Unconditional Parenting with Alfie Kohn

Welcome to the Sage Family Podcast, where we explore natural home schooling, gentle parenting, simple living, and family adventure. I'm Rachel Rainbolt, the Sage Parenting Coach coming to you from the Pacific Northwest, where I live wild and free in connection with my three wildlings and the Papa Bear and our fixer-upper on the beach. This is Episode 22 and today I'm here with Alfie Cohn talking about unconditional parenting. Alfie is the author of 14 books on education, parenting, and human behavior. He's been on Oprah twice, The Today Show, and many other programs, in addition to speaking regularly at conferences across the country. He lives actually in the Boston area and virtually at AlfieCohn.org. So join us around the campfire and let's get living the family life of our dreams. [Music] If you are enjoying the Sage Family Podcast, then please scroll down and click those stars and leave a review in your podcast app or on iTunes. This is a quick and easy way to support the show using the currency of feedback. Nailed that first take, Bay. Shout out to our new patron, Yana Campbell. We are going to hear from her leader in the show when she joins us to share her favorite day this week for our Day in the Life segment. If like Yana, you too are loving the Sage Family Podcast, then become a part of it and even join me on it through Patreon at PATREON/SageFamily. The adventure I'm sharing this week is actually one I wasn't even on. Skye, who is 13, planned a two-week solo trip to San Diego. She made arrangements with family and friends, saved up the money for the plane tickets, and orchestrated a grand surprise for her cousin on her birthday. If you want to cry some happy tears, then head on over to Sage Parenting on Instagram and watch the video. She had such a good time, and talking on the phone the night before her return flight, she said it felt bittersweet. She was happy to be returning to the family home in life she loved, but sad for the experience to be ending. Independence is a funny thing in the world of parenting. On the mainstream path, it is prematurely pushed before they're ready, but then denied as they naturally reach for it. I invite you to flip that on its head. Honor all your kids' needs, and then through access and finding the quality yeses, honor their independence too. One leads to the other. A child needs that secure foundation on which to launch into competent and confident independence. It's a simple formula, and it happens to be research supported and completely in line with your natural maternal intuition and trusting your children. Today, Alfie Kohn is joining me to share a conversation on unconditional parenting. His game-changing book of the same name was published the year I became a mother. It was pivotal for me in framing and articulating my own parenting approach and the approach I utilized in guiding families through my work, offering research to support the step away from mainstream parenting tactics rooted in power, control, and manipulation that I knew felt wrong and didn't work. I'm so honored to share this conversation with you, Alfie. So I'm just going to jump right in. Help us understand the difference between conditional and unconditional parenting. Well, children need not only to be loved and loved a lot, they need to be loved no matter what with no strings attached. And that's what I mean by unconditional parenting or love or support, that we love them not on the basis of what they do, but just for who they are. So that even when they screw up or fall short, they have a keen understanding that that will never make our care for them evaporate. And that sounds like something everybody would sign off on. And if you ask most parents, do you love your children unconditionally? No matter what, of course, we all say yes. Unfortunately, most traditional parenting practices and the kind that are actively recommended to us by many parenting authors and pediatricians and therapists are the exact opposite of that. They are ways of offering support, acknowledgement, attention, approval to kids, conditionally, contingently with strings attached. The two great examples of this are timeout, which is a euphemism for forcibly isolating children when they need us most, which children tend to experience as our having turned off the love when they failed to please us, and conversely, positive reinforcement, for example, in the form of a verbal reward, like good job, which communicates to kids that we get excited about them and pleased with them, only when they jump through our hoops. That's the opposite of unconditional support. So in my book, Unconditional Parenting, I invite parents, first of all, to look beyond getting short-term compliance, which is the unstated goal of most parenting resources, and instead look at our long-term goals for the kinds of people they become. And I talk about how we can move beyond conditional parenting approaches, which are variations of bribes and threats, and instead talk about supporting children unconditionally. There's so many like gents and everything that you just said, and I just want to share this really quick anecdote back earlier in my career, when I was working with parents who had been abusing their kids in