The Myth of the Spoiled Child

by Alfie Kohn

  Now one problem with punishment is that it really doesn’t work very well. Practically speaking, it’s remarkably ineffective—even counterproductive—with respect to any goal other than eliciting temporary compliance. Punishment fails to promote ethical growth, responsibility, or concern for others’ well-being. What it does tend to promote are intense feelings of resentment, a concern with figuring out how to avoid being caught (rather than with doing the right thing), a belief that power allows one to get one’s way in life (by making weaker people suffer), and a nearly exclusive attention to self-interest.6

  There are several reasons why punishment persists despite its disappointing, if not alarming, track record. The one I want to identify here is that for some people its track record is irrelevant. They punish not to promote ethical growth but because they see it as appropriate, even a matter of duty, to do so. Its purpose is retribution, not improvement. When children misbehave (however the adult chooses to define that), they should be made to suffer—just as those who accomplish something should be rewarded. In short, conditionality is often seen as a moral imperative, not just a way to bring about certain results.

  Praise

  The crusade against perceived entitlement, and in favor of conditionality, is on display in rants like one in the Washington Post about how “everywhere you turn these days, adults are passing out stars, stickers and trophies to children for not doing much more than showing up.”7 But it’s become just as common to denounce what we say to children as what we give them—in particular, what’s described by traditionalists as excessive or empty praise. I find this last example particularly interesting because for the past couple of decades I, too, have offered a critical account of praise, but from a very different direction.8 As a result, I’ve had the odd experience of seeing my work cited approvingly by people whose views and values are diametrically opposed to my own.

  As I see it, praise is a verbal reward, often doled out in an effort to change the behavior of someone with less power. (It’s managers who praise employees, teachers who praise students, parents who praise children—rarely the other way around.) It’s a “doing to” intervention, one likely to be experienced as manipulative regardless of the intentions of the person who offered it. It’s a pat on the head—“pat” being short for “patronizing”—that’s offered when the person with less power impresses or pleases the person with more. And that’s true regardless of whether the less-powerful person is praised for his ability or for the effort he’s made.9

  Unlike feedback, which is purely informational, praise is a judgment. And positive judgments are ultimately no more constructive than negative ones. The primary effect of offering them is to make children dependent on getting more such expressions of approval. Like other extrinsic inducements, moreover, praise tends to undermine intrinsic motivation and, often, the quality of people’s work or learning.10

  But beyond its practical effects, I find praise troubling because children are likely to conclude that they’re valued—and, by implication, valuable—only when they live up to someone else’s standards. The message is that attention, acknowledgment, and approval are offered only when the child does a “good job.” As we saw earlier in the context of psychological control, praise is tantamount to what psychologists call “conditional positive regard.” It’s not only different from, but antithetical to, the unconditional care that children need: to be loved for who they are and not merely for what they do. It makes perfect sense, then, that positive reinforcement was developed as a technique to elicit certain behaviors, not to promote healthy development.

  The suggestion that there might be anything problematic about telling children you like what they’ve done will strike many people as counterintuitive, even unnerving. But if you’ve ever come across an article that’s critical of praise, chances are it didn’t sound anything like what I’ve just described. Instead, it probably said something like this: “We congratulate children for every little thing they do—to the point that praise has become meaningless. By over-celebrating their accomplishments, we lead them to believe they’re more talented than they really are.” What’s thought to be wrong with praise is that it, like other rewards, is given out to the undeserving—just one more symptom of a culture of overindulgence and overparenting. The solution is to be more parsimonious, more stringent in our expressions of approval. Set the bar higher. Demand that kids do more before we praise them.

  In other words, make our approval of them even more conditional.11

  A central weakness of this common conservative critique is that praise actually doesn’t represent indulgence or excessive encouragement. Rather, like most of what’s classified as overparenting, it just extends the old-school “doing to” model of raising children and teaching students. That becomes clear if we stop focusing on how often or how easily kids are praised, and instead ask why they’re being praised. What are the intentions of the adult? The answer, once again, is that the point is often to control children. Control, we may need to remind ourselves, doesn’t always take the form of punishment and coercion. Sometimes it’s expressed by means of a sugary “Good job!” The latter is obviously less harsh, but the point is still to produce whatever behavior is favored by the parent or other authority figure. To that extent, children’s resistance to being controlled may explain the research showing that praise tends to be counterproductive (apart from eliciting temporary compliance, which any reward or punishment can sometimes manage).

  To listen to adults as they dole out a verbal reward to a child is to hear another example of how approval is contingent on the child’s performance or behavior. Traditionalists, by contrast, listen to the same utterances and think, “But that kid wasn’t very impressive! He should have to do more before we say nice things to him.” This reaction isn’t based on evidence that it’s beneficial in a practical sense to set more stringent standards for praising kids. It’s based on the belief that there’s something morally wrong with giving anything to children that the speaker believes they haven’t earned.

