Punished by Rewards (Kohn)

[cahn]

3/5. I must grudgingly give this book a score of 3 because I agreed broadly... mostly... with what he is saying (extrinisic rewards don't really work that well as a motivator), and this is an important concept, if you haven't read any parenting books (and I can imagine there being rather less of an overlap with readers of this book and other parenting books than the last pop psych book I read), and there were some interesting studies I hadn't seen before, but just about every page I'd be all "Yes BUT..." and "Okay BUT...," in large part because Kohn is wildly annoying.

It starts with Kohn's grand pronouncement that our society runs on the central idea Do this, get that, which is, he says firmly, not the way the world works a priori, it's a philosophy.

Me: But... that is actually the way the world does work? If you throw a ball straight up, it will come right back down and hit you on the head. You do a thing, there are consequences to the thing.
Kohn: Yeah, well, but if you were asking me I would say that's perfectly all right if you want to reduce humans to physics, but humans are obviously MUCH MORE COOL than that because we have, like, consciousness and free will and stuff.
Me: I'm... not even going to get into that with you. But even putting that aside... physics is still a thing? And also there are consequences to human interactions too --
Kohn: I'm talking about rewards EXTRINISIC to the task it rewards, like gold stars and money bribes to get A's, not INTRINSIC motivations.
Me: Okay, but you never actually said that in the first couple of chapters, I just had to infer that from the specific sorts of rewards you decry and how you talk about how great intrinsic motivation is. Also some of the things you class under intrinsic motivations actually seem to be natural consequences, but you seem to have this thing against this straw man that you call natural consequences --
Kohn: But you got my point, right? (*)
Me: FINE.

So... yeah... I agree that extrinsic rewards are not great as a motivator and can backfire! And that intrinisic motivations and natural consequences (more about this in a bit) are way better in general! And I agree totally that the fact that often one has to keep the extrinisic rewards going is an indicator that it's not something that works so well in general. And that often it just devolves into rules lawyering about "well, did THAT count as doing the task and can I get the reward?" Yes, I've been there, done that. So yes, I agree that he makes a very good case that forcing a tight coupling between extrinisic rewards and tasks, especially with the express purpose of controlling the kid, is not great.

That being said, there were many, many things that annoyed me NO END about this book.

-The thing that probably annoyed me the most is how the white male privilege here just basically oozes off the page: every several pages or so Kohn would say to me without saying to me that he has never been, say, a stay-at-home parent raising small children. For example, he reluctantly admits that it's probably not incredibly terrible to use rewards for toilet training, except insomuch as it reinforces the philosophy of "do this, get that." Which is good, because before I read that, toilet training was the counterexample I kept coming up with of "...but it actually works in this case and doesn't have any sort of bad long-term effects," but also I knew what he was going to say about it, which was that we should consider that instead of using rewards, perhaps it's the parent's problem for expecting the kid to toilet train before they're intrinsically motivated to. Which tells me HE HAS NEVER BEEN A STAY AT HOME PARENT PRIMARILY RESPONSIBLE FOR TOILET TRAINING. Seriously, though -- one of my strong use cases for extrinsic rewards(/punishments) is the case where the person involved will eventually be motivated intrinsically but needs a bit of extrinisic help to get over that initial hump -- which he doesn't seem to think is ever the case. Everyone I know who has more than one kid used extrinisic rewards at least once to toilet train, and no one I know still used them after the kid figured out that hey, not making a mess everywhere and not having to wear diapers is its own reward. (Also, it is the case that Kohn is all about how he's not going to deal with 'classical conditioning' -- that's the Pavlovian response whereby you hope to pair an artificial stimulus with a response -- but rather is concerned with 'operant conditioning' -- which is the "do this, get that" response he objects to -- and at least some of toilet training rewards is classical rather than operant, where you hand the kid a toy or candy as soon as they pee or poop. We are also currently trying to do classical conditioning with E. with a small reward (chocolate chip) when she uses her anger management techniques, at the suggestion of her fantastic therapist/coach (who, yes, is familiar with Kohn).)

But also toddlers are not mini adults! Once you spend more than five minutes with a toddler, you realize that they do not actually viscerally understand logical chains like "hey, if you toilet train your life will be immensely better and you will be able to go on sleepovers and fun things like that!" Babies require total control; toddlers require more control than a tweenager than a full adult, and Kohn seems to have only a grudging and implicit acceptance of this idea. Now, it's also the case that parents do have problems with how much control to relinquish as their kids get older, and how to control their kids in such a way that they kids actually do preserve as much autonomy (and, sometimes, the perception of autonomy) as possible, and that's a real issue and worth having a conversation about! And Kohn's points are obviously very relevant to this! but I feel like any explicit acknowledgment that hey, at different parts of their lives, different kids might need different amounts of control and different amounts of judgment would have gone a long way towards diffusing my annoyance at what I perceive as Kohn's apparent lack of actually spending time with anyone under the age of 15.

-Behavioralists: Wow, Kohn Does Not Like behavioralism. Because human beings must be more than the sum of their impulses and conditioning! That's it, that's his argument. Honestly I came out of this book thinking I should read more Skinner, he sounds like an interesting guy.

-Natural consequences: Kohn says that the parenting technique of "natural consequences" is just another way of saying "punishment." One of his examples is "A child who tips her chair back in class must stand up for the rest of the period." Okay, I agree, IDK whom he is talking to, but that sounds a bit... well, removed from the "natural" part of it. (The canonical example of "natural consequences" I know of is the one where, if a child does not dressed, they go to school in their PJs. There shouldn't be any parent-induced shame associated with this; but the kid is able to realize, hey, wait, okay, if I don't put on my clothes then... I don't have my clothes on!) Kohn then goes on to say,

If a child tips her chair back too far, she will fall over. That is a "natural consequence" -- and the fact that it qualifies for that label offers no argument for letting it happen; caring adults go out of their way to prevent many such consequences from occurring. If, by contrast, a child who tips her chair back is forced to stand up for the rest of the period, that is a punishment.

Gosh, this in a nutshell is how I felt about this whole book: I agree with all these sentences taken individually! and yet when you put them together I'm like, this is leaving a bad taste in my mouth somehow? Like, part of living in this world is figuring out that actions DO INDEED have consequences, whether it be the physical consequences of gravity or consequences in relationships with other human beings, and part of raising a child to adulthood is showing them how that all works, and that doesn't seem to be part of Kohn's philosophy at all?? I kept thinking of this:

His mother had often said, When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. She had emphasized the corollary of this axiom even more vehemently: when you desired a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.

(Bujold, of course.)

-On merit-based pay at work: Kohn is against this. Kohn says that one strategy is to pay everyone the same. So, there are a couple of problems with this. First, the people who are high contributors are going to feel undervalued and unappreciated. Their work IS worth something valued in money to the company, so I don't think at all that it's weird for the company to acknowlege that! Second, if you don't pay people enough they'll leave and go to another company that will pay them enough. It's true that, as Kohn cites, pay isn't the most important thing about work for a lot of people. But it's not nothing either! And at many places, including my own company, "being paid what you're worth" is a proxy for how they treat you in other ways, for what I think should be obvious reasons.

