1) Honor your father’s history. What events shaped his life? Have his tell a story of his childhood, ask him to teach you his favorite childhood game or song…
2) Honor your father’s outlook. What have you learned from him?
3) Honor your father’s dreams. What of his hopes for you, whether realized yet or not?

After reflecting on these questions, tell someone you care about (a friend, your partner, your children, or even your father) what came to your mind. For those whose fathers have died, perform a ritual for remembering: Play an album or read a book that he enjoyed, look through some family photographs, give to a cause that he supported, or visit a place that he liked.

Share his memory and tell someone a story from his life.

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In responding to children as cute, we are responding to many qualities that rightly, as if by healthy instinct, appeal to us. Children tend to be, among other things, healthy, energetic, quick, vital, vivacious, enthusiastic, resourceful, intelligent, intense, passionate, hopeful, trustful, and forgiving – they get very angry but do not, like us, bear grudges for long. Above all, they have a great capacity for delight, joy, and sorrow. But we should not think of these qualities or virtues as “childish,” the exclusive property of children. They are human qualities. We are wise to value them in people of all ages. When we think of these qualities as childish, belonging only to children, we invalidate them, make them seem things we should “outgrow” as we grow older. Thus we excuse ourselves for carelessly losing what we should have done our best to keep. Worse yet, we teach the children this lesson; most of the bright and successful ten-year-olds I have known, though they still kept the curiosity of their younger years, had learned to be ashamed of it and hide it. Only “little kids” went around all the time asking silly questions. To be grown-up was to be cool, impassive, unconcerned, untouched, invulnerable. Perhaps women are taught to feel this way less than men; perhaps custom gives them a somewhat greater license to be childlike, which they should take care not to lose.

But though we may respond authentically to many qualities of children, we too often respond either condescendingly or sentimentally to many others – condescendingly to their littleness, weakness, clumsiness, ignorance, inexperience, incompetence, helplessness, dependency, immoderation, and lack of any sense of time or proportion; and sentimentally to made-up notions about their happiness, carefreeness, innocence, purity, nonsexuality, goodness, spirituality, and wisdom. These notions are mostly nonsense. Children are not particularly happy or carefree; they have as many worries and fears as many adults, often the same ones. What makes them seem happy is their energy and curiosity, their involvement with life; they do not waste much time in brooding. Children are the farthest thing in the world from spiritual. They are not abstract, but concrete. They are animals and sensualists; to them, what feels good is good. They are self-absorbed and selfish. They have very little ability to put themselves in another person’s shoes, to imagine how he feels. This often makes them inconsiderate and sometimes cruel, but whether they are kind or cruel, generous or greedy, they are always so on impulse rather than by plan or principle. They are barbarians, primitives, about whom we are also often sentimental. Some of the things (which are not school subjects and can’t be “taught”) that children don’t know, but only learn in time and from living, are things they will be better for knowing. Growing up and growing older are not always or only or necessarily a decline and a defeat. Some of the understanding and wisdom that can come with time is real – which is why children are attracted by the natural authority of any adults who do respond authentically and respectfully to them.

We too often respond condescendingly or sentimentally.

One afternoon I was with several hundred people in an auditorium of a junior college when we heard outside the building the passionate wail of a small child. Almost everyone smiled, chuckled, or laughed. Perhaps there was something legitimately comic in the fact that one child should, without even trying, be able to interrupt the supposedly important thoughts and words of all these adults. But beyond this was something else, the belief that the feelings, pains, and passions of children were not real, not to be taken seriously. If we had heard outside the building the voice of an adult crying in pain, anger, or sorrow, we would not have smiled or laughed but would have been frozen in wonder and terror. Most of the time, when it is not an unwanted distraction, or a nuisance, the crying of children strikes us as funny. We think, there they go again, isn’t it something the way children cry, they cry about almost anything. But there is nothing funny about children’s crying. Until he has learned from adults to exploit his childishness and cuteness, a small child does not cry for trivial reasons but out of need, fear, or pain.

Once, coming into an airport, I saw just ahead of me a girl of about seven or eight. Hurrying up the carpeted ramp, she tripped and fell down. She did not hurt herself but quickly picked herself up and walked on. But looking around on everyone’s face I saw indulgent smiles, expressions of “isn’t that cute?” They would not have thought it funny or cute if an adult had fallen down but would have worried about his pain and embarrassment.

There is nothing funny about children’s crying.

The trouble with sentimentality, and the reason why it always leads to callousness and cruelty, is that it is abstract and unreal. We look at the lives and concerns and troubles of children as we might look at actors on a stage, a comedy as long as it does not become a nuisance. And so, since their feelings and their pain are neither serious nor real, any pain we may cause them is not real either. In any conflict of interest with us, they must give way; only our needs are real. Thus when an adult wants for his own pleasure to hug and kiss a child for whom his embrace is unpleasant or terrifying, we easily say that the child’s unreal feelings don’t count, it is only the adult’s real needs that count. People who treat children like living dolls when they are feeling good may treat them like unliving dolls when they are feeling bad. “Little angels” quickly become “little devils.”

Even in those happy families in which the children are not jealous of each other, not competing for a scarce supply of attention and approval, but are more or less good friends, they don’t think of each other as cute and are not sentimental about children littler than they are. Bigger children in happy families may be very tender and careful toward the little ones. But such older children do not tell themselves and would not believe stories about the purity and goodness of the smaller child. They know very well that the young child is littler, clumsier, more ignorant, more in need of help, and much of the time more unreasonable and troublesome. Because children do not think of each other as cute, they often seem to be harder on each other than we think we would be. They are blunt and unsparing. But on the whole this frankness, which accepts the other as a complete person, even if one not always or altogether admired, is less harmful to the children than the way many adults deal with them.

Much of what we respond to in children as cute is not strength or virtue, real or imagined, but weakness, a quality which gives us power over them or helps us to feel superior. Thus we think they are cute partly because they are little. But what is cute about being little? Children understand this very well. They are not at all sentimental about their own littleness. They would rather be big than little, and they want to get big as soon as they can.

On their part, they would want to become free, active, independent, and responsible as fast as they could, and since they were full-sized and could not be used any longer as living dolls or super-pets we would do all we could do to help them do so.

Or suppose that people varied in size as much as dogs, with normal adults anywhere from one foot to seven feet tall. We would not then think of the littleness of children as something that was cute. It would simply be a condition, like being bald or hairy, fat or thin. That someone was little would not be a signal for us to experience certain feelings or make important judgments about his character or the kinds of relationships we might have with him.

Children do not think of each other as cute.

Another quality of children that makes us think they are cute, makes us smile or get misty-eyed, is their “innocence.” What do we mean by this? In part we mean only that they are ignorant and inexperienced. But ignorance is not a blessing, it is a misfortune. Children are no more sentimental about their ignorance than they are about their size. They want to escape their ignorance, to know what’s going on, and we should be glad to help them escape it if they ask us and if we can. But by the innocence of children we mean something more – their hopefulness, trustfulness, confidence, their feeling that the world is open to them, that life has many possibilities, that what they don’t know they can find out, what they can’t do they can learn to do. These are qualities valuable in everyone. When we call them “innocence” and ascribe them only to children, as if they were too dumb to know any better, we are only trying to excuse our own hopelessness and despair.

