A society in which no one is willing to risk being called a troublemaker is a place where power is certain to be abused.
In an autobiographical essay published in 1946, Albert Einstein reflected on his days as a student of physics some fifty years earlier. He recalled his teachers with affection but, referring to exams,...
Nothing is more important to us when we’re young than how our parents feel about us. Uncertainty about that, or terror about being abandoned, can leave its mark even after we’re grown.
Good tennis players are those who beat other tennis players, and a good shot during play is one the opponent can't return. But that's not a truth about life or excellence -- it's a truth about tennis....
Children need to be loved as they are, and for who they are. When that happens, they can accept themselves as fundamentally good people, even when they screw up or fall short. And with this basic need...
Few readers will be shocked by the news that extrinsic motivators are a poor substitute for genuine interest in what one is doing. What is likely to be far more surprising and disturbing is the furthe...
Children aren’t helped to become caring members of a community, or ethical decision-makers, or critical thinkers, so much as they’re simply trained to follow directions.
Besides, what best prepares children to deal with the challenges of the real world is to experience success and joy. People don’t get better at coping with unhappiness because they were deliberately m...
All rewards have the same effect, one writer declares. They dilute the pure joy that comes from success itself.
The use of powerful systematic reward procedures to promote increased engagement in target activities may also produce concomitant decreases in task engagement, in situations where neither tangible no...
They are not raising children so much as living résumés, and by the time high school arrives, the kids have learned to sign up for activities strictly to impress college admissions committees, ignorin...
S. Neill put it, promising a reward for an activity is tantamount to declaring that the activity is not worth doing for its own sake.26 Thus, a parent who says to a child, If you finish your math home...
Independence is useful, but caring attitudes and behaviors shrivel up in a culture where each person is responsible only for himself.
In the pages that follow, I want to invite readers who don’t regard themselves as social conservatives to reexamine the traditionalist roots of attitudes about children they may have come to accept. A...
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 mome...
As Thomas Gordon pointed out, 'Parents who find unacceptable a great many things that their children do or say will inevitably foster in these children a deep feeling that they are unacceptable as per...
What matters is not just how motivated someone is but the source and nature of that motivation.13
When you stand by and let bad things happen, your child experiences the twin disappointments that something went wrong and you did not seem to care enough about her to lift a finger to help prevent th...
The story of declining school quality across the twentieth century is, for the most part, a fable, says social scientist Richard Rothstein, whose book The Way We Were? cites a series of similar attack...
My advice is to make a point of apologizing to your child about something at least twice a month. Why twice a month? I don't know. It sounds about right to me. (Almost all the specific advice in paren...