Alfie Kohn on Punishment

If I may interject...you're right. It is a competitive world, if you're talking about the world of managers and underlings. You're right; if the goal of parenting is to raise good workers, who can perform any chores their bosses ask them to, OR perfect soldiers for armies, then you're right, being soft on children won't help.

IF, however, your goal is to raise children who can write the scripts for their own lives, or critical thinkers, then training them to accept cruelty is awful.

Nobody who has seriously studied behavior analysis has ever EVER considered that to be "time out"
That is a complete bastardization of an explanation

That's only because "behavior analysis" is a euphemism for hard-core behaviorism, which is accepted by only a tiny, cultish subset of psychologists. The explanation in the video makes a lot of sense to most people who study child development.

Thanks for sharing this video on youtube. I've been raising my children for 17 years without punishments or rewards of any kind (though we do use other things that Alfie doesn't talk about like setting firm limits, listening to feelings, special time, etc.) and my children are wonderful, responsible, disciplined people.

Hi, that's awesome and I'm sure your children must have grown up very happy and felt very respected.

I have read a book by Alfie called Unconditional Parenting where he does speak about limits, feelings, special time and other things. I would also HIGHLY recommend Naomi Aldort's book Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves. She is awesome! I just didn't have a video to post of hers as she already has her own youtube channel lol

You are the one that says we have to treat children in a way that the real world will treat them.

He can't even ask for things without looking like he's terrified. I can barely hear him when he's asking for something - his voice is almost inaudible and he starts to mumble. My son still uses self defense if one of the children attack him and I have no problem with them but I step in and then comes the conversation. I'm not teaching him to talk to the person when he's clearly in a life-threatening situation but I teach him to talk to a person BEFORE it gets to that point.

The other parents actually ask me what I do with him to make him act like that (see the word "make him" act like that? it's all about control with them). My son is polite and I've NEVER told him to say "please, thank you" or to ask for things. He simply follows me lead because he feels good about doing it. The children that are abused even start acting differently after being around me for some time.

My son questions everything. When a kid does something he doesn't understand, he asks them why did they do that. It's funny to see the other child go into self-analysis as if that's something he's never done before. He is actually helping the other children learn about themselves.