parenting groups, they were court mandated, and I had just recently read your book, and it had never occurred to me that people wouldn't love their children unconditionally, and that their children wouldn't receive their love as unconditional. And I was working with this father and going back and forth, and in the end I said, "You know, it's okay to love your child unconditionally, even when they do things that you're not sure how to respond to, or things that upset people around them." And it was a light bulb moment for everyone in the group, and the father instantly started crying and said, "I had no idea that I was allowed to love him unconditionally in that way." "Allowed to," my goodness, so one would hope it would be something one would feel... Well, I guess "allowed to" is actually an interesting phrase, because people do feel that they've gotten so much advice to do exactly the opposite, or at least to do. I think maybe the light bulb moment for a lot of parents is to realize that what they're doing and what they've been advised to do is not experienced by the children as unconditional love, but as it's opposite. And so when they think, "Yeah, I want to love my kid unconditionally," they never made the connection before that praising children for being impressive or well-behaved, or giving kids punishments, which we prefer to call "consequences," is exactly the opposite of the thing that they know they ought to be doing, or want to do. Yeah, you see, you mentioned goals, and society often communicates to us that the everyday goal of parenting should be to raise "good children." Of course, with someone packing, we realize that good usually means quiet and obedient, and discipline techniques are judged as "effective" if they meet that short-term goal. And you explain that the big problem with this is that those short-term goals actually lie in direct conflict with the pretty much universal long-term goals that parents have for their children, and that our words and actions today should be in service of fostering those characteristics we hope to impart in the long run. Can you speak to that foundational conflict or problem that we keep seeing? Yeah, that conflict, that discrepancy is at the heart of the work that I do, which is why when I'm asked to get a lecture to a parenting group, or by the way, to teachers, I almost always begin by asking the people present to just think for a moment about what their long-term goals are for their kids, or in the case of teachers, for their students. How would you like your kid to turn out? What would you like him or her to be like many years from now? Think of a single adjective or phrase that captures for you a long-term objective. And then I sample, I get people to tell me what they've come up with, and everywhere I go, I get very, very similar responses across different ethnic groups, urban, suburban, rural, teachers, parents, parents and educators of very young kids or older kids. People tend to say the same kinds of things. Well, I want my kid, most of all, to be happy, moral, curious, critical thinker, independent, compassionate and caring, and these kinds of things. And so then what I do for a living, basically, is to say to people, you say you want this, so why are you doing that? And then I draw from logic and research to show that very traditional, widely accepted practices, both for raising children and teaching them, actively undermine the very things we want as our long-term goal. And so that's where it becomes important to realize that most parenting advice, first of all, is focused on the short-term, not the long-term, and is focused on quick, little practical tips that never require us to challenge our frameworks, our beliefs about children, about human nature, the things we've simply inherited from our own parents without critically reflecting on whether they make sense, and we really do want to reproduce them in the next generation. And a lot of advice also is just focused on behavior. You know, I came up with this little rule of thumb in judging a parenting resource, you know, a book, an article, a seminar or whatever, that the value of that resource is inversely proportional to the number of times the word behavior appears in it. Because as soon as you accept that the focus should be on a child's behavior, which is the actions on the surface that you can observe and measure, to that extent you are not paying attention to what really matters, which is the child's needs and motives and values, or in fact to the child him or herself. And so as soon as you focus on a kid's behavior, it's going to be short-term, and it's going to lead you to some variation of bribes and threats, you know, or we prefer to call them positive reinforcement and consequences, which not only don't help to reach the long-term goals, but are actively destructive to the things we care about. And that requires, you know, a remarkable level of insight and sometimes courage in our very conservative culture to move beyond the, not only the advice we're given, but the underlying beliefs and assumptions that inform that advice. I try to think of those long-term goals like setting your compass. And in the actual moment, if you're focusing on the behavior, which is what you were talking