  SCARCITY

  Just as the hypothesis that rewards are required to motivate people often rests on the conviction that people should be rewarded for doing something well (and not rewarded when they don’t), so the hypothesis that competition is productive goes hand-in-hand with the belief that the struggle to be number one is desirable regardless of its effects. In our culture it’s not enough to achieve; one must triumph over others. Even when it’s possible for many people who are engaged in an activity to do it successfully, we’re encouraged to think of success as a scarce commodity. In fact, if people aren’t sorted into winners and losers, that’s taken as evidence that we’ve “lowered our standards.”

  This scarcity model is rarely questioned or even named. But it permeates our society to the point that it’s hard to find recreational activities for children that don’t pit them against one another, either individually or in groups. Sure, we think it’s nice if they acquire skills, get some exercise, and maybe even have fun. But at the core of these games is an imperative to prevail over the other team, to achieve a status that one side can acquire only if the other does not. The (symbolic) spoils go to the conquerors—and only to them.

  Again, the attachment to this arrangement that many people feel isn’t based primarily on the testable proposition that making kids compete will improve their performance. Rather, excellence has been defined as something that everyone can’t attain. This may explain why the word “competitive”—applied to a corporation, a school system, or an entire country—has become an honorific, a synonym for high quality. Doing well is conflated with beating others.

  What follows from all of this is an interesting bit of circular logic. Because we’re committed to this ideology, we set up a vast array of competitive activities. Within those activities, success does indeed require winning. Good tennis players are those who beat other tennis players, and a good shot during play is one the opponent can’t return. But that’s not a
truth about life or about excellence—it’s a truth about tennis. We’ve created an artificial structure in which one person can’t succeed without doing so at someone else’s expense, and then we accuse anyone who prefers other kinds of activities of being naïve because “there can be only one best—you’re it or you’re not,” as the teacher who delivered that much-admired you’re-not-special commencement speech declared. You see the sleight of hand here? The question isn’t whether everyone playing a competitive game can win or whether every student can be above average. Of course they can’t. The question that we’re discouraged from asking is why our games are competitive—or our students are compulsively ranked against one another—in the first place.

  It’s remarkable how empirical evidence tends to be shunted aside in discussions of this topic. You can cite study after study that shows people tend to do better on most tasks when they’re working with, rather than against, one another—only to be met with the accusation that you “don’t value excellence” or are “dumbing down” whatever institution is involved. You can point out that turning an activity into a contest tends to prevent all children, including the eventual winner, from doing their best, but that doesn’t matter once it has been decided that excellence cannot be attained by everyone. Each must strive against the others so that only one will end up on top. That struggle, and that result, are thought to be at the core of what excellence means.

  This is not just another instance of BGUTI. The objection to making things “too easy” for children is based partly on the belief that they need to learn to cope with bad things. But from the perspective I’ve been describing, competition isn’t bad, even if losing is unpleasant. One of its supposed virtues is that the process of sorting people into winners and losers reveals, and forces us to acknowledge, a natural distribution of ability. Talent, like successful outcomes, is thought to be scarce. Inequality is a defining feature of life, something to be emphasized and celebrated.

  That belief helps us to make sense of the contempt showered on anyone who suggests that we should stop keeping score at young children’s games, eliminate (or even just modify) awards assemblies, recognize kids for effort, or create more inclusive activities. “Why should an awards ceremony be about discrimination, excellence, and making choices when, instead, it can be about inclusion?” a Chicago Tribune reporter sarcastically demands.12 To smooth over the rough edges of competition is seen as tantamount to claiming that everyone is equally able, whereas, we’re repeatedly informed, the truth is that only a very few are special and worthy of commendation.13 Competition illuminates and accentuates the differences in talent and accomplishment among us.14

  In response, I would begin by pointing out that not even the most committed opponents of competition believe that all people are equally talented. I certainly don’t. By the same token, we can be reasonably sure that no child who received a trinket after losing a contest walked away believing that he (or his team) had won—or that failing is just as good as succeeding. (A twenty-four-year-old writer, describing how Millennials are faulted for everything under the sun, points to an article filled with the usual blather about their lack of motivation due to having received too many trophies, and offers this deadpan response: “It’s true. I remember when I got a trophy for soccer in second grade and assumed I was set for life.”15) The fact that participation trophies have never been convincingly shown to have any negative effects at all16 provides further evidence that the outcry over them has its roots in ideology more than in practical objections.

  Giving trophies to all the kids in order to minimize the destructive effects of competition is a well-meaning attempt to exclude fewer children from these noxious distinctions—a tiny step in the right direction. But it doesn’t begin to compensate for all the ways that children are made to feel inadequate on a daily basis at school and at play. In fact, adding more trophies distracts us from the problems inherent in competition itself and its message that each kid must succeed by making others fail. In other words, “trophies for everyone,” like effusive praise, troubles me for the opposite reason that it offends conservative critics.