(This is not transferable to student-teacher or child-parent relations, because students' performance or children's tasks aren't really... worth a certain amount to the teacher or parents the way that work is worth to the company.)

I also don't see why this has to devolve into cutthroat competition, as Kohn claims it does. I assume Senior Engineer gets paid more than I do. He should! He is extremely productive AND in the last five years has launched a major successful business initiative, which I have no interest in doing. I don't resent him for getting paid more! If anything I would be more inclined to worry that he's not getting paid enough (I mean, I assume he is), I don't want him to jump ship!

I am also super amused (and annoyed) that Kohn deals with people saying, "If this is the case then why do you get paid for your lectures??" with, well, it's okay for HIM to get paid for lecturing and even negotiate for higher amounts because in his head he tries to decouple the money from how good a job he does! Basically, he's a special snowflake. Now, I don't disagree that it works better if people do decouple to a certain extent how much they get paid from the work itself; in fact, I think people at my workplace generally do that, which is how they maintain good motivation. It's the tight coupling of rewards and tasks, I agree, that is the problem. But I also think Kohn is not agitating to be paid the same as everyone else.

The other issue here is that in fact people do respond to extrinsic motivations, and if you take pay away, other extrinsic motivations will often rise to take their place, especially in a large-group setting (as opposed to a small-group or family setting) where there are lots of jobs that have to be done. I've been thinking about my church in relation to this recently. My church actually does not pay anyone anything! (Well, I think they do at the upper levels, but I'm concentrating on the lower levels that I know about.) And they get people to put inordinate amounts of time into their callings and do really good jobs at them! Part of what is going on here is a strong dependence on faith and a culture of hard work... but... there's also a lot (a LOT) of peer pressure and community status involved. The jobs that are the hardest and take the most time are generally also the highest-status jobs. There's a lot of time spent at church talking about how there's no such thing as a high-status calling, but... this is manifestly not the case in practice. (This is, I will admit, somewhat offset by people changing callings every several years, but even then you will get people who keep going "up" in the hierarchy.) As evidence, I submit how hard it is, as a general rule, to get people in my church to be a nursery leader (age 18 mnths-3 years) as opposed to Relief Society President (leader of the women's organization); even though the latter is way WAY more work than the former, it comes with a lot of status and the other doesn't. (People will still be nursery leader, because of the strong dependence on faith as well as the cultural imperative/peer pressure to say yes when called, but it's got a much higher rate of people outright saying no or flaking out or asking to be let out before their time is up.)

Is this the world that Kohn wants? Maybe. And, I mean, I'm still in that world, so it's clearly a world that appeals to me on many levels. But it's not a world that everyone wants, and which even most people in my church wouldn't want for their daily job. A lot of people would much rather have straightforward pay than have to navigate the silent trickiness of peer pressure and community status.

-On praise: okay, I have a LOT to say about praise because I had issues with this chapter. Kohn goes on about how praise is bad because it's just like any other reward and so is bad in the same kinds of ways, plus with an extra helping of manipulativeness/control and also judgment. More on the "judgment" bit later.

I think there's something to this, but it confused me for the longest time because I (and I think most people) conflate the word "praise" with several different types of activities. One is the kind that Kohn decries: praise as control. He doesn't like this (and rightly so, I think -- I'll have more to say on this in a bit) and says that people get dependent on it because they want more of it.

But there are other things I think of as praise. There's also "praise" as "appreciation." When I do e.g. music for church, it's always super nice when people come up to me afterwards and say, "Wow, that was great!" and even more when they say something like, "That touched my heart." I think of that as praise. But there's no judgment involved there, usually (with very few exceptions they're not qualified to judge and we both know that). It's sharing with me what their response was, and telling me that they appreciate me. And that is honestly encouraging! I want to do things because I know people appreciate it. And at the same time I don't think it's either a locus of control (except to the extent that all human relationships involve various push-pulls) or something I'm dependent on, and I'm gonna do my best regardless of whether anyone says something nice to me afterwards. (Sometimes no one does and that's fine!) This is the kind of praise that honestly I think should be encouraged and even taught (in my case, it's something I had to explicitly learn how to do by emulating what I saw other people doing).

And -- maybe a subset of that -- praise as "celebration" or "sharing." Like when I learned that my kid's classmate got a last-minute winning touchdown at his flag football game and I was like, "Oh wow! Hey, that's so awesome!!" I don't want anything from Classmate, I'm not trying to judge him, and he understands that. I'm sharing a moment that was exciting and meaningful to him, and am happy for him.

Note that these differing types of praise also mean that the "control" inherent in using praise, as well as the tight coupling of rewards and tasks -- which I argue is the problem here -- is looser for praise than it is for some other kinds of incentives, because while a child or other person may encounter some of the control/manipulative/tight-coupling types of praise, they are, in a reasonably healthy upbringing/life, also likely to encounter a good deal of the other sorts as well. I'll return to this in a bit; I think it's the tight coupling that is the problem.

(Tangentially, Kohn also dislikes the habit of "find something nice to say," which I don't get at all?? Like, a big part of the point of that is for the person who is giving the praise, because it's really really easy to focus on the parts that need improvements and not on the (sometimes many) parts that were good. But also I think it's totally fine to want one's negative feedback to be leavened by positive feedback??)

Okay, now let's talk about praise as judgment. Kohn thinks that one of the reasons praise (e.g., "Good job!") is bad because it's judgmental; you can see this because if an underling said "Good job!" to a superior, that superior would get annoyed because it was condescending. I... think there is more going on here. Saying "Good job!" is annoying in this case not because of the judgment part of it, but because the underling is assuming a mastery over the superior that they do not in fact hold. For example, if I had an underling who understood something technical much better than I did, and I had to brief that underling's work, and they then said "Good job!" to me, I'd feel good about that in a way I wouldn't feel good if I were briefing high-level material and the technical underling said "Good job," because I would be like, suck it, you don't know more than I do about the higher-level material! So this is a case where judgment is being applied, but the stickler here is not the judgment, it's whether the person has the right to make that judgment. (For another work example that decouples the praise part from the judgment part, I was recently in a meeting where I was doing an on-the-fly presentation on some technical material, and though it was mostly fine, I was struggling a bit with flow, and the other engineer asked me a leading question: "What does each row in that file represent?" Though it was admittedly helpful with the flow, I also found it super condescending, because there is something of a judgment involved in asking a leading question to which you already know the answer, and I know that file inside and out better than Other Engineer does :P But when I was a baby grad student my advisor did the same thing to me, ask me a leading question like that, and I was grateful and didn't find it condescending at all, okay, partially because advisor has a, um, more laid-back personality than Engineer, but also we both acknowledged his mastery over mine.)