about, you're kind of missing the point. So really, we should be asking ourselves, what can I do or say in this moment to move toward those long-term goals, right? That's right. That's right. And the interesting revelation for many of us is that much of what it is we're doing is not just irrelevant to, but at odds with our own long-term goals. And that leads us to, you know, what I call a "doing to" approach to parenting, as opposed to what we need to work toward, which is a working with approach. Yes. So let's talk specifically about those rewards and punishments you've mentioned. Explain for us how rewards and punishments actually undermine our true goals. Well, let's start briefly with punishment, which even if we prefer to call it by a euphemism, like consequences, means I'm going to deliberately make my child unhappy, doing something that he or she doesn't like, or forbidding the child to do something he or she does like. Retribution for your own good. Yeah, exactly. That's right. So what punishments can get, they can be effective at getting one thing sometimes, and only one thing, which is temporary compliance at an enormous cost. And the cost includes, first of all, the child coming to feel less loved by us, and less trusting of us, so that the caring alliance that children need with a parent is ruptured when they are pretty soon about as happy to see us coming as we would be to see a police car in our rearview mirror. Punishment tends to create rage and defiance and a desire to get even. It tends to make kids feel resentful and misunderstood. And it focuses their attention on self-interest. The consequence that we have in mind when we use that word is the consequence to the actor. So the kid comes to ask, what do they want me to do, and what happens to me if I don't do it? So whenever you use any kind of punishment on a child, it doesn't have to be physical violence like spanking, although that's the most appalling. It can be, you know, forcible isolation through timeout or grounding. You lose privileges or dessert or you can be yelled at or humiliated. Whatever it is, what punishment tends to lead kids to think about is self-interest and power. What you're modeling for children through any kind of consequence is I have more power than you do and I can use that to force you to capitulate. I don't have to have love or reason on my side. I'm the powerful one and that's the lesson that children in such traditional households learn all too well and then try to use that on their peers when they're the ones who have more power. But most of all, all punishment, no matter how it's administered and no matter what it's called, leads children to be less concerned about other people and the impact of their actions on other people. So they're focused now on what's going to happen to me if I'm caught. And that's why it never makes sense to do anything like this if we want to promote children's moral development. We want them to think about how what they're doing makes other people feel not just about what will happen to them. So that's punishment. Along come some other advisors and say, all right, well then don't do punishments, do rewards. Just the carrots. Use carrots, exactly. I'll catch you doing something right and then give you a doggie biscuit if I like it. This of course is just as much. I shouldn't say of course because what I'm what I'm saying now is is unsettling news to many people. Rewards and punishments are not opposites. They're two sides of the same coin. And that coin doesn't buy very much. The rewards and punishments are both ways of doing things to children. Instead of getting them to ask what do they want me to do and what happens to me if I don't do it, rewards, including praise, get them to ask what do they want me to do and what do I get for doing it? Neither question helps kids to think about the kind of person, you know, he or she wants to be. Both are about self-interest. Both undermine concern about other people, which is why we shouldn't be surprised to learn that research finds that children who are frequently rewarded or praised by their parents tend to be less generous and caring than other children. And other research, meanwhile, finds that rewards tend to undermine interest in the task at hand. So for example, if you one of the best ways to destroy children's interest in reading is to give them some sort of a reward for reading books, because now you've taught them that this is something somebody wouldn't want to do. That's why they have to bribe me to do it. Yeah, like those library reading programs. Oh my god. And the people who do those are almost always well-intentioned. They just do not. They're still operating on a very, very old outmoded approach to motivation that was developed on lab animals. So rewards actually have two strikes against them. First, they undermine what psychologists call intrinsic motivation. So that if you extrinsically motivate them by giving them a sticker or a gold star or dessert or a pat on the head or a dollar or an A, they actually tend to become less excited about whatever they had to do to get the reward. And the second problem is that rewards constitute a kind of conditional parenting rather than the unconditional kind we talked about earlier. Right. And all