After I read that article by Alfie Kohn everyone kept telling me about, I decided to read his book, Unconditional Parenting. I remembered his other article in the Times (Magazine?) in which he described how crippling it is for kids to hear that they’re smart, in particular a study comparing test scores of kids told they were either hardworking or smart. Hardworking smacked down smart. That article, like the more recent, brought me vividly back to childhood. Most of what he’s saying sounds so obvious to me and so in line with my experiences as a child, that I was surprised to read a page of uncomprehending comments beneath. I bought the book primarily in an attempt to figure out why what he’s saying (or what I’d read so far) seemed so evident to me. Or maybe that’s not quite right, I felt like it was a way of organizing a bunch of ideas that to me feel almost odd and a little exciting to extract and view as externally as theory. (Also, I don’t think I have some great insight lacking from the vast pool of commenters at the Times and I was puzzled by all the indignation until I realized that most adults don’t seem to remember what it was like to be a child. In addition, V reminds me of the difference between readers and indignant commenters. Oh, yes, of course.) The first part of the book nails it. He ties a fixation on discipline and rewards to a deep discomfort with the idea that any individual has a right to something he hasn’t earned. In other words, humanity is inherently corrupt, so every human matter on earth is, at bottom, an economic transaction. The baldness of that makes me recoil as I bet it does a lot of people who are uneasy about the colorful array of boxed parenting options, Froot Loop style Smart Choices®, but it explains everything. I think Kohn is saying not to be frightened of your child, to learn to know him in a way that will make a lot of disembodied childrearing advice beside the point. This should be familiar to anyone who has ever enjoyed the company of another human being. Then, of course, he has to go on to provide a lot of disembodied advice because how else could he fill up the second half of the book without scripts for over-explaining stuff to tantruming toddlers? (This reminds me a little of those volumes of tips for creating a compelling resume or land a man. Totally unconsidered is the possibility that you may not want to work for/shack up with someone who doesn’t find your sincerity valuable. I suspect that this is another instance in which you either get it or your don’t. You can’t fake a relationship.) I found the discussion of the various studies he includes to be pretty interesting, mainly because I love to visualize studies involving hordes of toddlers and their tutting mothers (on the THX 1137 set), but the appendix in which he discusses race and culture was really excellent. He politely dismantles the galling conclusions of the Physical Discipline among African American and European American Mothers study. Okay, I haven’t read the whole study, but I’d like to suggest to the authors that maybe physical discipline doesn’t bother African American kids because, as history teaches us, they probably only experience 3/5ths of the pain white kids do from being walluped. Just like African American children didn’t suffer from autism for a very long time and low income kids certainly still don’t have the imaginary allergies affluent kids with healthy diets and helicopter moms suffer from. (Interestingly, oppositional defiant disorder appears to often cause the same swollen eyelids, snot face, and crankiness as do imaginary food allergies in rich kids. So much creativity!)… That silence was me clicking away—reading, while everyone else is asleep. This is a bit of researching the rest cure a few months ago. Drapetomania! Dysaethesia Aethiopica! Science!