  As for the tendency to emphasize differences in ability: List a hundred capabilities—writing poetry, sensing how others are feeling, hitting balls with sticks—and you’ll find a range of aptitude in any population. Some kids have to work harder than others to do any given thing well. We know it, and they know it. But that’s not an argument for calling attention to those differences, let alone for making children try to defeat one another. On the contrary, we ought to assist those for whom things come less easily, thereby reducing the salience and significance of kids’ relative standing. Better yet, we can help the kids themselves to reframe the differences in how good they are: If Allison grasps certain concepts faster than Allen does, it’s not that Allison wins and Allen loses, but that Allison is lucky enough to be able to help Allen improve. Later, at another task at which he excels, he can return the favor.17

  Grade Inflation

  Where young people are concerned, the best illustration of an ethic of scarcity may come from the classroom rather than the playing field. I’m thinking of the widespread assumption that grades are inflated—accompanied by the belief that this is a very bad thing. Academe’s usual requirements for supporting data and reasoned analysis seem to have been suspended where this issue is concerned. The idea that grade inflation is out of control has largely been accepted on faith and, in some quarters, feeds indignant expostulations about a diminished commitment to excellence and, of course, kids’ sense of entitlement.

  There are two problems with this claim right off the bat: First, it’s not clear that grades are actually rising.18 Second, even if they were, that doesn’t prove they’re inflated. (One would have to demonstrate that those higher grades are undeserved, which means ruling out any number of alternative explanations.19) The bottom line is this: No one has ever demonstrated that students today get A’s for the same work that used to receive B’s or C’s. We simply do not have the data to support such a claim, and that claim is the linchpin of the belief that grades are inflated.

  It’s telling, though, that many critics don’t even bother to assert that grades have risen over time or are too generous. They simply point to how many students get A’s right now—as if a sufficiently high number was objectionable on its face. Some find it disturbing if “too many” good grades are given out because it then becomes harder to spread out students on a continuum, ranking them against one another for the benefit of post-college constituencies. One professor asks, by way of analogy, “Why would anyone subscribe to Consumers Digest if every blender were rated a ‘best buy’?” But how appropriate is such a marketplace analogy? Is the professor’s job to rate students like blenders for the convenience of employers? Or is it to offer feedback that will help students learn more skillfully and enthusiastically? (Notice, by the way, that even consumer magazines don’t grade on a curve. They report the happy news if it turns out that every blender meets a reasonable set of performance criteria.)

  What we’re really looking at here is, again, a commitment to scarcity. “The essence of grading is exclusiveness,” says Harvey Mansfield, a Harvard professor, who adds that students “should have to compete with each other.” It doesn’t matter whether they’re all learning more or working harder, adds Richard Kamber, who, like Mansfield, is a tireless critic of the putative “epidemic” of grade inflation. “If grades are to have any coherent meaning, they need to represent a relative degree of success.”20

  The key word here, of course, is “relative.” In other words, students should be sorted, with grades used to announce how well they’re doing compared to one another, rather than providing information about absolute accomplishment. And if they’ve already been sorted by the admissions process so that elite institutions contain the very best students, well, they ought to be sorted again within those institutions. No matter how well they all do, the game should be rigged so that only a few ca
n get A’s. To put it differently, the question guiding evaluation ought not to be “How well are they learning?” but “Who’s beating whom?” A school’s ultimate mission therefore wouldn’t be to maximize everyone’s success but to ensure that there will always be losers.

  This view, while rarely stated explicitly, is what drives denunciations of grade inflation. I find it both intellectually and morally deficient. What statisticians call a normal distribution (also known as a bell curve) may sometimes—but only sometimes—describe the range of knowledge in a roomful of students at the beginning of a course. But when that course is over, any responsible educator hopes that the results would skew drastically to the right, meaning that most students have learned what they hadn’t known before. He or she would want all students to wind up with A’s—if grades have to be given out at all. Conversely, as a group of education theorists argued, “It is not a symbol of rigor to have grades fall into a ‘normal’ distribution; rather, it is a symbol of failure—failure to teach well, failure to test well, and failure to have any influence at all on the intellectual lives of students.”21

  Making sure that students are continually re-sorted, with excellence turned into an artificially scarce commodity, is really rather perverse when you think about it. In any case, relative success—how many peers a student has bested—tells us little about how much she knows and is able to do. And such grading policies tend to create a competitive climate that’s counterproductive for everyone because it discourages a free exchange of ideas and destroys any sense of community, which is conducive to exploration. Based on what we know about the effects of extrinsic motivation, the real threat to excellence isn’t grade inflation at all; it’s grades. And the more we’re preoccupied with limiting the number of A’s, the more attention students are led to pay to grades—rather than to the learning itself.