that is so important and valuable for us as parents to understand. And once we can look at it through that lens, you can see that play out with your kids. I mean, if your kid does something that hurts another child and you see them looking at the consequences of that and you point out, oh, look at his face. I can see that he's really hurting right now. You can see things happening in the child and you see that play out in future interactions where if you reward for sharing or punish them when they do something that hurts someone else, their focus becomes you. When they do something wrong, they look right at you. They don't look at the person that they've hurt. That's exactly right. They look at you to see whether you're going to make them suffer by punishing or whether you're going to give them approval by rewarding or praising. And rewards and punishment teach self-interest and power. I've been studying rewards in particular for a long time. And as I pointed out in an article I just wrote on this topic last week, the more time I spend with this, the more I realized that rewards like punishments are really all about power. They don't advance long-term goals and they don't advance children's moral and social development. That's so true. And you describe praise like good job as a judgment and encourage parents to instead describe what we see and ask questions. And I've talked before on this podcast about how it's helpful for me to use. I'm noticing and I'm wondering as sort of a framework to get me out of that habit. But talk to us about why praise is not helpful. And I know in your book you mentioned conditional self-esteem as being one of the reasons. Yes. Basically I'd be repeating what I just said a few moments ago because praise is just a verbal reward. So what I just said about rewards, the two problems with it, that it's a form of extrinsic motivation that tends to undermine intrinsic desire to do things and it communicates conditional affection. So all of that is just as true when you say good job, you know, that which parents tend to do in a knee-jerk basis. They can't stop themselves from judging. Just because it happens to be a positive judgment today really doesn't matter. The relevant distinction is judging versus not judging. Not positive judgment versus negative judgment. But when we do that, yeah, we're communicating to kids, you have to do this to get the high five, the thumbs up, the fist bump, the hug, the smile, whatever. They don't love me for who I am. They seem to love me only when I'm well-behaved or I do well in school or I don't get angry or I'm funny or whatever. It doesn't matter which condition is placed on this. At the lowest level on this developmental ladder, the least ambitious form of parenting is one that rewards children just for being well-behaved, which essentially means compliant, mindlessly obedient. So here it's not just the method of using rewards and praise that's a problem. It's the goal, which, you know, this is the opposite of helping children to become creative, curious, critical thinkers, skeptics, empathic, and so on. I think a lot of parents imagine that praise is building up their child's self-esteem, but the research shows that it just makes it more fragile. Exactly. Fragile and conditional. So what you're doing here, I think, is what you've just done is to show the connection between the conditional approval that parents communicate through praise. I approve of you when you dot, dot, dot, and conditional self-approval. I'm not just loved only when I X. I'm only lovable when I X, and that is the very opposite of what children need to flourish psychologically. What matters about self-esteem is not just whether it's high or low, but whether it's durable or, as you say, fragile, whether it's unconditional or conditional. And unconditional self-esteem doesn't mean that you're a narcissist with sort of grandiose fantasies about yourself. In fact, it's just the opposite. If you have this core of self-acceptance that I'm a decent person, even though I sometimes struggle to do good stuff, that paradoxically allows you to accept criticism and to grow and to realize that you could have done things better. The people who are desperate in their need for approval and attention, who can never accept criticism, never apologize, who are in such awful psychological situation, a circumstance that they have to plaster their name on the buildings that they own, the kind of people who lash out viciously at the hint of anything that's critical. This is what we have in the White House right now, a reverse role model, someone who is the exact opposite of what almost all thoughtful parents want their children to be like. And that's not because his self-esteem is too high. Almost any thoughtful psychologist would say this is a desperate attempt to compensate for a deep-seated belief that I'm really not any good. And so what we want to do to raise healthy children is not to praise them. And I want to be clear here. I want to distinguish what I'm saying from the typical sort of social conservative critique of praise, which is that we praise kids too much or too often or too lavishly or without their having to earn our words of approval. That's the exact opposite of what I'm saying. The problem