Unconditional Parenting is a book by Alfie Kohn that has taken me about 2 months to read. This is not because it is massive or boring or hard to understand but because it is so bloody confronting. Most parenting books look at strategies on how to get kids to do what they're told, this assumes that the parent is right and the child is wrong. Kohn asks, what do our kids need - and how can we meet those needs? The answer of course is our kids need to be loved unconditionally but as parents we often fall short of this in all sorts of ways.
When I think about the characteristics I want to instil in my kids words like confidence, curiosity and kindness come to mind. I want the kids to be able to think for themselves and make brave decisions - choose the hard path over the easy one because it will be more fulfilling in the long run. To give new things a try and to treat failure with just as much respect as success. All of these things are important to Matt and myself but when I look at the way we behave as parents it's like we didn't get the memo.
You see, parents are basically fucked. From the moment we first birth a baby into the world we’re on the tools. Like being a brother or a sister, daughter or son, we are now a mum or a dad and this role will forever define us in one way or another. As every parent knows there is no user manual on how to be a parent. We all start with our own experience from our upbringing, perhaps some how-to-parent books (if you panicked and did some extra reading) and if you're lucky (unlucky?) the influence and advice of those around you.
The kicker is we are in the thick of it from day one. I remember a friend mentioning they were worried about changing nappies because they had never done it before - when asked how the nappies were going they said they were a pro by the end of day 2 because they had changed 15 nappies already. Parenting is jumping straight into the deep end and just starting to swim, no matter your stroke, you just need to stay afloat.
This is why we default to what we know. It’s easy and necessary that we draw our parenting techniques from somewhere and our own upbringing is the most common source. Even if you’ve been actively trying NOT to do something that your parents did, every parent finds themselves shocked when they hear their parents exact words coming out of their own mouth!
The point is we are now parents and this leaves very little time to objectively look at how we parent and more importantly why. Even now, with a 5 and 6 year old this is the first time I’ve taken time to consider why we do the things we do. This came about because the first half of this book is about what conditional parenting looks like and we pretty much ticked yes to all of the controlling behaviours that parents use.
The carrot and the stick is a big one in our house. This is when you offer a reward for good behaviour and punishment for bad. ‘You can have the Nintendo once you have your school uniform on.’ ‘I’ll take the Nintendo away if you don’t pack up this mess.’ The problem with the carrot and stick approach is that while it may produce short term gain, it creates a long term culture of the kids thinking that they are only worthy of good things when they do good and will be punished if they don’t do what they’re told. Being a constant people pleaser and putting others' emotions before your own wellbeing are not what I want to instil in my kids.
The other day Alice was helping me in the kitchen. She dragged a chair over from the kitchen table up next to the bench and started to climb up it. She got caught up in her dress (which was one of my old ones from the dress-up box) and ended up falling off the chair and landed with a thump on the floor. She immediately jumped up and said ‘Sorry Mum, it was an accident, I’m ok’. My first reaction was shock, was she ok? Followed quickly by anger - I bloody told her not to wear the silly dress around. Then I felt shit, really shit - my daughter had just hurt herself and her first reaction was to apologise. What the fuck. That’s not unconditional love. That's being told every time you do something wrong that it's your fault because you didn’t do what I told you to do.
That's when this book gets confronting. When you realise how many things you do that crush all of the traits you’re trying to encourage. Kohn suggests that as much as we think we do, we don’t actually respect our kids. Not like we respect other people. A hangover from the generations of ‘kids should be seen and not heard’ perhaps but it's socially acceptable that ‘good’ kids are the ones who are standing quietly next to their parents in the supermarket line, while the ‘bad’ kids are the ones running up and down the isles.
Why is that? When we boil down those two scenarios I’d argue it’s the parents' emotional needs not the kids that are being addressed. ‘Don’t embarrass me in the supermarket’. I can literally think of hundreds of situations when I have told the kids off for doing something that isn't necessarily a bad/dangerous thing on its own, but I didn’t want them to do it so they wouldn’t embarrass me.
What a jerk. While this book has really highlighted some of the parenting traps that we all fall into, it also offers guidance on parenting with more love and reason. Firstly we have to be more reflective. Asking why you are doing something is the first step in creating change. We fly on autopilot more often than we don’t so we need to stop and question our motives and sometimes we’ll need to reconsider our requests.
Keep our eyes on your long term goal - if we really want the kids to be confident, curious and kind then what does that look like? Are we saying no to things that are in fact examples of the above?
The most important thing we can do is actually respect our kids, listen to them. Just because we’re their parents doesn't mean we know what's best from them all the time. We can do this by talking less and asking more. Rather than just assuming, we can be curious and ask them to explain what they want or why. Something a simple conversation can avoid a complete meltdown if you're willing to give kids the respect you’d offer any other human.
Reading books like this is challenging - we so often just want to be told that we’re doing an amazing job and being told that we might be doing the opposite isn’t easy to take onboard. I could’ve kept writing for days about this book but I’ve only given myself 2 hours. Perhaps there will be a followup edition but in the meantime I’m going to focus on not being in a hurry with the kids. Not being in a hurry gives me time to reflect on what I’m asking, give us time to discuss what or why they want or don’t want to do something and will help to foster a bit more of that unconditional love that I want my kids to have in their lives.