I do see Kohn's point, though! Praise as granting or witholding approval (especially as a parental figure) is, yeah, bad. But it's because of the control locus, not directly because of the judgment -- though control is easier when there's a judgment component, so it's definitely highly correlated. In general I think he has the causality the wrong way. He says "Praise is bad because it is controlling"; I say, "Praise is bad when it is controlling." (Or, I concede, perceived to be controlling, which is why I don't disagree with a lot of his points for being more careful about how praise is delivered. Which I don't think makes a difference for some people, but might very much for others.)

Becoming dependent on external praise and validation: I don't think this is exactly the problem that Kohn does, although it's related to the problem that he sees. I don't think that, generally speaking, praising a child and providing them with external validation in and of itself will cause the child to become dependent on that praise and validation, although too much of anything is probably not great (and again, kids differ in how they react; I'm sure there's some kid who could become dependent on it even when done in the most innocuous of ways). (And of course the usual parenting caveats on "praise effort not results; praise things a kid does rather than things a kid is (smart, good, etc.)," etc. -- but the kinds of negative effects those are concerned with are a bit tangential to the negative effects Kohn is principally concerned with.)

Now, again, I do think that Kohn is correct that controlling a child through praise and validation -- witholding the praise and approval unless the kid is doing exactly the thing that the parent wants, and which almost never happens, so that it's effectively also used as a punishment -- can have potentially seriously bad effects. Again, I claim it's the control and the tight coupling that's the problem, not the fact of praise. If it's a "you only ever get praise or approval when you do this exact thing, and never otherwise," if it tightly couples the praise with a particular path/task/result, and especially when that's done by a parent, who has the most effect on the child's worldview, then... well, yeah. (The funny thing is, I recently found through a totally unrelated search an email of mine back from 2012 where I said that "being too aggressively tiger-mommed... I think can lead to doing things for external reward/praise rather than because one wants to do it and do it right, and [to having] one's self-respect bound up in one's intelligence." Note that I identified the root cause here as not the external rewards/praise, but rather the tiger-momming.) The one person I have known who was extremely dependent on external praise got almost no praise as a child; I believe strongly that it was the lack of praise (or, rather, the extreme control of the praise) that messed them up.

Anyway, I think that's really the message to get from this section, but I felt that he actually undercuts his own message by being sloppy about his definitions; I had to think about this for a week to decide how I felt about it and why I had so many problems with what he was saying while still agreeing with many of the underlying principles. Which... is sort of my problem with the entire book, come to think of it.

(*) It turns out that at least for E, being able to check things off on a checklist gives her the same sort of dopamine hit as a reward does. Would Kohn call that an extrinisic reward? I don't think he would, but then I don't really know what his definition is, except "extrinsic rewards are what they're called when I don't like them."

Comments

[luzula]

Re: different salaries for different jobs, I'm not sure that is good or bad in itself, but is good or bad depending on how the decisions are made and the reasons behind them. An acquaintance of mine works in a employee-owned company where they have a sort of ladder system of salary depending on seniority etc, which is voted through by all employees. Which seems very reasonable to me! (Although it's true that they have had people leave because they don't give more for management positions than is merited by their seniority, so not everyone does agree.)

OTOH, the general drive from the capitalist class towards differentiating salaries/wages as much as possible in order to keep the working class low and allow some to rise high, is something else IMO (and sucks). (I don't understand the distinction between salary and wage, if there is one.)

[cahn]

Re: different salaries for different jobs, I'm not sure that is good or bad in itself, but is good or bad depending on how the decisions are made and the reasons behind them.

Yeah, and to give Kohn credit, he does make a point that's somewhat like that.

OTOH, the general drive from the capitalist class towards differentiating salaries/wages as much as possible in order to keep the working class low and allow some to rise high, is something else IMO (and sucks).

Yeah, there's that. (And okay, some people really... don't seem to be worth all that??)

(I don't understand the distinction between salary and wage, if there is one.)

I guess I would generally think of salary as being a yearly amount of money, and wage being an hourly amount, with also the connotation that you get the salary no matter how little or how much you work, and for a wage you only get the money dependent on how many hours you work. But it's also sort of weirdly class-based too, where blue-collar workers work for wages and white-color workers work for salary, even people who technically charge by the hour like consultants and lawyers. (On the other hand, I guess the consultants and lawyers I know are mostly-guaranteed the number of hours of work that makes up their salary, so maybe that's the difference.)

[antisoppist]

Does the chap have pathological demand avoidance? Because as a child I reacted to attempts to make me do things by means of external rewards and punishments with "this means they want me to do the thing so I'm not going to do the thing because if I do the thing, they will have won". And fairly recently I found there was a term for this that wasn't just "antisoppist is stubborn and stroppy". But I did also learn to function in the world (albeit by being self-employed so that no-one tells me to do anything) not try to reorganise the way the world works around my monstrous ego!

[cahn]

OOH. You know... I can see how this might be a good framework for someone with pathological demand avoidance, at that. (My friend's daughter hasn't officially got diagnosed with it, but it's definitely been thrown around as a potential diagnosis, and a lot of what my friend does with her is actually pretty similar.) But not for everyone, I think :)

[mildred_of_midgard]

Hahaha, omg, THIS BOOK. I have a weird love-hate with it--actually, now that I say this, a lot like my love-hate with the Engineer Trilogy--because "but just about every page I'd be all 'Yes BUT...' and 'Okay BUT...,'" YES EXACTLY, but also he said some stuff I had never heard articulated before and that I am planning to share at work* and at least one thing that sort of...changed my life is a little strong, but it made something click that made a really big difference to an issue I'd been having.

* E.g. why the Culture Club's attempts to get us to give more technical talks by bribing us with snacks is not working.

In order to read this book, I found I had to ignore everything that didn't make sense and bring a *whole lot* of background to the table to fit it into a framework (largely of authority and stress) that I already had, and then I got a lot of value out of it.

He seemed weirdly confused about a lot of really obvious stuff. To pick one example that's really central to his argument, I remember thinking, "You'd be less confused if you understood the difference between:

a) Motivated by the intrinsic *process*, e.g. reading an interesting book,
b) Motivated by the intrinsic *outcome*, e.g. reading a boring book because you want to know what's in it,
c) Motivated by something extrinsic, e.g. reading a book to get a pizza,

instead of conflating a) and b) under 'intrinsic' and tripping up over yourself."

I don't really understand how you write a book about this topic and get that tripped up by not having articulated the difference between process and outcome.

Anyway, I alas cannot respond to your post in detail at this time, work is crazy, but yeah. THIS BOOK. :P

Okay, quick notes:

- I also have a lot of thoughts about praise, which overlap a lot with yours;

- I'm putting together a talk on communication in the workplace for work (this is where Kohn is going to come up) and lol, leading questions get a whole section to themselves: when to use them, when not to use them;

- "I don't really know what his definition is, except "extrinsic rewards are what they're called when I don't like them," HAHA, yes, this!! I don't think *he* knows what his definition is, see also my comment about tripping himself up;

- My stepdaughter has such bad anxiety that she is allergic to *any* kind of praise or positive feedback, which is why I told my wife about this book and suggested that she mention it to stepdaughter. I said there were a lot of things wrong with this book, but you can at least take away from it why praise might be a stressor, because that's been something that's horribly confusing to my wife (horribly as in trying to figure out how much she should blame herself for how her daughter turned out). Basically, if you take any small stressor for a normal person, it's been amplified 1000x and become a crippling stressor for my stepdaughter. So this book might end up changing her life, and definitely made a really big difference to my wife to hear my summary of it (in combination with me telling her about Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria).

