Quotes by Alfie Kohn

“When test scores go up, we should worry, because of how poor a measure they are of what matters, and what you typically sacrifice in a desperate effort to raise scores.”

“What can we surmise about the likelihood of someones being caring and generous, loving and helpful, just from knowing that they are a believer? Virtually nothing, say psychologists, sociologists, and others who have studied that question for decade”

“Most parents want to know what they can do to make their children do as theyre told,”

“We think of ways that we can control them, whether it be with a spanking or a gold sticker or a parent constantly saying, Good job, good job, good job. ”

“When we do things that are controlling, whether intentional or not, we are not going to get those long-term outcomes,”

“You have to welcome their arguing with you, not to the point of disrespect, but if they are going to stand up for themselves, they need to learn to argue effectively,”

“Sometimes we have to put our foot down, ... but before we deliberately make children unhappy in order to get them to get into the car, or to do their homework or whatever, we need to weigh whether what were doing to make it happen is worth the possible strain on our relationship with them.”

“Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason.”

“What is equally striking to me is this ... there isnt a sense of a community solving problems together, rather theres punishment for aberrant individuals.”

“You have to give them unconditional love. They need to know that even if they screw up, you love them. You dont want them to grow up and resent you or, even worse, parent the way you parented them.”

Students get the message bout what adults want. When 4th graders in a variety of classroomswere asked what their teachers most wanted them to do, they didnt say, Ask thoughtful questions or Make responsible decisions or Help others. They said, Be quiet, dont fool around, and get our work done on time.

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.

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.

Like any other tool for facilitating the completion of a questionable task, rewards offer a how answer to what is really a why question.

How well you do things should be incidental, not integral, to the way you regard yourself.

My advice is to make a point of apologizing to your child about something at least twice a month. Why twice a month? I dont know. It sounds about right to me. (Almost all the specific advice in parenting books is similarly arbitrary. At least I admit it.)

Good tennis players are those who beat other tennis players, and a good shot during play is one the opponent cant return. But thats not a truth about life or excellence -- its a truth about tennis. Weve created an artificial structure in which one person cant succeed without doing so at someone elses expense, and then we accuse anyone who prefers other kinds of activities of being naive because there can be only one best -- youre it or youre not, as the teacher who delivered that much-admired youre-not-special commencement speech declared. You see the sleight of hand here? The question isnt whether everyone playing a competitive game can win or whether every student can be above average. Of course they cant. The question that were discouraged from asking is why our games are competitive -- or our students are compulsively ranked against one another -- in the first place.

Historians have shown that parents in the Middle Ages worried about their kids no less than we worry about ours today, and by the nineteenth century there is evidence of bars being placed on windows to protect toddlers from falling out as well as leading strings so that young children wouldnt wander off during walks.

How we feel about our kids isnt as important as how they experience those feelings and how they regard the way we treat them.

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 thats focused on long-term goals.