Why Carrot and Stick Parenting Helps Some Children and Hurts Others
The science says parents shouldn’t use carrots and sticks to push their children to be Olympians, doctors, engineers, or into any other prestigious endeavor. However, there is a small percentage of parents who use bribes, punishments, fear, and other carrot and stick tactics successfully. There is also a small percentage of parents who don’t ever do anything to motivate (or even support) their child, and their children still go on to be successful in some prestigious endeavor.
Why is this? How do some parents do all the wrong things and still get the right results? As the saying goes, a broken clock is still right twice a day. So, even when a child has broken parenting, there is a particular edge case that allows them to overcome their circumstances.
This edge case is when a child is lucky enough to grow up with the nurture of a community, school, sport, or other extracurricular activity congruent with their natural gifts, passions, motivations, and strengths. Indeed, plants thrive growing wild in their natural habitat, but need meticulous care to survive when they are not. The same is true with children.
When children are lucky enough to grow up in an environment that complements their nature, there is almost nothing parents can do to screw this up. Unfortunately, some parents on the outside looking in see this and think it’s the parenting making the child so successful. Then, these parents copy the other parents only to find themselves frustrated when they don’t get the same results.
Ultimately, this is the word of caution I want you to takeaway. Parenting matters, but it often doesn’t matter as much as you may think. One parent can’t just copy another parent and expect to get the same results. If anything, parents can copy methods to discover a child’s natural gifts, passions, motivations, and strengths. It’s these methods that are most transferable. Moreover, its these methods of discovery that fuels great parenting.
As author Mary Reckmeyer, Ph.D. states in her book Strengths Based Parenting:
Our job as parents is to nurture our children’s nature, to be detectives and discover who are children already are and who they are becoming, to be coaches and create pathways that play to their strengths and manage their weaknesses.