P.S. I just woke up from a long and elaborate dream in which you, D, and I were all at a math competition!* It wasn't the Putnam, but it was so exactly like the Putnam that I said I was going to treat it like the Putnam and expect to get a 0, and that I was there just to enjoy the problem-solving process.**

* Which followed on a dream in which we were on a space shuttle, and D was going to the space station for a two-year stint, and I was headed to Earth. Haha.

** It was still a stress dream, so I'm sorry to report that I kept unintentionally breaking the competition rules, D kept interrupting me by talking when I was trying to concentrate, and you kept bumping me with your pencil. I was sitting between the two of you, and by the end I was thinking, "Next time, you can sit next to each other!"

[cahn]

YES EXACTLY, but also he said some stuff I had never heard articulated before and that I am planning to share at work*

*nods* There is some stuff in here that is pretty good!

and at least one thing that sort of...changed my life is a little strong, but it made something click that made a really big difference to an issue I'd been having.

Huh! Elaborate?

* E.g. why the Culture Club's attempts to get us to give more technical talks by bribing us with snacks is not working.

Ha, fair.

"You'd be less confused if you understood the difference between:

a) Motivated by the intrinsic *process*, e.g. reading an interesting book,
b) Motivated by the intrinsic *outcome*, e.g. reading a boring book because you want to know what's in it,
c) Motivated by something extrinsic, e.g. reading a book to get a pizza,

instead of conflating a) and b) under 'intrinsic' and tripping up over yourself."

YES THIS! THIS!

Anyway, I alas cannot respond to your post in detail at this time, work is crazy, but yeah. THIS BOOK. :P

Haha, this is actually good because i"m also swamped and would be unable to reply to you at length :P

but you can at least take away from it why praise might be a stressor,

That's true! And I should have given him more credit for that in the post.

me telling her about Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria

Wow! I had never heard of this before this comment. That's really interesting and while E. doesn't have that, some of her qualities look a little like that (and you and I have talked about how it may be coming from the same kind of place). She and I have talked before about how if anyone is at all critical of anything she does, her mind immediately jumps to "this means I am a Bad Person" even though no one has ever told her that and no one is thinking that except her.

It was still a stress dream, so I'm sorry to report that I kept unintentionally breaking the competition rules, D kept interrupting me by talking when I was trying to concentrate, and you kept bumping me with your pencil.

So, it is hilarious to me that you had a dream about D whom you have never interacted with in any way, but also that in the dream D kept interrupting you by talking, because although he tends to get along very well with geeky people, he is well-known (especially among non-geeky people) for being very not talkative!
(also, haha, I would be more likely to be talkative than D, though not really likely, and probably also extremely unlikely to continually bump someone with a pencil because PERSONAL SPACE OMG)

Heh, my usual stress dream, as I think I've told you, was topology class for many many years, and maybe 5-10 years ago it switched to trying to make it to weddings on time.

[mildred_of_midgard]

and at least one thing that sort of...changed my life is a little strong, but it made something click that made a really big difference to an issue I'd been having.

Huh! Elaborate?

So I always had mixed feelings about school. I loved it, but I dreaded it. And I always felt that dreading it reflected on my commitment to the learning endeavor, and that if I were somehow more committed, I wouldn't have dreaded it.

I was always vaguely embarrassed and confused in my head by my memories of dreading school and looking forward to it being over, while simultaneously hating being at home, because I was intellectually starved, as you know, and looking forward to school. And of course I was highly highly successful at school (and I can't even say that my acceptance at home depended on that, because it was kind of the opposite, *as you know*).

And even though I had studied Sapolsky's work on stress, and spent years devising a better and less stressful educational system in my head, Kohn was the one who went through the current educational system and systematically deconstructed why school is so unnecessarily stressful in a way that clicked for me. It allowed me to mentally decouple the "learning" part of school (the part I loved!) from the "stress" part of school (the part I dreaded) and realize that stress is not an intrinsic and inevitable part of teaching a child! It did not reflect on me!

So instead of being vaguely embarrassed and lowkey confused, and having all that cognitive dissonance, I had a *moment* when I looked back on a particular memory of my nine-year-old self on the playground before school, dreading the start of the school day, and I thought, "Well, of *course* she was stressed! That poor kid!" And that was *so* freeing, to externalize the shame for that.

So I do owe him a debt of gratitude for that, despite the book's many manifest problems.

me telling her about Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria

Wow! I had never heard of this before this comment. That's really interesting and while E. doesn't have that, some of her qualities look a little like that (and you and I have talked about how it may be coming from the same kind of place). She and I have talked before about how if anyone is at all critical of anything she does, her mind immediately jumps to "this means I am a Bad Person" even though no one has ever told her that and no one is thinking that except her.

Yeah, that's definitely an anxious child, and I would say maybe even puts her in the category of anxiety disorder (obv., see a professional, I can't diagnose someone I never met, etc.).

My stepdaughter has every symptom of RSD to the point where it's an instantly recognizable description of her. I read the list of symptoms aloud to my wife, and she had a life-changing moment of, "Oh, it's *not* something I did when raising her, it's a disorder she was born with!"

Me: "I've been trying to tell you that for years, I thought it was self-evident that nothing in her childhood, not even the traumas that I don't want to downplay, accounts for her disproportionate crippling anxiety. But I guess you needed a name for it."

It was all the more clear in stepdaughter's case because of the strong correlation with ADHD, which she has in spades and has been diagnosed with. Like, "Yep, this is her."

I think when I was googling it for my wife, I found RSD had *some* correlation with autism? If E doesn't have a full-blown case, it might still be a useful concept (like anxiety disorders).

Huh, having taken another quick look at google, it has RSD-specific medication suggestions. I'm going to ask my wife if stepdaughter's tried any of those (I know no professional has ever mentioned RSD to her, my wife had never heard of it, and googling it told me that professionals rarely know about it and usually misdiagnose it as something else).

So, it is hilarious to me that you had a dream about D whom you have never interacted with in any way, but also that in the dream D kept interrupting you by talking, because although he tends to get along very well with geeky people, he is well-known (especially among non-geeky people) for being very not talkative!

I never said it was an in-character dream! (I also find it hilarious that I had a dream about D, with whom I've never interacted in any way!)

(also, haha, I would be more likely to be talkative than D, though not really likely, and probably also extremely unlikely to continually bump someone with a pencil because PERSONAL SPACE OMG)

Well, 1) I doubt you would be talkative in the middle of the Putnam! 2) it was a math competition, we didn't have control over the seating. I've definitely been in exams where I felt like I was way too close to my neighbor. And restaurants.