Today in the Boston Public Garden I watched, as I often do, some infants who were just learning to walk. I used to think their clumsiness, their uncertain balance and wandering course, were cute. Now I tried to watch in a different spirit. For there is nothing cute about clumsiness, any more than littleness. Any adult who found it as hard to walk as a small child, and who did it so badly, would be called severely handicapped. We certainly would not smile, chuckle, and laugh at his efforts – and congratulate ourselves for doing so. Watching the children, I thought of this. And I reminded myself, as I often do when I see a very small child intent and absorbed in what he is doing and I am tempted to think of him as cute, “That child isn’t trying to be cute; he doesn’t see himself as cute; and he doesn’t want to be seen as cute. He is as serious about what he is doing now as any human being can be, and he wants to be taken seriously.”

What is cute about being little?

But there is something very appealing and exciting about watching children just learning to walk. They do it so badly, it is so clearly difficult, and in the child’s terms may even be dangerous. We know it won’t hurt him to fall down, but he can’t be sure of that and in any case doesn’t like it. Most adults, even many older children, would instantly stop trying to do anything that they did as badly as a new walker does his walking. But the infant keeps on. He is so determined, he is working so hard, and he is so excited; his learning to walk is not just an effort and struggle but a joyous adventure. As I watch this adventure, no less a miracle because we all did it, I try to respond to the child’s determination, courage, and pleasure, not his littleness, feebleness, and incompetence. To whatever voice in me says, “Oh, wouldn’t it be nice to pick up that dear little child and give him a big hug and kiss,” I reply, “No, no, no, that child doesn’t want to be picked up, hugged, and kissed, he wants to walk. He doesn’t know or care whether I like it or not, he is not walking for the approval or happiness of me or even for his parents beside him, but for himself. It is his show. Don’t try to turn him into an actor in your show. Leave him alone to get on with his work.”

We often think children are most cute when they are most intent and serious about what they are doing. In our minds we say to the child, “You think that what you are doing is important; we know it’s not; like everything else in your life that you take seriously, it is trivial.” We smile tenderly at the child carefully patting his mud pie. We feel that mud pie is not serious and all the work he is putting into it is a waste (though we may tell him in a honey-dearie voice that it is a beautiful mud pie). But he doesn’t know that; in his ignorance he is just as serious as if he were doing something important. How satisfying for us to feel we know better.

We tend to think that children are most cute when they are openly displaying their ignorance and incompetence. We value their dependency and helplessness. They are help objects as well as love objects. Children acting really competently and intelligently do not usually strike us as cute. They are as likely to puzzle and threaten us. We don’t like to see a child acting in a way that makes it impossible for us to look down on him or to suppose that he depends on our help. This is of course very true in school. The child whose teachers know that he knows things they don’t know may be in trouble. We know, too, how much schools and first-grade teachers hate to have children come to school already knowing how to read. How then will the school teach him? When we see a young child doing anything very well, we are likely to think there is something wrong with him. He is too precocious, he is peculiar, he is going to have troubles someday, he is “acting like an adult,” he has “lost his childhood.” Many people reacted so to the extraordinarily capable child pupils of the Japanese violin teacher Suzuki. And I remember the sociologist Omar K. Moore telling me that when he first showed that many three-year-olds, given certain kinds of typewriters and equipment to use and experiment with, could very quickly teach themselves to read (which they weren’t supposed to have the visual acuity, coordination, or mental ability to do), he received a flood of indignant and angry letters accusing him of mistreating the children.

Children do not like being incompetent any more than they like being ignorant. They want to learn how to do, and do well, the things they see being done by the bigger people around them.

Excerpted from Escape from Childhood: The Needs and Rights of Children. New York: Ballantine Books, 1974. Reprinted with permission of Holt Associates. For reprint inquiries, write to info(AT)HoltGWS.com. For more information about John Holt, visit www.holtgws.com.

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Nurturing a child’s love for learning begins with trust. As unschoolers, we trust our children to know when they are ready to learn and what they are interested in learning. We trust them to know how to go about learning. Parents commonly take this view of learning during the child’s first two years, when he is learning to stand, walk, talk, and to perform many other important and difficult things, with little help from anyone. No one worries that a baby will be too lazy, uncooperative, or unmotivated to learn these things; it is simply assumed that every baby is born wanting to learn the things he needs to know in order to understand and to participate in the world around him. These one- and two-year-old experts teach us several principles of learning:

Children are naturally curious and have a built-in desire to learn first-hand about the world around them.

John Holt, in his book How Children Learn, describes the natural learning style of young children:

“The child is curious. He wants to make sense out of things, find out how things work, gain competence and control over himself and his environment, and do what he can see other people doing. He is open, perceptive, and experimental. He does not merely observe the world around him. He does not shut himself off from the strange, complicated world around him, but tastes it, touches it, hefts it, bends it, breaks it. To find out how reality works, he works on it. He is bold. He is not afraid of making mistakes. And he is patient. He can tolerate an extraordinary amount of uncertainty, confusion, ignorance, and suspense. … School is not a place that gives much time, or opportunity, or reward, for this kind of thinking and learning.”1

Children know best how to go about learning something.

If left alone, children will know instinctively what method is best for them. Caring and observant parents soon learn that it is safe and appropriate to trust this knowledge. Such parents say to their baby, “Oh, that’s interesting! You’re learning how to crawl downstairs by facing backwards!” They do not say, “That’s the wrong way.” Perceptive parents are aware that there are many different ways to learn something, and they trust their children to know which ways are best for them.

Children need plentiful amounts of quiet time to think.

As John Holt noted in Teach Your Own, “Children who are good at fantasizing are better both at learning about the world and at learning to cope with its surprises and disappointment. It isn’t hard to see why this should be so. In fantasy we have a way of trying out situations, to get some feel of what they might be like, or how we might feel in them, without having to risk too much. It also gives us a way of coping with bad experiences, by letting us play and replay them in our mind until they have lost much of their power to hurt, or until we can make them come out in ways that leave us feeling less defeated and foolish.”2

But fantasy requires time, and time is the most endangered commodity in our lives. Fully-scheduled school hours and extracurricular activities leave little time for children to dream, to think, to invent solutions to problems, to cope with stressful experiences, or simply to fulfill the universal need for solitude and privacy.

Children are not afraid to admit ignorance and to make mistakes.

When Holt invited toddlers to play his cello, they would eagerly attempt to do so; schoolchildren and adults would invariably decline.

Unschooling children, free from the intimidation of public embarrassment and failing marks, retain their openness to new exploration. Children learn by asking questions, not by answering them. Toddlers ask many questions, and so do school children – until about grade three. By that time, many of them have learned an unfortunate fact: that in school, it can be more important for self-protection to hide one’s ignorance about a subject than to learn more about it, regardless of one’s curiosity.

Children take joy in the intrinsic values of whatever they are learning.

There is no need to motivate children through the use of extrinsic rewards, such as high grades or stars, which suggest to the child that the activity itself must be difficult or unpleasant; otherwise, why is a reward, which has nothing to do with the matter at hand, being offered? The wise parent says, “I think you’ll enjoy this book”, not “If you read this book, you’ll get a cookie.”

Children learn best about getting along with other people through interaction with those of all ages.

No parents would tell their baby, “You may only spend time with those children whose birthdays fall within six months of your own. Here’s another two-year-old to play with.”

John Taylor Gatto, New York State Teacher of the Year, contends, “It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to sit in confinement with people of exactly the same age and social class. That system effectively cuts you off from the immense diversity of life and the synergy of variety; indeed, it cuts you off from your own past and future….”3

A child learns best about the world through first-hand experience.

