Disciplining Children Means Our Love Is Conditional

I am confused…Apparently, my method of raising my daughter is conditional…All this time I was under the impression that by disciplining her when she did something wrong and rewarding her when she did something right, I was raising her to be a well behaved human being who knew right from wrong, but I was wrong …

A recent study highlighted in the New York Times says by rewarding good behaviour with affection and things and punishing bad behaviour by withholding love and comfort we are doing nothing but harming our children…It goes on to suggest that in order to raise happy and well adjusted human beings, parents should not try to make an example of their child by using conditional means (rewards, punishment), but lead by example…

We all know that spanking children (aggressive negative conditioning) can be harmful, but what most of us don’t know is that positive conditioning (rewards, showering love) may also have negative results…According to research, positive reinforcements make our children feel that they are worthy of love only when they do what we think is right…The study also suggests that praise is just another method of control, analogous to punishment and both are forms of conditional parenting…

In 2004, two Israeli researchers, Avi Assor and Guy Roth, joined Edward L. Deci, a leading American expert on the psychology of motivation, in asking more than 100 college students whether the love they had received from their parents had seemed to depend on whether they had succeeded in school, practiced hard for sports, been considerate toward others or suppressed emotions like anger and fear.

In a companion study, Dr. Assor and his colleagues interviewed mothers of grown children. With this generation, too, conditional parenting proved damaging. Those mothers who, as children, sensed that they were loved only when they lived up to their parents’ expectations now felt less worthy as adults. Yet despite the negative effects, these mothers were more likely to use conditional affection with their own children.

This July, the same researchers, now joined by two of Dr. Deci’s colleagues at the University of Rochester, published two replications and extensions of the 2004 study. This time the subjects were ninth graders, and this time giving more approval when children did what parents wanted was carefully distinguished from giving less when they did not.

The studies found that both positive and negative conditional parenting were harmful, but in slightly different ways. The positive kind sometimes succeeded in getting children to work harder on academic tasks, but at the cost of unhealthy feelings of “internal compulsion.” Negative conditional parenting didn’t even work in the short run; it just increased the teenagers’ negative feelings about their parents.

…data suggest that love withdrawal isn’t particularly effective at getting compliance, much less at promoting moral development. Even if we did succeed in making children obey us, though — say, by using positive reinforcement — is obedience worth the possible long-term psychological harm? Should parental love be used as a tool for controlling children?

…according to an impressive collection of data by Dr. Deci and others, unconditional acceptance by parents as well as teachers should be accompanied by “autonomy support”: explaining reasons for requests, maximizing opportunities for the child to participate in making decisions, being encouraging without manipulating, and actively imagining how things look from the child’s point of view.

All this research has only managed to make my brain go haywire…I was just wondering if unconditional love and no discipline is a practical form of teaching despite what research says? I know from experience that even if I lead by example, my daughter doesn’t always follow…In such situtations, what should I do? Keep leading expecting her to follow? By always bestowing unconditional love on her, won’t she think I’m a sucker and that she can get away with just about anything? Will this sort of thinking help her in the long run?

I’m sure someone will soon publish another research saying that all this is crap and the system of rewards and punishment is the only way to raise well adjusted children…