Anyway, the whole thing is hilarious. :'D

[cahn]

Ohhhh this makes a lot more things clear to me actually!

Either I never found school particularly stressful until I was in college, or I enjoyed the stress. Probably some of each. There were parts that were stressful in an irritating way (I remember thinking SPELLING TESTS WHY) but as a whole it wasn't very stressful -- until college I wasn't concerned about my grades because it was clear that reasonable studying on my part was going to lead to good ones, and I wasn't dependent on good performance in school leading to educational opportunities like you were. (College was another thing entirely, mind you, but there were also a lot of other things going on in college.) Now I see why this is such a big part of your educational reform platform whereas a lot of times I was like "why so important?" Also why you vibe so much with E's school stress, although I don't think her school stress maps precisely on to yours.

Huh, having taken another quick look at google, it has RSD-specific medication suggestions.

Yeah, I saw that too! In the last comment I was going to ask (but forgot) whether your stepdaughter was on any medication, as google seems to imply that medication is a major treatment. I've thought about trying to get E on medication (after reading Temple Grandin's autobiography where she basically put herself on anti-anxiety meds) though I think we'll try what we're doing now for at least a little while longer, as she has generally been getting better at dealing with things as she gets older.

[mildred_of_midgard]

Now I see why this is such a big part of your educational reform platform whereas a lot of times I was like "why so important?"

Ha! That makes sense. Part of the reason it took so long to click that stress and learning as two different things applied to *me*, even though reducing stress was already a big part of my educational reform platform, is that I wasn't approaching it from the angle of "I myself was unnecessarily stressed." It's "I was the only one I knew who liked school at *all*, and was made fun of for liking it, and if we're teaching kids that learning is unpleasant and something you have to be forced to do...is that really the outcome we want?"

And while I think my particular brand of performance anxiety probably puts me in a minority, I think the aspects that made me dread school despite liking it overlapped a lot with the very aspects that made other students dislike it so much.

I also think the things that cause stress overlap a lot with poor pedagogy: you can force someone to memorize something in the short-term for rewards, but if you want long-term engagement in the topic, you should harness intrinsic motivations.

Otherwise, as Kohn says, "You give the students brick after brick, and think they have a house at the end, when what they have is a pile of bricks, and they don't have that for very long." I had another OMG YES THIS moment at that, and I have been quoting it at people ever since. (He has his moments!)

Also why you vibe so much with E's school stress, although I don't think her school stress maps precisely on to yours.

Yeah, some of it does, some of it doesn't. But the overlap is definitely why I'm like, "Well, of COURSE she [blah]" about certain triggers and coping methods. (Having the sensible parts of Kohn in the back of my head also helps with that. Between Sapolsky, Kohn, Bruce Perry, and others, having a *paradigm* of stress in the back of my head helps me apply it to people with different personalities, stressors, and coping methods than my own. It's super useful as a manager too!)

In the last comment I was going to ask (but forgot) whether your stepdaughter was on any medication

She's on a lot of medication, and has tried a lot of other medication, but as Rachel (whom I emailed about RSD this weekend) pointed out, the medications for RSD are somewhat unusual. Stepdaughter's tried the meds for the conditions she's been diagnosed with, which are slightly different than RSD. My wife confirmed that she hasn't tried any of the RSD meds.

My wife's going to see if she's open to hearing about this and trying it out. (Part of RSD is not wanting to talk about her disabilities, because it reminds her that she feels like a failure.)

Fingers crossed!

[cahn]

ahahaha more later but

"You give the students brick after brick, and think they have a house at the end, when what they have is a pile of bricks, and they don't have that for very long."

I somehow skimmed over that without thinking about it at the time (lol, this is Kohn's problem, I get so annoyed at his smirking that I miss some of his good points), but your quoting it makes me think of the bricks of learning about electrons, protons, and neutrons, which I have probably told you before. EVERY YEAR we would learn which ones had mass and which ones had which charge, and we'd take a test, and then I would promptly forget the information, because no one EVER bothered to inform me that there were reasons it was IMPORTANT! Then I took chemistry and was like "ohhhhhhh!" and had no trouble retaining it in my memory ever again :)

[mildred_of_midgard]

Right? It's simultaneously true that it's bad pedagogy, and also that being forced by an authority figure to do something pointless is a stressor. Different kids react differently to stressors, but it's not great for any of them!

So when you said:

Now I see why this is such a big part of your educational reform platform whereas a lot of times I was like "why so important?"

my reaction is like, yes and no. It wasn't "Let's reform this so kids can not go through the stressful experiences I went through," it was, "This kind of approach is bad pedagogy and also makes kids hate learning," and only years later was it, "Oh, THAT'S why I was so stressed!"

But subconsciously, I agree my own stress response helped make some of the problems more visible to me. Even if they were problems for other people for different reasons than they were problems for me. In my case, a lot of my stress as a child, which predates the years when academic success had anything to do with future academic opportunities, was due to a perfectionism that not many kids have...but the reason my perfectionism was triggered was because the authority figure preselected material that you were set a goal of mastering 100%, then told what you did wrong. And that's bad because:

- Authority figure arbitrarily preselecting material is a stressor.
- Extrinsic rewards rather than intrinsic rewards.
- 100% focus on what you got wrong is a stressor.
- Spending 95% of your time on the 5% of material that you're having difficulty getting through your head is massively less efficient than writing off that 5%, which isn't 95% more important, and spending that 95% of your time learning things that are coming more easily because you're ready to learn them!
- Spending 95% of your time on the 5% of material that is the hardest for you does not teach the majority of kids that learning is rewarding.
- Even for me, all it did was teach me to feel good about spending 95% of my time on the hardest 5% material when there was an extrinsic reward, and then make me feel *insufficiently motivated* when I wasn't willing to torture myself like that in the absence of extrinsic rewards. Me! Insufficiently motivated! I ask you!

The fact that I myself constantly dreaded school, and that that was understandable in this context, kind of got lost in the multitude of reasons why this approach is bad, bad, and also bad! So that's why I owe Kohn for.