No parent would tell her toddler, “Let’s put that caterpillar down and get back to your book about caterpillars.” Unschoolers learn directly about the world. Our son describes unschooling as “learning by doing instead of being taught.” Ironically, the most common objection about unschooling is that children are “being deprived of the real world.”

Children need and deserve ample time with their family.

Gatto warns us, “Between schooling and television, all the time children have is eaten up. That’s what has destroyed the American family.”4 Many unschoolers feel that family cohesiveness is perhaps the most meaningful benefit of the experience. Just as I saw his first step and heard his first word, I have the honor and privilege of sharing my son’s world and thoughts. Over the years, I have discovered more from him about life, learning, and love, than from any other source. The topic we seem to be learning the most about is the nature of learning itself. I sometimes wonder who learns more in unschooling families, the parents or the children!

Stress interferes with learning.

Einstein wrote, “It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion.”5 When a one-year-old falls down while learning to walk, we say, “Good try! You’ll catch on soon!” No caring parent would say, “Every baby your age should be walking. You’d better be walking by Friday!”

Most parents understand how difficult it is for their children to learn something when they are rushed, threatened, or given failing grades. John Holt warned that “we think badly, and even perceive badly, or not at all, when we are anxious or afraid… when we make children afraid, we stop learning dead in its tracks.”6

While infants and toddlers teach us many principles of learning, schools have adopted quite different principles, due to the difficulties inherent in teaching a large number of same-age children in a compulsory setting. The structure of school (required attendance, school-selected topics and books, and constant checking of the child’s progress) assumes that children are not natural learners, but must be compelled to learn through the efforts of others.

Natural learners do not need such a structure. The success of self-directed learning (unschoolers regularly outperform their schooled peers on measures of academic achievement, socialization, confidence, and self-esteem) strongly suggests that structured approaches inhibit both learning and personal development. Because unschooling follows principles of natural learning, children retain the curiosity, enthusiasm, and love of learning that every child has at birth.

Unschooling, as Holt writes, is a matter of faith. “This faith is that by nature people are learning animals. Birds fly; fish swim; humans think and learn. Therefore, we do not need to motivate children into learning by wheedling, bribing, or bullying. We do not need to keep picking away at their minds to make sure they are learning. What we need to do – and all we need to do – is to give children as much help and guidance as they need and ask for, listen respectfully when they feel like talking, and then get out of the way. We can trust them to do the rest.”7

1 Holt, John. How Children Learn (New York: Perseus Books Group, 1995), p. 287.
2 Holt, John. Teach Your Own (New York: Perseus Books Group, 2003), p. 128.
3 Gatto, John. Dumbing Us Down (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers), p. 24
4 Ibid., p.26.
5 Einstein, Albert. Autobiographical Notes, Open Court Publishing Company, 1991, p. 17.
6 Holt. How Children Learn, op. cit., p. xv.
7 Ibid., p. 293.

Article Source & Courtesy of Jan Hunt of The Natural Child Project

Jan Hunt, M.Sc., offers telephone counseling worldwide, with a focus on parenting, unschooling, and personal matters. She is the Director of The Natural Child Project and author of The Natural Child: Parenting from the Heart and A Gift for Baby.

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Plenty of books and articles advise us against relying on punishment, from spanking to forcible isolation (“time out”). Occasionally someone will even ask us to rethink the practice of bribing children with stickers or food. But you’ll have to look awfully hard to find a discouraging word about what is euphemistically called positive reinforcement.

Lest there be any misunderstanding, the point here is not to call into question the importance of supporting and encouraging children, the need to love them and hug them and help them feel good about themselves. Praise, however, is a different story entirely. Here’s why.

1. Manipulating children. Suppose you offer a verbal reward to reinforce the behavior of a two-year-old who eats without spilling, or a five-year-old who cleans up her art supplies. Who benefits from this? Is it possible that telling kids they’ve done a good job may have less to do with their emotional needs than with our convenience?

Rheta DeVries, a professor of education at the University of Northern Iowa, refers to this as “sugar-coated control.” Very much like tangible rewards – or, for that matter, punishments – it’s a way of doing something to children to get them to comply with our wishes. It may be effective at producing this result (at least for a while), but it’s very different from working with kids – for example, by engaging them in conversation about what makes a classroom (or family) function smoothly, or how other people are affected by what we have done — or failed to do. The latter approach is not only more respectful but more likely to help kids become thoughtful people.

The reason praise can work in the short run is that young children are hungry for our approval. But we have a responsibility not to exploit that dependence for our own convenience. A “Good job!” to reinforce something that makes our lives a little easier can be an example of taking advantage of children’s dependence. Kids may also come to feel manipulated by this, even if they can’t quite explain why.

2. Creating praise junkies. To be sure, not every use of praise is a calculated tactic to control children’s behavior. Sometimes we compliment kids just because we’re genuinely pleased by what they’ve done. Even then, however, it’s worth looking more closely. Rather than bolstering a child’s self-esteem, praise may increase kids’ dependence on us. The more we say, “I like the way you….” or “Good ______ing,” the more kids come to rely on our evaluations, our decisions about what’s good and bad, rather than learning to form their own judgments. It leads them to measure their worth in terms of what will lead us to smile and dole out some more approval.

Mary Budd Rowe, a researcher at the University of Florida, discovered that students who were praised lavishly by their teachers were more tentative in their responses, more apt to answer in a questioning tone of voice (“Um, seven?”). They tended to back off from an idea they had proposed as soon as an adult disagreed with them. And they were less likely to persist with difficult tasks or share their ideas with other students.

In short, “Good job!” doesn’t reassure children; ultimately, it makes them feel less secure. It may even create a vicious circle such that the more we slather on the praise, the more kids seem to need it, so we praise them some more. Sadly, some of these kids will grow into adults who continue to need someone else to pat them on the head and tell them whether what they did was OK. Surely this is not what we want for our daughters and sons.

3. Stealing a child’s pleasure. Apart from the issue of dependence, a child deserves to take delight in her accomplishments, to feel pride in what she’s learned how to do. She also deserves to decide when to feel that way. Every time we say, “Good job!”, though, we’re telling a child how to feel.

To be sure, there are times when our evaluations are appropriate and our guidance is necessary — especially with toddlers and preschoolers. But a constant stream of value judgments is neither necessary nor useful for children’s development. Unfortunately, we may not have realized that “Good job!” is just as much an evaluation as “Bad job!” The most notable feature of a positive judgment isn’t that it’s positive, but that it’s a judgment. And people, including kids, don’t like being judged.

I cherish the occasions when my daughter manages to do something for the first time, or does something better than she’s ever done it before. But I try to resist the knee-jerk tendency to say, “Good job!” because I don’t want to dilute her joy. I want her to share her pleasure with me, not look to me for a verdict. I want her to exclaim, “I did it!” (which she often does) instead of asking me uncertainly, “Was that good?”

4. Losing interest. “Good painting!” may get children to keep painting for as long as we keep watching and praising. But, warns Lilian Katz, one of the country’s leading authorities on early childhood education, “once attention is withdrawn, many kids won’t touch the activity again.” Indeed, an impressive body of scientific research has shown that the more we reward people for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward. Now the point isn’t to draw, to read, to think, to create – the point is to get the goody, whether it’s an ice cream, a sticker, or a “Good job!”

