppressed emotions like anger and fear.

It turned out that children who received conditional approval were indeed somewhat more likely to act as the parent wanted. But compliance came at a steep price. First, these children tended to resent and dislike their parents. Second, they were apt to say that the way they acted was often due more to a “strong internal pressure” than to “a real sense of choice.” Moreover, their happiness after succeeding at something was usually short-lived, and they often felt guilty or ashamed…” (New York Times )

2 thoughts on “The Problem with Conditional Love”

  1. Interesting, and feels intuitive to those of us with a nurturing rather than disciplinarian outlook. Their characterization of time-outs as love-witholding seems a bit overstated, however — one can use time-outs in an autonomy-reinforcing way, as letting the kid use them to regain self-control and then come back, rather than just framing them as shutting the kid away from the family as punishment. Of course, there are limits to what sort of behavior can be accepted, however much the child is loved, so there have to be some methods of enforcing those limits, and those have to be negative in some way. Respect and communication are probably the best way to make the kid feel respected rather than just pushed around, but it’s easy to talk when your kid is pretty easy-going to start with . . .

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  2. Right – I have Kohn’s book (haven’t finished it) and much resonates. But (so far) I have a pretty easy-going kid, too, and it’s easy to parent such a child unconditionally.

    ACM – you might like Mama-Om — some interesting ideas on helping kids cope with their feelings (and other aspects of parenting). http://mama-om.blogspot.com/

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