I'm also glad you read Kohn, because books that we disagree with often lead to meatier discussions than ones we agree with. ;)

[hamsterwoman]

Everyone I know who has more than one kid used extrinisic rewards at least once to toilet train,

Let me be your exception-proves-the-rule counterexample on that :) Not out of any moral stance, it just worked out that way. We never had to with L, because she toilet trained herself when she was ~26 months. She had been showing signs of being close to ready, I was home with newborn!O and B was home on summer break, we had an unusual summer heatwave, so we let her run around naked from the waist down at home, with the potty out, and over the course of a weekend it clicked and she was daytime trained. We gave her a lot of praise, of course, but no tangible extrinsic reward because we were trying not to use those with her back then (we later caved in and instituted a rewards chart when she was around 3). She had a couple of accidents after that and took a long time to become nighttime trained (a couple of years), but as far as training she could consciously control, that was that. On the other hand, O showed signs of being in conscious control of toiletting from very early on -- during one very early diaper change, he managed to pee on his own head (boy plumbing! XD) and clearly disliked the experience and never did it again. And from a fairly young age, he never seemed to need a diaper change when we were out and about, only at home. But he refused to learn toilet training. We tried what worked with L, we tried the "pee on the cheerios" thing that I had great hopes for because it seemed like the kind of thing that should appeal to his sense of humour, we attempted rewards but he just wasn't interested in even trying -- he gets into this willfully shut off mode sometimes (I used to call it his "blue screen") from which it's impossible to extract him except by backing off, and that's what would happen with toilet training. And then he started preschool at 3 and there was an older boy there he would follow around everywhere, including the bathroom, and he learned to use the toilet there. Never had a daytime accident after (maybe one, but seriously, it was like flipping a switch), was nighttime trained very shortly after. So, clearly, he was physically ready for it, just... on his own terms apparently. But that's also consistent with what he's like in other ways -- this is also the kid who went from claiming he didn't know any letters to demonstrating he knew all of them overnight. *shrug*

One of his examples is "A child who tips her chair back in class must stand up for the rest of the period." Okay, I agree, IDK whom he is talking to, but that sounds a bit... well, removed from the "natural" part of it.

I do agree that's a punishment and not a natural consequence, but would it really be presented as a natural consequence approach by someone? I guess it's more linked than calling the kid's parents or not letting them go to recess, and so probably more effective at linking the behavior and the punishment, but the natural consequence approach for a kid who tips their chair back is when they topple over. Which, O is actually a chair-tipper, and has fallen over in class at least once, and then his math teacher wrote a haiku about it, which I like reciting at him when he does it at home. (It did not actually stop him from chair-tipping, but I think he's less extreme about the angle...)

-On merit-based pay at work: Kohn is against this. Kohn says that one strategy is to pay everyone the same.

Wow, I don't see that working at all in any kind of at all competitive field... . (Meritocratic pay can be done in a cutthroat competitive way, yeah, which I also hate, but definitely does not need to be.) I do not find money I get paid to be intrinsically coupled to the job I do, and I think I'm pretty far from the side of the spectrum that equates money and job satisfaction/importance/other good things, but the times where I felt like I was being paid the about the same as someone who was doing, in my opinion, a shit job, it was not a positive feeling! And if you get paid the same whether you perform at 70% of your capacity or 100% (or 30%), well, I could use the extra 30% for other things, which would be fine for me but not great for the company paying me.

That's an interesting point about "good job" -- I agree with you that I think it's a question about relative positions (expertise-wise) of the people involved, because I've had, for example, a positive and negative reaction to "good job!" type comments from the exact same person (friend in a hobbyist context, but in one case it was a hobby where I think I'm better at it, and in the other case, they are definitely a lot better than me!)

Speaking of "good job", I recently realized I would feel weird saying "good job" to my kids at this point because it does feel kind of condescending now that they are also adults. It's a bit odd, because I've never said "good job" to them, I think -- I speak Russian to them, and the Russian equivalent is "molodets!", which functionally means essentially the same thing but literally means something like "[you are] a fine fellow!" (it's a masculine word grammatically but gender-neutral in application, so maybe "you're a fine person!"). But when the kids were younger, I would sometimes think "good job!" and then say "molodets!" because I was trying to only speak Russian to them, and here was a perfectly good word that meant essentially the same thing. Now when they text me with some accomplishment, I think "good job!" -- but it doesn't feel right even inside my head, so I switch to "molodets!" not just for the language but also because it feels like a better fit for what I want to express, if that makes any sense. I think the difference is maybe that I would rather express "you're great!" than the (yeah, more judgement-y) "good job".

I've not thought about praise as being/being perceived as controlling in a parenting context and hm! I can definitely see the pitfalls of it when tightly coupled to a narrow "path". I was not raised with any tangible extrinsic rewards (it wasn't super possible when I was young, in the USSR, so wasn't nearly as common as a parenting tactic), with the exception of my mother primising me pet rats if I submitted to a session of dance classes (worthy trade, but it certainly did nothing to reconcile me to dancing XD), and by the time I came to the US and we were settled enough that extrinsic rewards were possible, I no longer needed to be "managed", so it never came up. But praise WAS a key thing, growing up, and I definitely think it's had a big effect on my personality as an adult. I'm sure the importance to me of praise from authority figures, and also just praise in general from people I respect comes from there, or was promoted by that (maybe I would've always had that tendency, but it can't have not helped), and I wish I was less like that -- it doesn't impact my life in any negative way, I don't think, but I'd just like to be less Pavlovian about it :P

When my kids were small, I was going through management training (which I did not end up doing long-term, but I learned a lot of useful concepts), and one of the things that I learned from that about myself was that I have a natural tendency to offer helpful suggestions, but if I don't consciously stop and think to do it, I don't tend to offer praise. So that's something I've been trying to work on for the last 18 years, both with colleagues and with my kids. (With the "praise effort", "praise what the kid does" kind of emphasis, although I do think it's also OK to express appreciation of/admiration for results in addition to effort when something genuinely deserves it.)

It is always really neat to read your write-ups of psychology/parenting books (that I would never have read myself because I don't read nonfiction :P)

[cahn]

Let me be your exception-proves-the-rule counterexample on that :)

Heeee! I used the stricture of "two kids" because in my experience usually one kid does well with them even if the other doesn't, lol. (E. didn't use them at all -- she's a rule-abiding sort of kid, so when she was told the rule was that she was supposed to go in the toilet, well, it wasn't immediate but it was reasonably fast. A. needed a bit more motivation, although to be fair we also did stop when he clearly wasn't ready and start again later.)

I do agree that's a punishment and not a natural consequence, but would it really be presented as a natural consequence approach by someone?

According to Kohn it was by the people he talked to! He needs to talk to more people :P

I guess it's more linked than calling the kid's parents or not letting them go to recess

The second one was ALSO cited by him as an example of a natural consequence someone had told him about! I was like ????

but the times where I felt like I was being paid the about the same as someone who was doing, in my opinion, a shit job, it was not a positive feeling!

Yes!!

Speaking of "good job", I recently realized I would feel weird saying "good job" to my kids at this point because it does feel kind of condescending now that they are also adults.

This does make sense. I think it's because parents are so naturally in a position of judgment over kids, that saying something like that recalls that hierarchy even though it's supposed to not exist in the same way now that they're grown. (mildred_of_midgard and I have also had the opposite conversation, where she pointed out to me that a son or daughter, even a grown one, saying that to a parent would also be perceived as weirdly judgmental even if that weren't intended.)

But praise WAS a key thing, growing up, and I definitely think it's had a big effect on my personality as an adult.

*nods* From other things you've said I suspect your upbringing was not entirely different from mine in the sense of being focused on academics and you probably got a lot of praise for good academic performance, right?

and one of the things that I learned from that about myself was that I have a natural tendency to offer helpful suggestions, but if I don't consciously stop and think to do it, I don't tend to offer praise.