with praise is not that we give it out too readily. It's that we use it alongside other rewards and punishments to control children and in a way that communicates conditional acceptance. If we placed more strictures or constraints and made it harder to earn, we would as social conservatives urge us to do that would multiply the problem with it by making it our acceptance and by extension our love even more conditional. Right. Well, choices are one of the things that a lot of people trying to move away from that try to embrace. Like you said, they also talk about consequences instead of punishment. But explain the difference between using choices as a manipulative tool of control and authentically empowering children with autonomy. Well, there are some disciplined parenting programs that use the concept of choice in a way that I call pseudo choice. One of those programs is called, I think it's still around love and logic and so on, where you basically offer kids a meaningless choice so they can screw up. Or you use the words of choice in a way like, "I see you've chosen to skip dessert," or something like that, which is a very dishonest way by which parents punish kids and then sprue with their heads so they try to make the kids think the kid is responsible for the punishment. Instead of the parent honestly saying, "I've chosen to make you suffer because you didn't obey me," which is what's really going on. But meaningful choice is not just using the word like a bludgeon to get compliance. It's about giving kids more say about their lives. Because kids learn to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions. And so part of our job as parents is to support children's autonomy, to do what we can to offer guidance, not to step back and do sort of hands-off parenting, do whatever the hell you want. I'm not arguing for permissiveness, that's a sort of caricature. Yes, and it's offered as sort of like a cartoon version of a more progressive or responsive approach to try to discredit it so we can feel, you know, as if we're justified in doing too approach. But what we need to do if in a way that's developmentally appropriate, appropriate to the age and capacities of our kids, is to give them as much say as possible about each aspect of their lives and engage them in reflection. If they offer a suggestion that seems like it's not going to work very well, you know, let's try it out. But you know, good parents talk less and ask more. And when I say ask, you know, I don't mean ask why do you keep hitting him? You know, or didn't you listen to me? I just told you. I mean, meaningful questions where we don't always know what the answer is going to be and where kids have the capability of making decisions that we might be uncomfortable with. So you've got as a parent the number one obstacle to kids growing in a healthy way is not kids immaturity. It's our need to be in power. And so we need to be in control of putting kids in control. That's much harder than traditional because I said so my house, my rules parenting on the one hand. And it's also harder than just negligent parenting where you let kids do whatever the hell they want on the other. Absolutely. So I have one last question for you. You don't explicitly use the word childism, but you do talk a lot about the disrespect and even disdain that most Americans have for children. What do you believe is the best way for us to combat that? Introspection and conversation to do what you just did, which is to put the issue out on the table where we can look at it to ask what assumptions do we have about children, how they should be treated, what they're like, what our role is with respect to them, and how those basic beliefs might be subtly, tacitly driving problematic parenting practices. And it's one thing to say, well, she's four. That means there are limits to what she's capable of doing. But it's another thing to just assume that kids are up to no good and have to have morality shoved down their throats, that you've got to punish or reward them, that it's unrealistic to think you could do without that. To really examine the beliefs we have about children and about human nature, which, by the way, tend to be very dark, cynical beliefs that often are behind traditional punitive practices. Research has established that. And to see whether good research supports it. By the way, the interesting irony is that the kind of people who constantly are doing this high-pitched praise of kids, "Oh, kids, child, I really like the way you do" often have the darkest view of children. They say things like, "Well, you have to praise them. You have to give them positive reinforcement when they share their toys." And I often ask, "Why do you believe that?" Because the assumption is that if the kid did something nice, it was a fluke. It's never going to happen again unless you give them an artificial incentive for doing it, namely getting your approval. So that's when you have a somewhat more benign, or at least a balanced view of human nature and children, you stop treating them like pets. Yeah, treating children like actual human beings whose needs are valid and who you can be and have share a relationship with and live with in a way that respects their natural evolution and process of