In a troubling study conducted by Joan Grusec at the University of Toronto, young children who were frequently praised for displays of generosity tended to be slightly less generous on an everyday basis than other children were. Every time they had heard “Good sharing!” or “I’m so proud of you for helping,” they became a little less interested in sharing or helping. Those actions came to be seen not as something valuable in their own right but as something they had to do to get that reaction again from an adult. Generosity became a means to an end.

Does praise motivate kids? Sure. It motivates kids to get praise. Alas, that’s often at the expense of commitment to whatever they were doing that prompted the praise.

5. Reducing achievement. As if it weren’t bad enough that “Good job!” can undermine independence, pleasure, and interest, it can also interfere with how good a job children actually do. Researchers keep finding that kids who are praised for doing well at a creative task tend to stumble at the next task – and they don’t do as well as children who weren’t praised to begin with.

Why does this happen? Partly because the praise creates pressure to “keep up the good work” that gets in the way of doing so. Partly because their interest in what they’re doing may have declined. Partly because they become less likely to take risks – a prerequisite for creativity – once they start thinking about how to keep those positive comments coming.

More generally, “Good job!” is a remnant of an approach to psychology that reduces all of human life to behaviors that can be seen and measured. Unfortunately, this ignores the thoughts, feelings, and values that lie behind behaviors. For example, a child may share a snack with a friend as a way of attracting praise, or as a way of making sure the other child has enough to eat. Praise for sharing ignores these different motives. Worse, it actually promotes the less desirable motive by making children more likely to fish for praise in the future.

*
Once you start to see praise for what it is – and what it does – these constant little evaluative eruptions from adults start to produce the same effect as fingernails being dragged down a blackboard. You begin to root for a child to give his teachers or parents a taste of their own treacle by turning around to them and saying (in the same saccharine tone of voice), “Good praising!”

Still, it’s not an easy habit to break. It can seem strange, at least at first, to stop praising; it can feel as though you’re being chilly or withholding something. But that, it soon becomes clear, suggests that we praise more because we need to say it than because children need to hear it. Whenever that’s true, it’s time to rethink what we’re doing.

What kids do need is unconditional support, love with no strings attached. That’s not just different from praise – it’s the opposite of praise. “Good job!” is conditional. It means we’re offering attention and acknowledgement and approval for jumping through our hoops, for doing things that please us.

This point, you’ll notice, is very different from a criticism that some people offer to the effect that we give kids too much approval, or give it too easily. They recommend that we become more miserly with our praise and demand that kids “earn” it. But the real problem isn’t that children expect to be praised for everything they do these days. It’s that we’re tempted to take shortcuts, to manipulate kids with rewards instead of explaining and helping them to develop needed skills and good values.

So what’s the alternative? That depends on the situation, but whatever we decide to say instead has to be offered in the context of genuine affection and love for who kids are rather than for what they’ve done. When unconditional support is present, “Good job!” isn’t necessary; when it’s absent, “Good job!” won’t help.

If we’re praising positive actions as a way of discouraging misbehavior, this is unlikely to be effective for long. Even when it works, we can’t really say the child is now “behaving himself”; it would be more accurate to say the praise is behaving him. The alternative is to work with the child, to figure out the reasons he’s acting that way. We may have to reconsider our own requests rather than just looking for a way to get kids to obey. (Instead of using “Good job!” to get a four-year-old to sit quietly through a long class meeting or family dinner, perhaps we should ask whether it’s reasonable to expect a child to do so.)

We also need to bring kids in on the process of making decisions. If a child is doing something that disturbs others, then sitting down with her later and asking, “What do you think we can do to solve this problem?” will likely be more effective than bribes or threats. It also helps a child learn how to solve problems and teaches that her ideas and feelings are important. Of course, this process takes time and talent, care and courage. Tossing off a “Good job!” when the child acts in the way we deem appropriate takes none of those things, which helps to explain why “doing to” strategies are a lot more popular than “working with” strategies.

And what can we say when kids just do something impressive? Consider three possible responses:

* Say nothing. Some people insist a helpful act must be “reinforced” because, secretly or unconsciously, they believe it was a fluke. If children are basically evil, then they have to be given an artificial reason for being nice (namely, to get a verbal reward). But if that cynicism is unfounded – and a lot of research suggests that it is – then praise may not be necessary.

* Say what you saw. A simple, evaluation-free statement (“You put your shoes on by yourself” or even just “You did it”) tells your child that you noticed. It also lets her take pride in what she did. In other cases, a more elaborate description may make sense. If your child draws a picture, you might provide feedback – not judgment – about what you noticed: “This mountain is huge!” “Boy, you sure used a lot of purple today!”

If a child does something caring or generous, you might gently draw his attention to the effect of his action on the other person: “Look at Abigail’s face! She seems pretty happy now that you gave her some of your snack.” This is completely different from praise, where the emphasis is on how you feel about her sharing

* Talk less, ask more. Even better than descriptions are questions. Why tell him what part of his drawing impressed you when you can ask him what he likes best about it? Asking “What was the hardest part to draw?” or “How did you figure out how to make the feet the right size?” is likely to nourish his interest in drawing. Saying “Good job!”, as we’ve seen, may have exactly the opposite effect.

This doesn’t mean that all compliments, all thank-you’s, all expressions of delight are harmful. We need to consider our motives for what we say (a genuine expression of enthusiasm is better than a desire to manipulate the child’s future behavior) as well as the actual effects of doing so. Are our reactions helping the child to feel a sense of control over her life — or to constantly look to us for approval? Are they helping her to become more excited about what she’s doing in its own right – or turning it into something she just wants to get through in order to receive a pat on the head

It’s not a matter of memorizing a new script, but of keeping in mind our long-term goals for our children and watching for the effects of what we say. The bad news is that the use of positive reinforcement really isn’t so positive. The good news is that you don’t have to evaluate in order to encourage.

Copyright © 2001 by Alfie Kohn. This article may be downloaded, reproduced, and distributed without permission as long as each copy includes this notice along with citation information (i.e., name of the periodical in which it originally appeared, date of publication, and author’s name). Permission must be obtained in order to reprint this article in a published work or in order to offer it for sale in any form. Please write to the address indicated on the Contact page at www.alfiekohn.org.

NOTE: An abridged version of this article was published in Parents magazine in May 2000 with the title “Hooked on Praise.” For a more detailed look at the issues discussed here — as well as a comprehensive list of citations to relevant research — please see the books Punished by Rewards and Unconditional Parenting.

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The reason I speak of a hoax in the case of “attention deficit disorder” is that there is no such “mental disorder” to “diagnose” and “treat.” And the reason I speak of a great hoax is that the less competent medical practitioners use this phony “diagnosis” as a warrant to “treat” millions of school children (over 5,000,000) per year by intoxicating them with brain-disabling narcotics.

And make no mistake about the power of Ritalin to disable and eventually shrink the brain. It differs little in its destructive effects from cocaine and the amphetamines, and is fast becoming the drug of choice among addicts in high schools and colleges. Children in middle schools and high schools who are required to take Ritalin daily at school are now selling their pills to their friends who want to get a quick fix. Of late the victims of pill pushers are fast becoming pill pushers themselves!

Attention is a form of consciousness… and not something that can be observed. Medical practitioners have chosen the word “attention” as the key to one of 400 or so “mental disorders” they’ve listed in their “diagnostic manual.” They say that some children don’t “have” enough attention to succeed in school, and that it is wise to try to increase their attention with stimulant drugs. They say these children can’t pay attention even if they try to.

