Top 80 Alfie Kohn Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The race to win turns us all into losers.”

— Alfie Kohn

52. “Maximum difficulty isn’t the same as optimal difficulty.”

— Alfie Kohn

53. “When was the last time you spent the entire day with only 42 year olds?”

— Alfie Kohn

54. “I realized that this is what many people in our society seem to want most from children: not that they are caring or creative or curious, but simply that they are well behaved.”

— Alfie Kohn

55. “John Dewey reminded us that the value of what students do ’resides in its connection with a stimulation of greater thoughtfulness, not in the greater strain it imposes.”

— Alfie Kohn

56. “We tell them how good they are and they light up, eager to please, and try to please us some more. These are the children we should really worry about.”

— Alfie Kohn

57. “There are different kinds of motivation, and the kind matters more than the amount.”

— Alfie Kohn

58. “Most of us would protest that of course we love our children without any strings attached. But what counts is how things look from the perspective of the children.”

— Alfie Kohn

59. “The dominant problem with parenting in our society isn’t permissiveness, but the fear of permissiveness. We’re so worried about spoiling kids that we often end up over controlling them.”

— Alfie Kohn

60. “Very few things are as dangerous as a bunch of incentive-driven individuals trying to play it safe.”

— Alfie Kohn

61. “How we feel about our kids isn’t as important as how they experience those feelings and how they regard the way we treat them.”

— Alfie Kohn

62. “What can we surmise about the likelihood of someone’s being caring and generous, loving and helpful, just from knowing that they are a believer? Virtually nothing, say psychologists, sociologists, and others who have studied that question for decade.”

— Alfie Kohn

63. “Few readers will be shocked by the news that extrinsic motivators are a poor substitute for genuine interest in what one is doing. What is likely to be far more surprising and disturbing is the further point that rewards, like punishments, actually undermine the intrinsic motivation that promotes optimal performance.”

— Alfie Kohn

64. “We complain loudly about such things as the sagging productivity of our workplaces, the crisis of our schools, and the warped values of our children. But the very strategy we use to solve those problems – dangling rewards like incentive plans and grades and candy bars in front of people – is partly responsible for the fix we’re in. We are a society of loyal Skinnerians, unable to think our way out of the box we have reinforced ourselves into.”

— Alfie Kohn

65. “Few parents have the courage and independence to care more for their children’s happiness than for their success.”

— Alfie Kohn

66. “Children aren’t helped to become caring members of a community, or ethical decision-makers, or critical thinkers, so much as they’re simply trained to follow directions.”

— Alfie Kohn

67. “Similarly, parents who want to teach the importance of honesty make it a practice never to lie to their children, even when it would be easier just to claim that there are no cookies left rather than to explain why they can’t have another one.”

— Alfie Kohn

68. “Educators remind us that what counts in a classroom is not what the teacher teaches; it’s what the learner learns. And so it is in families. What matters is the message our kids receive, not the one we think we’re sending.”

— Alfie Kohn

69. “Thomas Gordon said it well: “Children sometimes know better than parents when they are sleepy or hungry; know better the qualities of their friends, their own aspirations and goals, how their various teachers treat them; know better the urges and needs within their bodies, whom they love and whom they don’t, what they value and what they don’t.”4 In any case, we can’t always assume that because we’re more mature we necessarily have more insight into our children than they have into themselves.”

— Alfie Kohn

70. “Unconditional parents want to know how to do something other than threaten and punish. They don’t see their relationship with their children as adversarial, so their goal is to avoid battles, not win them.”

— Alfie Kohn

71. “When we do things that are controlling, whether intentional or not, we are not going to get those long-term outcomes.”

— Alfie Kohn

72. “A willingness to question the way things are paradoxically affirms a vision of the way things ought to be.”

— Alfie Kohn

73. “Like any other tool for facilitating the completion of a questionable task, rewards offer a “how” answer to what is really a “why” question.”

— Alfie Kohn

74. “How well you do things should be incidental, not integral, to the way you regard yourself.”

— Alfie Kohn

75. “From deep contentment comes the courage to achieve.”

— Alfie Kohn

76. “Besides, what best prepares children to deal with the challenges of the “real world” is to experience success and joy. People don’t get better at coping with unhappiness because they were deliberately made unhappy when they were young.”

— Alfie Kohn

77. “Think of your goal as giving your child a kind of inoculation, providing him with the unconditional love, respect, trust, and sense of perspective that will serve to immunize him against the most destructive effects of an overcontrolling environment or an unreasonable authority figure.”

— Alfie Kohn

78. “What provokes particular outrage and ridicule is the idea that children might feel good about themselves in the absence of impressive accomplishments, even though, as I’ll show, studies find that unconditional self-esteem is a key component of psychological health.”

— Alfie Kohn

79. “The story of declining school quality across the twentieth century is, for the most part, a fable,” says social scientist Richard Rothstein, whose book The Way We Were? cites a series of similar attacks on American education, moving backward one decade at a time.3 Each generation invokes the good old days, during which, we discover, people had been doing exactly the same thing.”

— Alfie Kohn

80. “We ought to love children, as my friend Deborah says, ‘for no good reason.’ Furthermore, what counts is not that we believe we love them unconditionally, but that they feel loved in that way.”

— Alfie Kohn

81. “I realized that this is what many people in our society seem to want most from children: not that they are caring or creative or curious, but simply that they are well behaved. A “good” child – from infancy to adolescence – is one who isn’t too much trouble to us grown-ups.”

— Alfie Kohn

82. “In my view, there are two fundamentally different ways one can respond to a child who does something wrong. One is to impose a punitive consequence. Another is to see the situation as a “teachable moment,” an opportunity to educate or to solve a problem together. The response here is not “You’ve misbehaved; now here’s what I’m going to do to you” but “Something has gone wrong; what can we do about it?”

— Alfie Kohn

83. “Many mothers and father return each evening from their paid jobs only to serve as homework monitors, a position for which they never applied.”

— Alfie Kohn

84. “All rewards have the same effect,” one writer declares. “They dilute the pure joy that comes from success itself.”

— Alfie Kohn