IT'S ME :) I actually learned how to do this from giving and receiving fic beta -- until I started writing fic myself, I didn't see why it was so good to also put in positive feedback when betaing fic, but I learned pretty quickly thereafter :) (Sorry, first couple of people whose work I betaed!)

I'm glad you enjoy the writeups! They're obviously extremely biased, haha, but I have a good time with them. (I just wish I could write more about stuff I actually enjoyed vs. stuff that I want to argue with :) )

[mildred_of_midgard]

(I just wish I could write more about stuff I actually enjoyed vs. stuff that I want to argue with :) )

Ha, I am the same. I'm far more motivated to argue than to agree!

[hamsterwoman]

(E. didn't use them at all -- she's a rule-abiding sort of kid, so when she was told the rule was that she was supposed to go in the toilet, well, it wasn't immediate but it was reasonably fast.

Aww! very handy, in that instance. (L is also a rule-abiding kid, so maybe that also helped, given that she was ready or close to ready, like, physically.)

He needs to talk to more people :P

Clearly! And missing recess as a natural consequence is even weirder to me, unless it's missing recess because the kid is finishing work they didn't finish during class time because they were goofing off or something.

I think it's because parents are so naturally in a position of judgment over kids, that saying something like that recalls that hierarchy even though it's supposed to not exist in the same way now that they're grown

Yeah, that makes sense to me. And interesting point about the KID saying "good job" to the parent. I've been trying to imagine that with my two in a non-sarcastic/non-facetious way, and I don't think I can, even though there are definitely things at which they are better than me (L and cooking or crafts, O and sports things / physical dexterity, plus their majors). They do say it plenty to me sarcastically, but that's of course a different thing.

in the sense of being focused on academics and you probably got a lot of praise for good academic performance, right?

Indeed! And definitely the "wrong" kind of praise -- that is, praise of results rather than effort, and praise for being smart rather than trying hard. It doesn't seem to have done me (or my mother, who was raised the same way) any significant harm, but was a lot of stuff to unlearn when it came to parenting.

I actually learned how to do this from giving and receiving fic beta

Oh yeah, actually, I found fandom culture really helpful when it came to praise / recognizing the work of others type of thing both with parenting and with work. By pure coincidence, I was really involved in online fandom for the first time right around the same time, rather than lurking online and doing active fandom things with a small group of RL friends or one-on-one with LJ friends in my own journal. But I ended up first getting involved in and the modding a fannish community, and picked up a lot of cheerleading and giving positive feedback from my fellow mods and comm members who were more inclined in that direction, and then I found myself reaching for some of the same tactics and vibes when it came to work (and then from work to parenting; I guess fandom <--> parenting was not a direct enough connection).

(I have also definitely become more skewed towards positive feedback as a beta, having seen how much fun that is to receive as an author. And then tried to use the same tactics when beta-ing my kids' school and college applications essays, haha, although that's definitely a lot harder!)

[cahn]

I've been trying to imagine that with my two in a non-sarcastic/non-facetious way, and I don't think I can, even though there are definitely things at which they are better than me (L and cooking or crafts, O and sports things / physical dexterity, plus their majors).

My cute 8-year-old does say "Good job!" sometimes, very earnestly, but in a way where I don't think he'll do that once he's more grownup -- when I'm doing something like Minecraft that he's good at and I'm not at all :)

Indeed! And definitely the "wrong" kind of praise -- that is, praise of results rather than effort, and praise for being smart rather than trying hard. It doesn't seem to have done me (or my mother, who was raised the same way) any significant harm, but was a lot of stuff to unlearn when it came to parenting.

YEP! Same here! And yeah, for me no significant harm (though I think my neuroatypicality helped a lot, as well as the results generally being good), but my sister definitely did not do well with it, and I also feel like I did have some lingering issues with identifying myself with my smartness that I wish I didn't have (and I think I'm mostly over now, but it took a while to get there).

I have also definitely become more skewed towards positive feedback as a beta, having seen how much fun that is to receive as an author.

Haha, yeah, exactly! Sorry people whom I betaed before I became an author!
I think though that I went fandom->parenting->work, lol. Though now that you mention it I have slipped back into old less-positive-feedback habits when beta-ing my kids' school essays, I should try to be better about that again...

[thistleingrey]

Yeeeah. It's complicated, no question, but extrinsic reward for toddler Reason: meeting the toddler-sized toilets at preschool and abruptly finding it no problem whatsoever to use them herself, since she hadn't enjoyed being lifted onto and off the removable seat at home or at daycare a few months prior.

I think there's a big difference between letting kids experience "natural" consequences that may damage them significantly and letting them meet stuff that hurts only a little, which may indeed help them remember. Potential concussion is not a little, IMO; it's Kohn's failure of empathy, or inability to hold cause/effect in his own head, I don't care, but ugh.

Agreed (with you, not Kohn) on praise re: control. It can turn into manipulation, which is not okay at all IMO. A few school friends were taught to be very competitive for the sake of crumbs of praise, and they found me very irritating because I was not competitive inherently and hadn't been taught their artificial rules, which meant that a limp washcloth sometimes outdid them and it didn't seem to matter to me, whereas it mattered very much to them (aged 10-12 or so) that they would not receive those crumbs that time because of ... someone who seemed not even to care. (I cared. But I didn't care about winning or about outdoing them specifically; I cared whether I'd done a reasonably good job.) Spoiler: by grade ten we weren't really what anyone external would consider "friends." :P

[cahn]

extrinsic reward for toddler Reason: meeting the toddler-sized toilets at preschool and abruptly finding it no problem whatsoever to use them herself, since she hadn't enjoyed being lifted onto and off the removable seat at home or at daycare a few months prior.

Ha! And... yeah, that's one of those rewards that is like a natural consequence, but which maybe toddler Reason didn't realize was going to be the case before she met it...

I think there's a big difference between letting kids experience "natural" consequences that may damage them significantly and letting them meet stuff that hurts only a little, which may indeed help them remember. Potential concussion is not a little, IMO; it's Kohn's failure of empathy, or inability to hold cause/effect in his own head, I don't care, but ugh.

Yeah, Kohn does come down on potential concussion being Bad, but I think where he gets sort of tangled up is that he sort of puts everything in the buckets of either "V. Bad, must protect against," or "this is a punishment," sort of an excluded middle kind of thing...

A few school friends were taught to be very competitive for the sake of crumbs of praise

Yeah, sigh. I've... definitely seen that.

[thistleingrey]

that's one of those rewards that is like a natural consequence, but which maybe toddler Reason didn't realize

Agreed. *I* didn't realize that that space--part of the same org, but separate location from where she'd been the two years prior--had cute tiny toilets until we went on the first day. Reason said, "For me??" It was great.

I think where he gets sort of tangled up

Hmm, makes sense.

[cahn]

Aww, that's super cute! <3

[cenozoicsynapsid]

It's kind of funny to transpose this into a fandom context... There's always someone who can't see the middle ground between between "I write what will get the most kudos/comments, whether I like it or not" and "I don't care if people kudos/comment my stories; I write for the file drawer exclusively."