But psychologists and other behavioral scientists say attention is a form of consciousness, hence a hypothetical mental event and not something that can be observed. Of course by noting what a child is doing we can guess what that child is paying attention to, and guesswork is OK for trying out different kinds of social intervention with children. But it’s not OK for trying out different kinds of physical intervention. The latter can, and often does, have irreversible consequences which are far worse than the “disorder” that is being “treated” (in the case of Ritalin, stunting of growth, brain atrophy, loss of muscular control, and loss of self-regard).

Clearly medical intervention differs markedly from psychological intervention. Medical practitioners treat disorders while corrective counselors counsel persons. Counselors join children in their social context, medics invade children’s brains – it’s social intervention versus physical interference.

According to the medical manual of mental disorders there are ten symptoms of attention deficit that are said to cause the impairment of attention. Most of these allegedly causal symptoms suggest that a child pays too little attention to assignments, the rest that this child pays too much attention to things other than assignments. When these symptoms are assumed to be present, the claim is that they cause impairment of the child’s capacity to attend to assignments.

One problem with this idea is that what the medics call “symptoms” are supposed to be observable, that is, visible or audible signs of something wrong. But attention is not visible or audible. Rather it’s something that we guess is going on in the brain of the person we’re observing, when all we can see or hear is what the person is doing. When a school boy is observed just sitting and seemingly doing nothing, it’s impossible to tell what he’s paying attention to. Of course it’s obvious he’s not actively engaged in doing his assignment; whatever he’s thinking about can only be a matter of conjecture.

The other problem with the idea of attention deficit is that the medics apparently believe it is caused by its symptoms. For sure the medics have got it backwards, and some of us are surprised that they haven’t noticed such an obvious error. Even though medical practitioners aren’t scientists, they ought to know better than that. It’s preposterous to say that the symptoms of attention deficit cause the deficit of attention. Even though preposterous, the medics seem to mean what they say. For example they say that “Some hyperactive-impulsive or inattentive symptoms that cause impairment must have been present before age 7 years.” Also they say that “Some impairment from the symptoms must be present in at least two settings (e.g. at school [or work] and at home).” [DSM IV, italics mine]

If I were a medic Id be embarrassed by this sort of talk, and I suppose that the more competent medics are somewhat embarrassed by this obvious error. In any case the essay on attention deficit in the DSM-IV is so poorly written that it’s a wonder anybody takes it seriously. Unfortunately a lot of medical practitioners in America do take it seriously and even (to my embarrassment) so do some psychologists.

By the way, European children seem immune to the “disease”, so the market for Ritalin is largely confined to America.

The expression “A.D.D.” is relatively new in the medical lexicon. Before its arrival on the scene educators had other names to call the children who did poor work at school, expressions such as “educationally handicapped,” “learning disabled,” “dyslexic,” and other impressive but undefined designations. But since invoking the magical “A.D.D.” label quickly gets children zapped and zombied with Ritalin, with no questions asked about the teacher’s part in the child’s behavior, small wonder that the other disguised pejoratives used by educators are used less frequently.

THE TEN “CAUSAL SYMPTOMS” OF “A.D.D.” LISTED IN THE DSM IV:

“Rarely do children afflicted with A.D.D.”:

1. Obey schoolwork directives
2. Sustain attention to schoolwork
3. Bother with schoolwork details
4. Try to avoid distractions from schoolwork
5. Try to avoid mistakes in doing schoolwork
6. Listen to the teacher’s directives
7. Remember school routines
8. Prepare for schoolwork
9. Organize schoolwork tasks
10. Like to do schoolwork

The claim is that children can’t do these things because there’s something wrong with their brains. Nobody has come up with any evidence that it’s their brain that’s at fault, but they keep looking for it, certain that sooner or later they’ll find it. In the meantime they fall back on the idea that there’s some sort of “chemical imbalance” in the brains of these children which can be set right by brain-altering chemicals. This is nonsense and they know it, but it quiets the fears of parents regarding the negative consequences of using these drugs. What the parents aren’t told is that stimulants, like sedatives and tranquilizers, are brain-disabling drugs.

Let’s examine these signs of impairment one by one:

1. Doesn’t obey schoolwork directives – “often does not follow through on instructions and fails to finish schoolwork”

Certain kinds of children are interested neither in pleasing certain kinds of teachers nor in doing their assignments. Most of these children are similar in temperament, and very different from their classmates. Most often they are Plato’s “Artisans” (Aristotle’s “Hedonics”) – concrete in perception and impulsive in action, ever on the lookout for fun things to do in the here and now. With this sort of temperament, it is not surprising that most schoolwork is unappealing to them. They, far more than those with other kinds of temperament, are prone to ignore or forget the order to do their assigned work. This is disinterest in the teacher’s agenda, not inability to comply with it, and disinterest can hardly be taken as evidence of brain dysfunction! The problem is really a clash between two kinds of temperament: those who value opportunities to have fun and those who value schedules for getting work done.

2. Doesn’t sustain attention to schoolwork – “often has difficulty sustaining attention in tasks”

The claim here is that it’s hard for such children to continue working on assignments even if they want to. But this presupposes that the child is trying to pay attention but fails in his attempt. It could be that his attention is elsewhere and that he’s not trying to maintain attention on some task. If there’s nothing in the assignment that appeals to this sort of temperament – concrete, impulsive, players – then it’s unlikely that such children will want to continue doing it. The children I’ve known like this (in 20 years of casework) can sustain attention to tasks they’re interested in for a very long time. Indeed, it’s sometimes hard to tear them away from such tasks. And while it makes sense to blame temperament for this flagging interest in schoolwork, it’s definitely unwise to blame the brain for it.

3. Doesn’t bother with schoolwork details – “often fails to give close attention to details”

Those same concrete impulsives that won’t bother with the details of schoolwork are usually capable of attending to details that their teacher can’t even see, if the details are part of some exciting activity. But it is rather naive and a little foolish to expect them to attend to the details of clerical work such as practice in spelling, handwriting, grammar, or arithmetic. It’s not that they can’t attend to such matters, but that they don’t care to. Sorry, but the brain is in no way implicated by this bothersome “symptom.”

4. Doesn’t try to avoid distractions from schoolwork – “is often easily distracted by extraneous stimuli”

Again, if they’re not interested in pleasing their teacher, why should these concrete impulsives try to ward off the distractions that often occur so often in most classrooms? Letting themselves be distracted is a welcome relief from filling in the empty spaces on the mimeographed form on their desk. Concrete-impulsive option-oriented children are indeed “easily distracted” from what must seem to them useless exercises in futility. The degree of distractibility in a given child is determined entirely by the attractiveness of the assignment. As before, don’t blame the brain, blame rather the disparity of aims on the part of teacher and pupil.

5. Doesn’t try to avoid mistakes in doing schoolwork -”makes careless mistakes in schoolwork”

Certain kinds of children are careful and certain others are carefree. Trying to be accurate in doing assignments is not of much interest to the concrete impulsive types, who usually put as little effort as possible in doing school work. It isn’t that they make mistakes as much as it is that they don’t want to bother with such work. The tacit assumption is that the reason for their mistakes is that they can’t keep their mind on their work. But this has to be a faulty assumption, it being much more likely that they’re not interested in keeping their mind on their work. The medics got it right this time: these children make “careless mistakes” because they couldn’t care less about the work they’re supposed to do.