growing up. Yep, well said. Thank you so much for coming on and talking to me today, Alfie. This is a career highlight, getting to share a conversation with you. I really appreciate it. It's very kind of you. I appreciate your interest, and I hope for people who are interested in more of this, you'll point them to my website where I have whole bunches of articles available for free, as well as information about the books I've written. Absolutely. I'm going to link to your website and I've been sharing all about your book and posting pictures about it and quotes from it. So I'm a huge fan and I'm going to continue helping to spread the word and getting people over to your direction so we can, like you said, combat this childism by shining a light on these issues for people to start questioning the status quo. Yeah, that's nice to hear. Thanks so much for your time. Thank you. Our Q&A this week comes from Abby. She asks, "We're taught in society that power is a zero-sum game. How do we flip this on its head in moments of struggle? How do we help our children feel powerful and allow ourselves to feel powerful at the same time?" My answer is that I don't feel empowered by overpowering my children. The real question isn't how can I feel more powerful. The real question is what are the needs? So what are my needs and what are my child's needs? For example, perhaps my child wants to do something risky. They may have a need to jump and test heights and I may have a need to address safety concerns or feel heard as in, "Hey, I'm noticing how high this ledge is and how rough and hard the asphalt is below." I'm wondering if you have any ideas about mitigating that hard landing. So it's not about who can be victorious in a battle of doing two, but collaborating and meeting everyone's needs cooperatively. Now, everyone does need to have a sense of power and for so many adults who are just parenting off of that script they inherited and working from a place of not feeling whole, they are often trying to compensate for feeling powerless in their childhood by feeling powerful, by exercising power over their kids. So I don't get my power, a sense of empowerment or my inner strength or sense of autonomy or control. I don't get that from my kids really. I get that from myself and from choices I make in my life. For example, I trained in Krav Maga for a few years and I felt so incredibly powerful doing that. When I stand up for something I believe in or for someone else, I feel incredibly powerful. So I think that the mainstream recipe or formula is for parents to get the power they didn't get in childhood by asserting dominance over children. And so a lot of times the first question I hear is like you asked, "Where do I get, you know, how do we both get power out of these interactions?" And I say, "Don't. Just walk away from that battle for power all together." Our Day in the Life this episode comes from Sage Mama and Patreon supporter Yana Campbell. Yana, help us get to know you a little better first. Okay, so my fellow and our almost three-year-old son, Elijah, live in Sonoma, California, beautiful Northern California wine country. And I am a full-time mama right now. I've had a lot of food business jobs in my past. I'm passionate about food. I'm passionate about gardening and growing food. And since becoming a mama, starting to feel like I have a real pull towards some type of work in my future that supports motherhood and families in some ways that I feel are really lacking in our culture. And I don't know what that'll look like. It feels like some years off still since we're expecting a new babe and May or June. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. And yeah, my fellow is a magician and a vaudeville performer. He has a beautiful hand-built mobile feeder on the back of a vintage truck that he drives around and performs for people and festivals. That is amazing. Yeah, it's amazing. He's a magic man. Elijah is going to be a lucky little guy. Oh my gosh. My kids would just die of excitement hearing that that's something that somebody uses to provide for their family and to support their lifestyle. And you said you live in like a 500-square-foot cabin on like 60 acres of land, right? Yes. Yeah, we've rented this cabin. I guess I've been there for about 10 years now. My fellow Tobias has been there. I think it's actually the only place he's lived besides his parents' house. It's been a really long time. We're really, we're really blessed. We live in paradise. It's really, really beautiful. Oh, that sounds dreamy. And what a perfect fit you are for being a part of the Sage Family podcast. And of course, I didn't know that like inviting you on, but like, I just love you even more now. Rachel? Okay, so describe your favorite day this week and share with us why you loved it. Okay, well, so yeah, this week was challenging. We've been inside almost, you know, for the entirety of the past 10 days because we are experiencing a lot of intense smoke from the wildfires that are burning a few hundred miles northeast of us. So that, that's been tough. And so we did escape for a couple of days with some friends up the coast to the beach. It was a little bit less smoky there. And even though, let's see, yeah, I'm making lemonade out of