I have had discussions with people who have been educated religiously to believe that if they aren't completely selfless when doing something good, it's secretly evil because it's just egotism. This, also, strikes me as a misunderstanding of something very basic.

[cahn]

Haha, right? :) I was thinking a lot about fic writing while reading the praise section, and thinking about how I really like people kudosing and commenting on my stories! But I also write in tiny fandoms... I don't think that's bad or that my self-worth is dependent on people commenting (which is good given the tiny fandom thing). well, okay, maybe on Dec 26 I'm a bit unhealthy about checking my AO3 account every ten minutes

I have had discussions with people who have been educated religiously to believe that if they aren't completely selfless when doing something good, it's secretly evil because it's just egotism. This, also, strikes me as a misunderstanding of something very basic.

Yeah, and also kinda sad! You can't enjoy yourself at all, even while doing something good?

[hidden_variable]

We've definitely been the House of Shameless Bribery over here in the context of toilet training, lol. Glad to know we're not alone in this!

For the salary thing: I guess my employer would more or less be an example of "everyone getting paid the same." We have a union-negotiated salary schedule, such that if you know someone's education level and years of experience, you can look up exactly what their salary will be (modulo a few possibilities to add a bit by teaching extra classes, being department chair, etc.). For me, I think this structure has worked very well. If I were in a situation where I had to go and ask for raises, I'd just never do it; I'd much rather leave that to people who are active in the union and are good at that sort of thing. And I would say I'm very much intrinsically motivated to work hard on parts of my job that I either enjoy or think will be genuinely useful to someone--I'm lucky to be able to say that most parts of my job fall into one of those two categories. I don't think I'd be any more motivated to do better if the possibility of more money were held out as a reward. On the other hand, I know there are people who are turned off by that sort of structure. Once when I was on a hiring committee, one of the candidates emailed me to ask if they could negotiate about salary. I said no and sent them a link to the official salary table, and they were like, "No thanks, bye!"

I'm confused on the praise part--does Kohn say that you should just never praise anyone, ever? Like when your child takes their first steps, you should just look bored and say, "Yeah, whatever, kid"? Also, is this supposed to be specific to parenting, or more general? I'm thinking of something like grading exams (which is what I'm supposed to be doing right now). The point of grading is to give feedback so that people can learn a skill, right? And in order to give useful feedback, you should say what they're doing well in addition to what needs to improve. Also, completely agree with you on the distinction of having vs not having the level of expertise to offer a judgement.

[cahn]

On salary: ha, okay, that's fair! Although I would also say that people who have a job like yours tend to be people who are extremely intrinsically motivated by that job, and not everyone falls into that category like me who noped out of the whole thing :)

I'm confused on the praise part--does Kohn say that you should just never praise anyone, ever? Like when your child takes their first steps, you should just look bored and say, "Yeah, whatever, kid"? Also, is this supposed to be specific to parenting, or more general? I'm thinking of something like grading exams (which is what I'm supposed to be doing right now). The point of grading is to give feedback so that people can learn a skill, right? And in order to give useful feedback, you should say what they're doing well in addition to what needs to improve.

So, this is one of the maddening things, that he says "positive feedback" is fine but "praise" is bad, and I still am not entirely sure what he thinks the difference between those things are. I think he thinks that when your child takes their first steps, you say something like, "Hey, you're well on your way to achieving your goals of faster and more efficient locomotion!" I guess?? (Although, hilariously, both my kids learned how to walk not because they wanted to go faster or mimic the Big People but because they wanted to carry things in their fists and crawling wasn't easy with that!)

He does mean it more generally. So, I think he thinks the feedback part of exams is OK, like, telling a student where they need to improve, or maybe... saying that they have mastered a skill? But I guess saying "Good job" is right out?? And he really doesn't like grades and thinks things should be at most graded as high pass/pass/fail. It's really irritating because I feel like he sort of has things that he approves of and things he thinks are Definitely Bad, and sometimes they seem awfully similar to me and I can't really tell where the line is.

[mildred_of_midgard]

And he really doesn't like grades and thinks things should be at most graded as high pass/pass/fail.

As I recall, he said sth like "still mastering" vs. "mastered"? And I had a "yes!" and air-punching moment of triumph, because I had independently invented that as part of my imaginary pedagogical reforms. Like, either you need to keep practicing this skill, or you're ready to do something more complicated that requires mastery of this skill.* (I would also add the nuance that sometimes if you haven't mastered a skill yet, it's because the time isn't right, and you should leave it off and go do something else that's working out better for you, as opposed to banging your head against it.)

* And yeah, of course it's a continuum, like I've mastered German well enough that I can do academic research that requires reading book-length works, as long as I don't have to read them too fast, but obviously I also need to keep practicing, because I want to do research that requires reading faster!

I think he thinks that when your child takes their first steps, you say something like, "Hey, you're well on your way to achieving your goals of faster and more efficient locomotion!" I guess??

That was also my sense. Part of the problem with the book is the problem so obvious that everyone pointed it out and my edition had a very defensive appendix that was all, "Look, I know you keep saying I spend all my time telling you what you shouldn't do and not enough time telling you what you *should* do, but it's not actually my job to give you something constructive to replace the things I don't like with!"

Me: Yes. Yes, it is.

Anyway, I sort-of-mostly agree with feedback that emphasizes supporting people's own goals as much as possible, but 1) I think that shorthand "good job" *can* be okay, in the right context, 2) kids (and probably adults) need more engagement and enthusiasm than his examples gave. Just emotionally (read The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog for a framework on why).

Ugh, I'm going to try to cut this short and get back to the other things I need to be doing, but yeah. Arguing with books I don't agree with is easier, I can do it all day long!

[cahn]

That's how the kids' school does grades, with each "skill" being the common core standards. (*) (And yeah, sometimes the conclusion is "still working on this," with subtext of "maybe this is a long-term project over a couple of years...") I don't think the kids have ever seen their "grades," though; they have a pretty good idea themselves of what they need to work on (they do talk about this in class), and we talk about it at parent-teacher conferences. (E also attends hers; A does not, nor did E at his age.)

(*) Which I think are pretty reasonable standards for what kids ought to know in the various grades. (That is to say, I don't think that kids ought to be held strictly to a "grade-level" knowledge that's tied to their age, but it's a pretty good collection of standards.) Though -- this is completely off-topic, I'm just going to rant -- one of the major issues I had with E's school was that they never gave us a complete list of standards, just said "here's how you did on these three that we worked on this term," which camouflaged that her teacher for 5th grade just sort of... entirely skipped a lot of them, without any plan for making them up later, which I found out when it occurred to me that I hadn't seen E write anything in a while, and asked her about it, leading to finding out that she had written NOTHING in her fifth grade year that was longer than a paragraph. Which is when I went through all her previous report cards and discovered that many standards were just completely missing.

[hamsterwoman]

"Hey, you're well on your way to achieving your goals of faster and more efficient locomotion!" I guess??

*scroll-by giggle*

[cahn]

:)