6. Doesn’t listen to the teacher’s directives – “often does not seem to listen when spoken to directly”

These children are listening all right, even though they’re not looking at the teacher. Why not? Because the teacher’s usually getting after them for not working on their assignment. For that matter, even adults of this temperament won’t look at whoever is giving them a bad time for their shortcomings. Why then expect children to? Doubtless they don’t want to hear what’s being said to them, but because they’re smarter perceptually than other types, they’ll hear it all. Far from being deficient in this kind of attention, they are usually proficient in it, more proficient than other types of temperament.

7. Doesn’t remember school routines – “is often forgetful in daily activities”

Some children just don’t take to schedules. And when they grow up they still don’t. The medics may have gotten this one right. These children do indeed forget things that are scheduled. Not because their brain won’t let them, but because they simply aren’t interested in such things. Indeed, some are temperamentally predisposed not only to ignore schedules but to resist them, because schedules preclude options. This is especially true of the more impulsive children who like to do exciting things on the spur of the moment (ten or twelve children per class). Small wonder that they remain oblivious to school routines – “daily activities” – when at any moment, if they keep their eyes peeled, some fun activity may show up. Remember that options and schedules do not mix very well.

8. Doesn’t prepare for schoolwork – “often loses things necessary for activities”

The children that are on the lookout for fun options have no interest in getting prepared to go to work on those dull assignments they are supposed to complete. “Be prepared” is not exactly their motto. Indeed, theirs is more likely to be something like “grab a hold or lose out” or “go for it,” something like that. Equipment to be used for upcoming activities, especially schoolwork, is of little concern to those who want to do interesting things here and now. Can’t blame the brain for that.

9. Doesn’t organize schoolwork tasks – “often has difficulty organizing tasks and activities”

I’m surprised that the medics seem not to know that it’s the teacher’s job to design and schedule assignments, not the child’s. The child’s job is to do the assigned task and not “organize” it. I’m afraid the medics got this one wrong, but that’s understandable because they know very little about what goes on in schools. In this case both the child’s brain and temperament are exonerated.

10. Doesn’t like to do schoolwork – “often avoids, dislikes, or is reluctant to engage in tasks that require sustained mental effort”

Bingo! The medics hit the nail right on the head. For sure these concrete impulsives don’t like to expend the amount of effort required to concentrate on what they consider to be trivial pursuits. Let’s face it, some teachers give dull assignments which bore and annoy certain temperaments, especially those boys who are very concrete and practical in their interests and abilities. It is natural that such a child “avoids, dislikes, and is reluctant to engage” in what are to him boring tasks. Give the perceptive-impulsive child a concrete and practical assignment and he will eagerly “engage in it” and will “like” doing it. In this neither brain nor temperament is guilty.

Signs of Impairment
Medics claim they can observe these ten signs of impaired consciousness. But that’s nonsense because consciousness is not observable. So the ten signs of A.D.D. are merely guesses and therefore cannot be seriously considered as either criteria or symptoms of some hypothetical deficit of consciousness. And to claim that these bogus symptoms actually cause an impairment of consciousness is simply preposterous.

The problem is curriculum content and instructional method, not brain defect.

It is therefore evil that they persist in experimenting with brain disabling drugs to get children to do as they are told.
Bear in mind that school children are told to do three things: 1. stay put, 2. keep quiet, and 3. get to work. The so-called A.D.D. afflicted child obeys the first two directives, but disobeys the third: he stays put, keeps quiet, but doesn’t get to work. His reason for dragging his heels is that he probably doesn’t like to do schoolwork (criterion #10), at least the kind that the less capable teacher assigns him. It’s as simple as that. It’s ridiculous to probe around in his brain to see if there’s something wrong with it. And its preposterous to disable his brain with drugs to “help him focus on his lessons.” The problem is curriculum content and instructional method, not brain defect.

Remember that the medics who prescribe stimulant narcotics, in order to be licensed to practice, are required to swear the oath of Hippocrates that they will “do no harm.” Yet each of them violates that oath by doing irreparable harm to children, even four-year-olds, who are merely attending to their own business instead of their teacher’s.

There is nothing wrong with these children. Neither special education nor experimental narcotherapy is the way to treat children who disobey orders to get to work. After all, it isn’t so much that these children can’t work as it is that they don’t want to work. Their inborn temperament prevents these concrete, fun loving, and impulsive children from adapting to the school. Some day in the not so distant future the school may come to realize that not all children can be scheduled and routinized, that children, like adults, are fundamentally different in this regard. Perhaps then the school might adapt itself to those children that do not fit its curriculum or its methods of instruction.

Special Thanks to David Keirsey who is the author of Please Understand Me, Please Understand Me II, and the Keirsey Temperament Sorter II.

A study by the American Academy of Pediatrics found that children under the age of two shouldn’t be watching any television at all. Dr. Jon LaPook reports on the study. (I really do not like the way the newscaster calls children “the kid” so much – cringe, and she’s not much better with her “our kids sit in front of the TV all day long!”

36 hours a week?  Next we have Ryan who wishes to inform his audience of the negative effetcs of children watching too much tv and to enlighten his audience on the healthy substitutions that can be taken in its place.

In summary…

My purpose in this chapter is to warn you of the hazards of making that diagnosis yourself, and of letting anyone else – doctor, teacher, or friend -do it for you. Once your child is given one of these labels there is a strong probability that he may be subjected to some unacceptable risks.

Professional counseling and drug treatment for children who exhibit exaggerated but perfectly normal developmental behavior has become almost epidemic in the United States. Largely because of pressure from school authorities, many American parents have lost faith in the legitimacy of their own decisions and in the accumulated wisdom of their parents, relatives, and friends. They’ve been led to believe that doctors and mental health professionals have the only answers to questions that previous generations answered quite effectively themselves.

If kids were made with cookie cutters, like the gingerbread man, norms could be set for your child’s developmental behavior and the level of activity that he should display. Happily, they’re not, with the result that no two children are precisely alike. That’s frustrating for teachers, doctors, and every other professional who believes that everything in life should go by the book. It is not uncommon today for a child who is so active and inattentive that he gives his teacher fits to be diagnosed as “hyperactive” or “brain-damaged”, treated with depressive chemicals, and isolated in the “learning lab” at school.

The possibility that your exceptionally active but perfectly normal child could be branded with one of these derogatory labels – none of which has a valid scientific definition – is not remote. The number of children who have suffered this fate has risen by 500,000 in the last five years. It could happen to your child if he displays some of these behaviors, which are on the checklists that psychologists use: doesn’t always listen to directions; fidgets and won’t sit still; daydreams in class; butts into situations that are none of his business; is slow getting ready for school; shows off when other children are around; or is more physically active than the other children in his class.

Your reaction to that list is probably the same as mine. I would begin to worry if a child didn’t display most of those behaviors. Then I’d devote my attention to trying to diagnose why he is behaving like a vegetable! But when he does display them, the mental health professionals are likely to give him drugs that often do turn him into something resembling a vegetable!

Avoid Drugs for Behavior Modification

If some of your child’s behavior is more exaggerated and thus more annoying than that of other children you know, don’t endanger him by exposing him to therapy or drugs. Instead, search for the environmental factors – at home, in school, or among his peers – that may be causing emotional problems. What pressures on your child are producing the behavior patterns that are unacceptable to his teachers and to you? Search also for dietary allergies that may be at the heart of his problems. Meanwhile, try to relieve some of the emotional pressure that his behavior is causing, provide strong emotional support at home, and let him know that he has you on his side when he encounters trouble outside your home.