lemons, I guess, because we were there with some other friends of ours who have a little person and just have a very different parenting paradigm than we do. That is can be hard to be in shared space and connection with a family who parents very differently. Yeah, yeah, it was, it was really challenging. So, but it was, it was also wonderful in a couple of ways, you know, just in that it gave us, you know, some, some, a lot of opportunity to really just ground and root ourselves in our parenting philosophy and just kind of hold that emotional space for everyone that was there and seeing a lot of kind of authoritarian parenting happening right alongside. And I feel like sometimes it's one of the biggest challenges of approaching parenting in a non-conventional fashion is just sort of that social pressure that you feel when you're with other people. And so just to be able to get to practice again and again, you know, standing in our beliefs and and really, yeah, just just getting to practice being an ally to our child and being an ally to their child as well. Yes, excellent. Yeah, so that that felt like a like a gift. Oh, man, I love that. Yeah, that is, gosh, I got to be honest, that baggage is the biggest obstacle that parents have in living a connected, supportive, enjoyable life with their kids. That's why it's like one of the first chapters or the first chapter in all my books, like unpacking that baggage and a huge piece of that baggage is the pressure that you've got social pressure, societal pressure, cultural pressure, family of origin pressure to parents in a different way than you have thoughtfully chosen to parent. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, also just the other thing that it really brought into focus for us was just, you know, how much we enjoy our son. And, you know, when I look at these friends of ours, I just see like their joy of parenting really diminished by, you know, the place that they're stuck in. And it just feels so sad, you know, when their son was ready to go to school, they just couldn't wait to get them out of the house. And it's like, I do not feel that way. And I feel so grateful that we don't feel that way. And, you know, I feel like parenting was just this sort of like mysterious alchemy. And you kind of never knew how everything was going to turn out. And like, how do you guard against this? How do you guard against your child becoming a drug addict or whatever. And it used to feel like a crapshoot. And it's so empowering to really understand, like, no, this is like relationship stuff. Like this is, you know, not that we can guard against everything that might, you know, be a bump in the road for our children later on in life. But just, yeah, just like feeling so much more empowered that like, this is a choice. And we have choices and we can, you know, foster, you know, yeah, that ability to make good, you know, for our children to make, make good choices for themselves. And yeah, it's sad that it's radical, the notion of treating children like human beings and genuinely enjoying being in connection with them and living a life with them. Yes. Yes. Yeah. I feel so grateful that that's our experience because I see so many people that, yeah, but for whom that's not their experience and that parenthood comes with a lot of grief. Well, way to seize that opportunity and turn those lemons into lemonade. Yana, thank you so much for your support of the podcast on Patreon. And thank you so much for being brave enough to come on and chat with me today. Can I say one more little thing? Yes. If you can't use it, you can't use it, but my ulterior motive for taking advantage of this lovely perk you gave me on Patreon after supporting you there, I just, I just really want to encourage everybody that listens to your podcast and gets all of the like wonderful free goodies that you, that you give to the, to the universe as your gift to the universe. I just, I hope that everybody that gains value from your, from you to support in whatever way they can. And even if it's, you know, a couple bucks a month, I'm sure it all adds up. And I just feel so, so grateful that we found you at the time that we found you because it's really obvious to me that we would not be where we are right now if I hadn't. And so I'm just really, really grateful for the work that you do and all that you choose to give of yourself. It's really, really valuable. And I just look at our world and I think, man, if Donald Trump had been just as anything. You're making me cry. Thank you so much. It's really true. You're a really gifted, special person. And I just, I have daily gratitude for you. So thank you, Rachel. Oh, thank you, Yana. Thank you so much. Now let's move into our deep dive. The show notes can be found at SageParenting.com/podcast21, where you can also subscribe and get future show notes sent right to your inbox. So what are my favorite resources for diving deeper into this topic? Alfie Kohn's website, which will be linked in those show notes and also his book, Unconditional Parenting. Like I said in the interview, this book was a game changer for me. It's in my all-time favorites, top book recommendations, book canon. So definitely get yourself a copy of that book and start reading. (upbeat music)