There’s a hot new parenting trend that you may have heard of. It’s called “Unconditional Parenting.” It gets a lot of press in the New York Times, because they’re always having the guy who wrote the books about it write parenting articles for them. I believe I railed about it once on this blog. I try to ignore it, but recently it’s been coming up a lot.
And it’s bugging the bejeezus out of me. I’m really sick of hearing out it. It’s one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever heard.
Basically, the idea is that “conditional parenting” is what normal people do, and it totally screws up your child. It includes punishing or praising your child. This teaches your child that your love is conditional: it goes away when they do something wrong, and it only becomes effusive if they do something right. Then they get “addicted to praise” and lose all sense of self. Then define themselves only by their relationships to others, fall into abusive relationships, do a lot of drugs, and end up as middle-management yes-men.
Unconditional parenting, on the other hand, involves never punishing a child. Seriously. Punishment=withholding love. I’m not making that up. If your child does something wrong, you should just redirect or practice “playful parenting.” It also involves not praising the child himself, but praising his actions. So saying “Good job! You’re so smart!” will backfire and make him question his smartness and/or his love for you if he does something stupid. Instead, you’re supposed to say “Wow, that must have made you feel good about yourself!”
I’m gonna call bullshit.
My main problem with this is that it is, at its core, about raising entitled children. That’s the point of it: to train a child not to need external validation, but to rely on internal validation. There’s a huge gaping problem here in that society doesn’t really give a damn if you feel good about yourself. If people only did things that made them feel good about themselves, the world would grind to a halt. There’s the minor problem that we’d all choke in a sea of Smug, a la South Park, because there’d be no such thing as a selfless act, when every act is defined as being something that makes you feel good about yourself.
And the major problem is that so much of the world really doesn’t revolve around you. An unconditional parent would never, ever require that their child say please or thank you: these things should be meant, so you can’t force them. The child needs to want to say them. Bullshit. It’s polite to say please and thank you. Period. When I say please, it doesn’t make me feel good. It has nothing to do with my self worth. It’s just the polite thing to say. And, more importantly, it makes the other person feel good, like their efforts are appreciated. That’s why you say please and thank you. Most of the time I say please and thank you, I don’t really mean it. I mean, I don’t not mean it. But it’s not some huge, heartfelt outpouring. Someone holds the door open for me, I say “thank you,” and we both move merrily on with our lives and never think about it again. I don’t say “thank you” because of some wave of gratitude on my part: I say it because it’s nice for the other person to hear “thank you” when they went the teeniest eensiest minorest bit out of their way and stood at the door for the extra one and a half seconds until I got there. I mean, I hope I don’t come off as bitchy and ungrateful here: but the plain and simple truth is that saying “thank you” has nothing to do with me. At best it’s positive reinforcement for the person who held the door, at worst it’s just a rote thing I say without really thinking because that’s just what you say when someone holds the door for you. Personally, I go for the positive reinforcement. But that doesn’t actually mean that I mean thank you.
So when you teach a child that they only need to say thank you if they really, really mean it, you’re not teaching them to be a citizen of the world, the world where they have to interact with other people on a real, day to day basis. You’re teaching them that their feelings and their actions are the only ones that matter. And the world just doesn’t work like that.
Human beings are social creatures. We just are. We’re animals of the pack. We travel in packs, we live in packs. We rely on our friends and neighbors. The human race survived, despite not being particularly big or fearsome or naturally well-armed, because we lived in groups and hunted in groups and protected our women and children in groups. And the only way that a group stays a group is if everyone agrees to live by a certain code of conduct. And the only way to maintain this code of conduct and ensure that everyone is on the same page is to exert some societal pressure.
Now, obviously things can be taken too far, so I’m not arguing that pack mentality is the best thing ever. But it has its place. The basic truth is that the best way to maintain social order, which we all need in order to live in a society, is positive or negative reinforcement. You do something good, the pack rewards you. You do something bad, the pack punishes you. And the rewarding and the punishing can take all sorts of forms, depending on the society and the action. Good deeds merit everything from a thank you, to people wanting to be friends with you, to a key to the city, to a Presidential medal of honor, to a cash prize. Punishments can range from a lecture, to a shunning, to jail, to a death sentence. At the end of the day, that’s what keeps us all in line.
There’s a woman I know who I don’t like. I find her nasty and vapid. Her children are little monsters. And, you know, it would make me feel good to tell her that. It really would. It would be a total load off my chest. And it would hopefully mean that she wouldn’t talk to me any more, which would be an added bonus. So why don’t I? Because she knows people who I do like, and if I walked up to this woman and told her she was a bitch, word would get around, and the pack would probably shun me. And I don’t think that these people actually like this woman either. But one of the basic things that keeps society humming along is that we don’t go up to people that we don’t particularly like, but who haven’t really done anything bad to us, and tell them that they’re dumb as a box of rocks. And if I broke that basic rule of society, who knows what other rules I would break? It would be in the pack’s best interest to put a stop to my anti-social behavior, before I went and robbed a bank (another thing that would make me feel good, incidentally) or slept with their husbands or did anything else that goes against our society’s best interests.
There isn’t a society or an organization on earth that doesn’t act like this. Not a town, not a country, not a business. Sure some people have super cool jobs that they love and adore, but I’d guess than 85% of Americans go to work and do the best they can in the hopes of getting a bonus or a raise or a promotion. A filing job well done does not give you a warm and fuzzy feeling inside: the extra money in your Christmas bonus because your boss liked your filing job does.
By telling kids that it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks of them, you’re doing your kids a disservice, and you’re doing society a disservice. Because it’s going to be a cold, hard reality when that kid grows up and discovers that his boss doesn’t much care that he doesn’t feel like getting coffee. And it’s going to really suck for all of us as a society when we have all these adults running around who were brought up thinking that the only thing that matters is their own self-worth.