In my experience, if it is carried out objectively and thoroughly, this approach usually works. Certainly, if it does, it is a desirable alternative to professional counseling that may cause your child to be labeled hyperactive, MBD, or ADD. If that happens, your child’s school will probably place him in a special education program and assign him to a “learning. laboratory”, which will brand him as inferior among his peers. (In some schools the learning lab is derisively labeled – by the kids who aren’t in it – as the “loony lab”!)

I don’t believe any child deserves that fate simply because he is harder to manage or harder to teach than the others in his class. This should concern you, but you should be even more concerned if psychoactive drugs, such as Ritalin or Cylert, are prescribed for your child. Educators and doctors who label a child hyperactive or learning disabled, and then suggest treating him with chemicals, always defend their recommendations by asserting that it will improve the child’s ability: to learn. They know that you will respond to this more positively than to their true motivation, which is to drug your child into near-somnolence so he will be more manageable and less of a nuisance in the classroom.

No one has ever been able to demonstrate that drugs such as Cylert and Ritalin improve the academic performance of the children who take them. The major effect of Ritalin and similar drugs is on the short-term manageability of hyperkinetic behavior. The pupil is drugged to make life easier for his teacher, not to make it better and more productive for the child. If your child is the victim, the potential risks of these drugs are a high price to pay to make his teacher more comfortable.

Dangerous Side Effects of Ritalin

What are the risks to your child if he is put on Ritalin or a similar drug? First, there is ample evidence that they are prescribed inappropriately, administered carelessly, and have side effects that are dangerous in themselves. Add to that the fact that they obviate the need and the incentive to discover what is really troubling your child, and you have a package that exemplifies contemporary medical practice and educational policy at their worst.

In the prescribing information for Ritalin that the manufacturer, Ciba-Geigy, supplied for the Physician’s Desk Reference, the company acknowledges that it does not know how Ritalin works or how its effects relate to the condition of the central nervous system. It warns against the use of the drug in children under the age of six and admits that its long-term safety is unknown. It also notes that suppression of growth in those who take the drug has been noted in some cases and that there is some clinical evidence that it may provoke convulsive seizures in some patients.

The prescribing information then goes on to the potential side effects, which are so frightening that I will quote them directly from the book (the italicized phrases are mine)

Nervousness and insomnia are the most common adverse reactions but are usually controlled by reducing dosage and omitting the drug in the afternoon and the evening. Other reactions include hypersensitivity (including skin rash), urticaria [swollen, itching patches of skin], fever, arthralgia, exfoliative dermatitis [scaly patches of skin], erythema multiforme [an acute inflammatory skin disease], with histopathological findings of necrotizing vasculitis [destruction of blood vessels], and thrombocytopenic purpura [a serious blood clotting disorder], anorexia, nausea, dizziness, palpitations; headache; dyskinesia [impairment of voluntary muscle movement], drowsiness, blood pressure and pulse changes, both up and down; tachycardia [rapid heartbeat], angina [spasmodic attacks of intense heart pain], cardiac arrhythmia [irregular heartbeat,; abdominal pain, and weight loss during prolonged therapy.

There have been rare reports of Tourette's syndrome. Toxic psychosis has been reported in patients taking this drug; leukopenia [reduction in white blood cells] and/or anemia; and a few instances of scalp hair loss. In children, loss of appetite, abdominal pain, weight loss during prolonged therapy, insomnia, and tachycardia may occur more frequently; however, any of the other adverse reactions listed above may also occur.

This is the kind of information about a drug that the manufacturer is compelled by law to share with the doctors who will prescribe it. Unfortunately, there is no law requiring that the doctors who prescribe the drug share the information about its potentially damaging or fatal effects with you. That is why I have provided so much information about Ritalin, which applies, as well, to its counterparts.

If your child’s teacher, school principal, counselor, or pediatrician attempts to pressure you into accepting chemical treatment for your child’s behavior patterns, reject the advice out of hand. There is no benefit that justifies the risks, nor can they be justified in order to spare his teacher the annoyance of having him talk out of turn or squirm in his seat.

Look for Emotional Pressures as Cause

Don’t accept a teacher’s assessment of your child’s behavioral shortcomings without investigating whether they may be the result of his or her interaction with him. Irreconcilable personality conflicts are not uncommon, and if one exists between your child and his teacher, the teacher may be the problem if he or she is not dealing equitably and sympathetically with your child. In that case the answer is to change teachers, not to use drugs to try to alter the behavior of the pupil.

While you are endeavoring to correct any conditions that are causing problems for your child at school, look for others that may be troubling him at home. If he is insecure because of stress among other family members, try to resolve those problems or at least avoid exposing him to the tensions that exist. If there are difficulties with his playmates or others outside your home, try to resolve those. Then turn your attention to the possibility that his hyperactive behavior may stem from allergies to food or other substances. There is substantial evidence that nutritional approaches may succeed in improving his emotional condition and behavior.

I must caution you that your pediatrician may not be sympathetic to this approach. The late Dr. Benjamin Feingold, the pioneer of dietary control of hyperactive behavior, encountered great skepticism from others in the medical profession. That’s not surprising, because doctors chronically reject non-medical solutions to problems they believe belong to them. Don’t let that discourage you. Nervous system symptoms related to food hypersensitivity have been described by one observer after another for at least half a century. More recently, there has been a mass of clinical evidence which demonstrates that the Feingold diet does work with many children.

Dr. Feingold, who was chief of the allergy clinics of the Kaiser Foundation in California, zeroed in on chemical food additives – colorings, flavorings, preservatives, stabilizers, and others – as the principal contributors to hyperactive behavior. He recommended eliminating these chemicals from the diet by substituting natural foods for the highly-processed items found in most American pantries and refrigerators. There is overwhelming clinical evidence that this approach is often successful.

Dr. Feingold’s results have been duplicated by many others. Dr. William G. Crook, a pediatrician and allergist at the Children’s Clinic in Jackson, Tennessee, reported on another study at a food allergy symposium. He said that hyperactivity was related to food allergy in about three-fourths of the cases in a study of more than 100 children who were overactive.

Dr. Crook observed precisely what Dr. Feingold and many parents have experienced: children can be helped by using elimination diets to identify offending foods. He identified milk and refined cane sugar as the leading culprits in a list that also included corn, wheat, eggs, soy, citrus, and other items.

If you have an overactive child with behavior problems, don’t turn to drugs prescribed by your doctor until you have determined what success you have with food you can buy from your grocer!

Question Diagnosis of Brain Damage

You should also be extremely wary of any suggestion that your child’s behavior patterns stem from some form of brain damage or disorder. These conditions do exist in some children, of course, but the number is far fewer than the number of such cases that are diagnosed. Psychiatry is such an imprecise science, if it can be called a science, that its practitioners rarely agree on a diagnosis. Experiments have been conducted which show that psychologists and psychiatrists can be expected to agree with each other on a diagnosis only about 54 percent of the time. That’s so close to the law of averages that you could consult a cabdriver and a carpenter and get the same result.

Nevertheless, on the basis of questionable diagnosis, your child may be recommended for psychotherapy if his behavior varies from what the mental health practitioner chooses to consider the “norm”. Children who are correctly diagnosed as having brain or neurological damage or actual psychoses may benefit from treatment, of course. But short of that, there is little evidence that psychological counseling helps, and considerable evidence that it may actually aggravate a child’s psychological/emotional problems.

