July 3, 2026 Categories: Features / Parenting Our Children
Unconditional Parenting in the Age of Entitlement
“What it’s like to be a parent: It’s one of the hardest things you’ll ever do but in exchange it teaches you the meaning of unconditional love.” – Nicholas Sparks
Spoiled children have been in literature, the news, and our collective consciousness much longer than we remember. At least that’s what Alfie Kohn, the author of The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Coddled Kids, Helicopter Parents, and Other Phony Crises is attempting to prove.
A lot is said today about the way that parents “coddle” their children or are overly permissive with them. Psychologists and journalists argue that in this new age of parenting, we are producing entitled and spoiled children. Kohn argues that the newness of this phenomenon and the idea that parents create it through permissiveness is a misconception.
Kohn points out that in January 1950 Parents magazine ran an article entitled “When and How to Say No” that condemned parents for being “unable to take the responsibility for being grown up and making decisions.” Later in 1963, Martha Weinman Lear published a book entitled, The Child Worshippers, and made the bold statement, “We are living, like it or not… in a child-centered society.” She went so far to say that it became a “national epidemic.”
So, why Kohn asked, when Newsweek published an article a few years ago asking the question, “Are We Living in a Child-Centered World?” were we made to think that this was a 21st century parenting singularity? Perhaps because the focus of parenting has changed, but that still doesn’t mean there weren’t spoiled children than 50 years ago too!
This is not the first time that I have written about Alfie Kohn for this publication, but I would like to focus on another of Alfie’s book entitled, Unconditional Parenting: Moving From Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason. Kohn’s book on unconditional parenting predates his book the myth of the spoiled child by almost a decade. Yet, much of what he talks about in his unconditional parenting book is integrally connected to raising (or not raising) spoiled children.
In his introduction to the book, Kohn writes about some of the consequences of the intensity and difficulty of parenting:
One consequence of this difficulty [of parenting] is that we may be tempted to focus our energies on overcoming children’s resistance to our requests and getting them to do what we tell them. If we’re not careful, this can become our primary goal. We may find ourselves joining all those people around us who prize docility in children and value short-term obedience above all.
In other words, he says that because of how difficult parenting can be, we focus on getting our children to listen in the moment than thinking long term in terms of goals for our children’s future. He argues that we need to think about what our long-term goals for our children are rather than what current behavior should look like. This leads to the most important distinction in the book – as to what unconditional parenting looks like – it is about loving kids for who they are rather than what they do.
If this sounds like the kind of parenting you would like to practice, Kohn argues you should shift away from the general parenting strategy of doing things to kids and towards ways of working with them.
What does working with parenting look like? Kohn recommends collaboration over control, and love and reason over power. Those broad statements make a lot of sense: working together with your child to create independence rather than planning everything and creating dependency. The details of this working-with parenting style is a whole other story.
Kohn argues that this “working with” parenting style needs to include the following elements in order to be successful.
- Accepting children unconditionally – loving them for who they are, not for what they do
- Providing regular opportunities for children to make decisions about matters that affect them
- Focusing more on meeting children’s needs and providing guidance than on eliciting compliance
- Regarding misbehavior as an occasion for problem solving and teaching, rather than as an infraction for which the child should be subjected to punitive “consequences,” and
- Looking beneath a child’s behavior in order to understand the motives and reason that underlie it
