Summer Reading

This summer I read 5 books.  This is quite an accomplishment for someone who finds very little time to read!  It was very enjoyable, thanks to good recommendations.

Here are 2 comments about a couple of the books. . . 

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I am embarrassed that it has taken me so long to begin this book.  I won a blog contest (on Amy's blog) and among the cool things she sent me, was this book.  It is her favorite and now I know why.  I absolutely LOVED it, every word.  I sent it to my mom for her birthday and she loved it too.  It is written in letters from extremely interesting and quirky people who formed a literary society to protect themselves during the German occupation. 

 

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I have posted before about one of Alfie Kohn's books, Unconditional Parenting.  Kohn wrote Punished by Rewards 7 years before Unconditional Parenting.  This book gave me a lot more insight about why punishments and rewards aren't that effective for long-term change. 

This quote (pg. 273) sums up why I liked it so much: 

 "Parents are widely admired for getting their children to obey.  We live in a culture where the highest compliment a parent can receive is that his or her kid is 'well behaved' (read: docile).  When strangers in restaurants tell us how 'good' our daughter is, they don't mean that she is admirable in an ethical sense but merely that she hasn't been a nuisance to them.  No wonder people declare matter-of-factly that it's simply unrealistic to do without treats and threats: these tactics may indeed be necessary if our goal is to produce children who spend their lives just doing what they're told."

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And, I just can't stop sharing insights from Kohn.  I like what he has to say and although I think it's really, really hard to follow his advice consistently, to me it is worth trying.  This is what he says on page 231.

". . .  punishment teaches about the use of power, not about how or why to behave properly.  . . .  But it makes sense to probe this belief to see what it rests on.  My impression is that the commitment to punishing children typically reflects a fear that the failure to respond this way will mean that they 'got away with something.'  If we dig still further, we find that this perception upsets us for two reasons.  First, it implies that the child has 'won.' Our authority has been challenged, and the more we construe a relationship as a battle for power, the more wildly we will lash out to preserve that power.   Second, we are concerned the child will come away thinking he can repeat whatever it was he did.  This concern, in turn, betrays a particular assumption about children's motives, namely that a child is inclined to do what he can get away with and will keep doing it until forcibly restrained.  Ultimately, our need to punish (or dread of not punishing) is predicated on a tacit theory of human nature.  . . .  Do we really want to pursue an adversarial relationship with the child?  If not, then it makes no sense to choose our response with an eye to preventing him from winning a contest for power, because there is no contest for power.  In my view, there are two fundamentally different ways one can respond to a child who does something wrong.  One is to impose a punitive consequence.  Another is to see the situation as a 'teachable moment,' an opportunity to educate or solve a problem together.  The response here is not 'You've misbehaved; now here's what I'm going to do to you' but 'Something has gone wrong; what can we do about it?'