The inadequacies of psychotherapy have been revealed repeatedly in follow-up studies of populations that exposed to psychiatric treatment. One well-known study points out that the spontaneous remission rate in patients with psychiatric conditions is 70 percent for both adults and children. Another study, reporting on a 20-year follow-up of patients at the University of Wisconsin, compared patients who were counseled with those who applied for but never received counseling. The most positive conclusion the study could reach was that counseling seemed to do no harm!

Another study of youths in Cambridge and Somerville, Massachusetts, was even less reassuring. It compared a group that had been counseled for five years, on a one-to-one basis with a personal counselor, to another group that received no therapy at all. Almost without exception, psychological therapy appeared to have a negative effect on these youngsters in later life. Begun in 1939, this 30-year follow-up found a solid correlation between therapy and criminal behavior. More of the men who had received psychotherapy as youths were convicted of serious crimes and multiple crimes than those who had no treatment at all. Those who had the longest and most frequent contact with counselors had the highest incidence of antisocial and criminal behavior.

Finally, a 1980 review of 120 studies of psychotherapy for juvenile delinquents found that those who received counseling fared worse, in terms of subsequent behavior, than those who didn’t. A report on this research in the Toronto Globe & Mail summed it up in this paragraph:

If you want to stop a juvenile delinquent from robbing, raping, and clubbing people, don’t send him to a social worker, a psychiatrist, a psychologist, a group home, or a therapeutic community, and don’t make any efforts to counsel his family either. They all fail and some may even make him more violent than when he began.

There are, to be sure, some specific childhood mental and neurological disorders that stem from brain and neurological damage. Many of them are the consequence of medical interventions that I have discussed earlier in this book, e.g., cerebral-palsy, Down’s syndrome, Tourette’s syndrome, autism, etc.

If your child is the victim of one of these conditions, professional help is appropriate, if for no other reason than to explore innovative treatment that may appear – such as the nutritional supplementation methods in the management of mongolism and other causes of mental retardation pioneered by Detroit’s Henry Turkel, M.D., and Ruth Harrell, M.D., of Old Dominion University. However, if your child is suffering from this kind of condition – rather than behavioral manifestations that simply make him more difficult to manage than other children – you’ll know the difference. Your best course is to seek professional help when it is clearly needed, but to avoid it if you are told that your child is suffering from a “learning disability”, an “attention deficit disorder”, or some other vaguely defined condition. The mental health professionals have yet to prove that any of these alleged disorders even exists!

SOURCE:  Chapter 18, How To Raise a Healthy Child… In Spite of Your Doctor. New York: Ballantine Books, 1990.

Reprinted by permission of Mrs. Rita Mendelsohn.

Dr. Robert Mendelsohn received his Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of Chicago. He was an instructor at Northwest University Medical College, and served as Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Community Health and Preventive Medicine at the University of Illinois College of Medicine. He was also President of the National Health Federation, former National Director of Project Head Start Medical Consultation Service, and Chairman of the Medical Licensing Committee of the State of Illinois. His highly-regarded books include Confessions of a Medical Heretic, Male Practice: How Doctors Manipulate Women, and How To Raise a Healthy Child… In Spite of Your Doctor.

Talk, talk and talk some more. Isn’t that what we humans do – COMMUNICATE? I am always so sad to see a family of 4 sitting, and each one of them are face down, iphone in hand and texting frantically to update their “friends” and business associates of their “latest news”. Tweet this, check in a foursquare, buzz about it – as if their online presence and identity is more important than their real relationship… you know, the one being ignored that is right in front of them.

All parents want the best for their child, especially when it comes to learning and education. But education starts long before kindergarten. It starts in the HOME – where the heart is. Parents do a great service to humanity as a whole when they are conscious to instill a love of learning in children by fostering healthy curiosity about the world around them and encouraging exploration and discovery. When this happens, some divine alchemy is formed and all of a sudden, children see learning come alive in their eyes. When this occurs, they have a natural reverence and mindfulness of the world around them. It’s much easier then to enjoy school and create habits of learning – and these are habits that they’ll carry with them throughout their entire lives.

Talking with your child about life’s everyday experiences will help each of you understand the others’ viewpoints, values, dreams, and interests. Parents need not only talk, but also listen to their children. Answering questions, or helping children find the answers, will help your child develop a sense of value and self-respect.

Many parents think activities such as going to the zoo, museums, or shows make up for lost time with their children. But, there can be just as much educational value in everyday activities, such as going to the bank, going grocery shopping, or doing a project at home. Parents just need to plan ahead a little to help their child discover the world.

Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Waldorf education, emphasized the importance of achieving balance in the three different means by which a person relates to the world through the realm of thinking, through the life of feelings, and through physical activity. In Waldorf circles – this is known as head, heart, and hands – and this synergy nurtures the child’s self-reliance, while building personal integrity and a sense of social responsibility. Children’s days should have a balance of practical activities to prepare him as thoroughly as possible for the flexibility needed to meet all life experiences, while at the same time instilling a life-long love of learning. The best way to do this is to include him or her. It sounds so simple, and yet just look around and see how disconnected people (families) have become.

The important thing for parents to remember is that they are the most important teachers in their child’s life.

Children are born eager to learn, but parents need to help them channel that learning. Talk with children before, during, and after any activity. The more you talk with each other, the more rewarding your conversations will be, and the better you will get to know your child…. ♥

One bitterly cold winter evening, the young Martin rode through the gates of Amiens on his fine, proud horse. He was dressed in the regalia of his military unit: gleaming armor, a bright helmet and a beautiful white cloak, lined with lambs wool. It was nearly freezing outside, but his thick cloak kept him warm. He was hardly aware  

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Cut one long side from an empty cardboard box. Decorate the box, inside and out, with pictures of vegetables and fruits. Make a table and chairs from twigs and blocks or use furniture from your doll house. Spread twigs and leaves on top of the box to form a roof. Then hang small bunches of fruits (such as grapes of currants) from the ceiling.

Source: Natural Childhood

There are many Thanksgiving celebrations and festivals celebrated all over the world. Most have their roots in the ancient festivals of light. Use this time to celebrate with your children and families and to learn about the festivals and cultural celebrations of your people, your roots.

Halloween Costume Suggestions:

Some ideas for non violet, non-Disney and non-TV costumes include: pumpkin, sun, elf, moon, prince/ss, knight, wizard, maiden, fairy, flower, gnome, butter- fly, forest child, honey bee, animals, storybook characters (Nils, Robin Hood, Rapunzel, etc.) or workers (mail delivery, fire fighter, construction, etc) and traditional dress from other countries also make lovely costumes. Of course, there is also my personal favorite:

“My name is Pippilotta Delicatessa Windowshade Mackrelmint Efraim’s Daughter Longstocking formerly the Terror of the Seas Now a Cannibal King!!!” Yes, My son was Pippi Longstocking one year. Some people questioned a boy being a girl, to which he also very knowledgably replied…. “This is Halloween and you can be whom or whatever you wish – and I am being Pippi because she is a wonderful character!”

Mabon: Celebrating the Autumn Equinox It’s the season of changing colors; crisp air filled with the scent of wood smoke; and festivals offering wine, hot cider, and apple pie. At this time of equal day and night, we give thanks for the harvest that will sustain us through the dark winter months. This book explores the history, legends, and traditions of the season that is honored from the Far East to the Celtic Lands, and from Scandinavia to South America. Create your own Mabon tradition with the help of the book’s many recipes, magical workings, equinox rituals, and crafts for all ages.