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In various books I’ve written, particularly one called Unconditional Parenting, I lay out the fundamental difference between a “doing to” approach and a “working with” approach. And of course the "working with" approach isn’t a recipe because its application will depend on the people involved and the different situations at hand. But what we know is that rewards and punishments never work to get anything beyond temporary resentful compliance. So the more focused we are on long-term goals such as helping our kids grow into happy, caring, responsible people, the less we would offer a reward when they please us or use some sort of punitive consequence, which again research has shown for decades to be extremely destructive on all sorts of levels even though it makes us feel better, when our kids make us mad.
Can you tell me what it means to be an “unconditional parent” and how can parents promote unconditional self-esteem in their kids?
It’s not enough to love our children, we have to love them for who they are, not for what they do. That means that kids mustn’t feel that we care more about them when they’ve been well behaved or done something impressive. It’s more important, if anything, to make sure that kids feel loved and cared about even when they screw up or fall short, and we have to make that clear in all sorts of ways. The easiest way to start that process of moving from a conditional parent to an unconditional parent is to stop doing the things that are explicitly conditional, such as praising them when they jump through our hoops, or doing things like time-outs where we literally turn off our love and even separate them from us physically until they’ve earned their way into our good graces again. Conditional support for kids as they experience it, and their experience of it is far more important than our intention, tends to promote conditional self-esteem. When kids feel acknowledged and approved by us only when they act in particular ways they come to believe that they are acceptable and loveable only under those conditions. That’s the opposite of what promotes psychological health and fully-functioning human beings, which is not just high self-esteem but unconditional self-esteem; the belief that even when you do something bad or you don’t succeed you still have a core faith in yourself as a basically good and competent person.
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