Giving & Withholding Love

Kohn Ch. 2-"Giving & Withholding Love"

*Types of love withdrawal: 

1. Ignoring

2.  Time-out, if forced.  "Time out from the positive reinforcement".

-"Time-out, like all punishments and rewards, stays on the surface.  It's designed purely to make an organism act (or stop acting) in a particular way".

*The results of love withdrawal

-"Disciplinary techniques effective for securing immediate compliance are not necessarily effective...in the long run".

-"Children may react to love withdrawal in ways that parents perceive as occasions for further discipline".

-Kids will focus on the consequences of their actions to themselves rather than how their actions have affected others.

-The young child doesn't know when the abandonment will end.

-Love withdrawal tends to cause low self-esteem, poorer emotional health, an aptitude for delinquent acts, depression.

-The most striking long-term effect is fear (fear of failure, fear to show anger, anxious).

-Promotes lower levels of morality

*The failure of rewards

-Rewards are ineffective at improving the quality of work or learning of a child/student/employee, ect.

-Punishments/rewards will not create commitments to tasks or actions when there is no longer any payoff or punishments.

-Intrinsic motivation means you like what you're doing for its own sake.

-Extrinsic motivation means you do something as a means to an end-in order to get a reward or avoid a punishment.

---extrinsic motivation is likely to erode intrinsic motivation.

-Its not the amount of motivation your child has that counts, its the type.

*No-so-positive reinforcement

-Praise reflects preoccupation with a behavior.

-Praise can become a reward and exemplifies the idea of conditional parenting.

-"Children's sense of their competence, and perhaps of their worth, may come to rise or fall as a result of our reaction".

-"The more we praise, the more our children need to be praised".

*The self-esteem controversy 

-High self-esteem isn't always accompanied by better outcomes, and even when it is, this doesn't mean that it caused those better outcomes".

-The real problem may not be self-esteem thats too low, it may be self-esteem thats contingent (I only feel good about myself when...)

-These people can lash out when their self esteem is threatened or can turn to self destructive behaviors such as eating disorders.

-Unconditional self-esteem is the best thing to shoot for.

-"If you need it, you dont have it, if you have it, you dont need it".

-Competition often causes contingent self-esteem.

-"Contingent self-esteem seems to result from being esteemed contingently by others".