Alfie Kohn Children Quotations

Most parents want to know what they can do to make their children do as they're told,

Children learn how to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions.

Children, after all, are not just adults-in-the-making. They are people whose current needs and rights and experiences must be taken seriously.

If children feel safe, they can take risks, ask questions, make mistakes, learn to trust, share their feelings, and grow.

Sometimes we have to put our foot down, ... but before we deliberately make children unhappy in order to get them to get into the car, or to do their homework or whatever, we need to weigh whether what we're doing to make it happen is worth the possible strain on our relationship with them.

If a child is off-task...mayb e the problem is not the child...maybe it's the task.

The value of a book about dealing with children is inversely proportional to the number of times it contains the word behavior.

Most of us would protest that of course we love our children without any strings attached. But what counts is how things look from the perspective of the children

Some who support [more] coercive strategies assume that children will run wild if they are not controlled. However, the children for whom this is true typically turn out to be those accustomed to being controlled— those who are not trusted, given explanations, encouraged to think for themselves, helped to develop and internalize good values, and so on. Control breeds the need for more control, which is used to justify the use of control.

In short, with each of the thousand-and-one problems that present themselves in family life, our choice is between controlling and teaching, between creating an atmosphere of distrust and one of trust, between setting an example of power and helping children to learn responsibility, between quick-fix parenting and the kind that's focused on long-term goals.