Alfie Kohn says rewards and punishments teach children to seek approval, not judgement

The education writer argues that children need collaboration and unconditional acceptance, rather than control-based discipline, to develop autonomy and moral judgement.

At a time when parenting advice is saturated with systems, techniques and quick fixes, Alfie Kohn is offering a sharply different message: children are not improved by being bribed or threatened into obedience. The American education writer, whose book “Unconditional Parenting” has been published by ZYX Books in Romania, argues that rewards and punishments may produce compliance in the short term but can weaken trust, distort motivation and damage the parent-child bond. Kohn is due to speak at ParentED Fest in Bucharest on October 17 and 18, bringing his long-standing critique of control-based parenting to a wider audience.

Speaking in an interview with ZYX Books, Kohn drew a distinction between discipline as domination and discipline as guidance. If discipline means using adult power to force children to behave in a prescribed way, he rejects it. If it means helping children develop socially and morally while working alongside them to solve problems, he embraces it. His point is not that parents should step back from setting limits, but that those limits should be built through collaboration rather than coercion.

The foundation of his argument is what he calls unconditional parenting. In Kohn’s view, children need to feel valued for who they are, not merely for how they perform, whether that means getting good grades, being agreeable or meeting adult expectations. When affection appears to depend on achievement or compliance, he says, children can absorb the message that love must be earned. In place of that, he advocates a relationship in which a child’s worth is not withdrawn after mistakes, and in which adults help children develop a stable sense of self. His earlier book “Punished by Rewards” makes a similar case, arguing that external incentives can shift attention away from the task itself and towards approval from others.

That approach, he says, has consequences beyond mood or behaviour in the moment. Children who grow up with conditional approval may become adept at performing for praise while losing touch with their own motives and values. Kohn told ZYX Books that some children build what amounts to a false self, adapting themselves to win adult acceptance. By contrast, he says, unconditional acceptance helps children develop internal motivation and moral judgement, because they are not constantly calculating how to secure favour or avoid disapproval.

Kohn also pushed back against the common claim that a gentler style of parenting leaves children unchecked. He described that fear as based on a false choice between harsh control and total permissiveness. The real alternative, he argued, is neither dominance nor indulgence, but a cooperative approach in which adults remain engaged, set limits and solve problems with children rather than against them. In an interview with CBS News, he made the same point, saying that punishment and rewards teach children to seek approval rather than to understand the effects of their actions.

His wider critique extends beyond the home. Kohn has long argued that children learn to accept competition, authority and obedience as natural parts of life because those patterns are built into childhood. In his first book, “No Contest: The Case Against Competition”, he wrote that repeated exposure to zero-sum situations teaches people to view others as obstacles rather than allies. In the same way, he says, a school or family culture organised around control can make autonomy feel unfamiliar. The answer, he believes, is not simply to reduce the use of punishments or competition, but to practise cooperation more deliberately at home, in school and later in working life.