Recently I was asked to give a talk on the Limits of Rewards and Punishment in Child Rearing and Education. This topic is an intriguing one for me and I have thought about it almost as long as I have lived in the USA. The differences between my native culture, German, and my adoptive culture, American, produce nothing short of a culturual clash in my thinking. I may, in a later entry, talk more about those differences. Here my goal is to get a handle on a phenomenon that I find observable on both sides of the Atlantic. It is an increasing unwillingness on the part of our children and youth to accept and comply with traditional authority.

Perhaps I am already in the process of rose-coloring things as I look back to the past. If I am, I would like to receive some feedback about that. It seems to me that children in my generation were more pliable, less prickly, more receptive of adult opinions and advice. My sense is that when I was a child and teenager being an adult automatically lent authority to a person. Add to that their profession--for example, if they were a teacher, professor, doctor or pastor--and you the person had every reason to expect that their word would be heard and that others would be inclined to believe them and follow their advice.

I am sensing that this has changed significantly in the last 25 years. Just because the adult in front of the class-room is an adult and a teacher does no longer guarantee their students respect for them. And if that person is a doctor or pastor, they can no longer rely on their insight being accepted by those they address. Rather, what they say and who they are as persons will be scrutinized and put in question. For how long I'm not sure. Maybe for ever. Because it almost feels as if nobody these days gets a free pass anymore.

There are a few exceptions to this and I want to briefly talk about them. One, of course, is the president of the United States. It seems that everybody respects every president. A rare exception this is, where respect simply comes with the role/office a person holds not with their accomplishments, intelligence, courage or wisdom. To some degree police officers seem to partake in a similar form of respect. Although one might be inclined to believe that this is due more to the fact that they are armed than to the fact that the police is "Dein Freund und Helfer" (Your friend and helper). Yes, and then there is one other large group: athletes. Most super-athletes seem to enjoy a certain kind of respect that is related to their physical accomplishments.

Size, by the way, seems to play an important role in the respect these people are given. Being the president of the whole US, or being a particularly tall or big basketball or football player, a fast race-car driver, etc. seems to result in spontaneous expressions of respect for such a person. The police-officer might be small (few are, however) but what makes them big anyway is their gun.

Here is the thing, though. Do I wish teachers, doctors, etc. were respected the way many in this country still respect the president, police-officers and athletes? No, I don't. In fact, I find these forms of respect somewhat repulsive and atavistic. They're mostly emergent from the fact that the other person could literally or metaphorically whoop your ass and, thereby, force you to respect them. In other words, the respect we give to these people is generally not freely given. We must, at least publicly, give them respect no matter what they do, what they say and how they behave.

Respect is a freely given offering of admiration and appreciation to another person. Respect should never come from the view-point "I am less than you, therefore you should have my respect." Rather, respect is about a certain equality that exists between us because we are human beings. A person worthy of respect can accept even being disrespected. Because such a person knows that there are as many things about them that are worthy of disrespect as there are things worthy of respect. A person worthy of respect is a person who can admit to his/her mistakes. Such a person will hold themselves accountable to exactly the same standard they also hold others to.

Respect is a democratic value. It can only exist in a democracy. For respect in a monarchy or tyranny (be that a political tyranny, educational or a tyranny of parenting) is never really respect; it is nothing but fear.

Having said all this I am, now, in a position to move closer to my original topic: the limits of rewards and punishment. I have often heard parents say or repeat that "this (i.e., the family) is not a democracy." And, this is the thought behind such statement, because it is not a democracy you (child) ought to respect me (parent). This principle of respect in a non-democratic family structure has worked for centuries (with exceptions never managing to upset the principle itself). However, my observation is that this is finally changing for good. While children and youth may still obey in fear and to avoid negative consequences, they are no longer confusing such obedience with respect for the person they're obeying.

I have wondered for a long time what might be behind this. It seems as if the last 25-35 years have given us not only a new appreciation of the role and signifiance of women, minorities and others. Young people, too, have come to the forefront more self-confident and more convinced of their own rightful place in the world. What is intriguing about this latter development is that is has had few supporters, few observers, few advocates. Most young people could not really speak for themselves in the academic and cultural ways in which other movements garnered support for themselves. So, what gave them the strength and energy to move ahead in the ways they have?

This confidence may have started roughly 40 years ago. The anti-war, anti-establishment, anti-many other things movement(s) were mostly fueled by young people, teens and young adults. They had no advocates, only themselves and their vision of a different world. If they didn't affect older generations much, they did affect many of their own peers, even those who didn't want to or weren't able to join the rest at Woodstock. Many things were buried during this time, one of them was the notion of "respect simply because someone had power." When that generation began to have children, they had an overwhelmingly different take on the role and place of children in the family and in society. Their children's younger age was reason enough to be protective of them. It wasn't, however, reason to discriminate against them. Children were members of a democratic system and society and as such had the same rights any adult would have.

It would be worth following these strains of thought to the present time, if only to see how they have mutated and how, also, there has been a kind of back-lash, a new authoritarianism, with which parents and teachers are trying these days to teach their children and students to behave properly. But I don't want to do that here.

Rather, I would like to shed light on another source of power that, in my mind, has greatly enhanced the confidence and authority of children and teens in our time. This source of power is technology. While I haven't researched this in detail I think it is safe to assume that there has never been a point in history when young people, children, have had more technological know-how than the adults that were raising them. However, this is exactly the point at which we are presently. Our children have, with a sweeping motion of enthusiasm and intrigue, learned to use and build on the communicative technologies that have been developed since the mid-eighties. Yes, I am talking about cell-phones, computers, i-pods, and the like. And I am not only talking about how much children and teens know about these items. I am mostly talking about how they use them to form a social net-work that provides them with friendship, opinions, news, gossip, culture, etc. The speed at which they know how to handle these things is dizzying. They rightfully look at us as near extinct mammoths, beings from a different age, who can only be taught so much about these new ways of communicating, before they simply stumble, give up, fall to the ground decrying the seeming lack of "real" ways of communication amongst kids.

The educator, speaker and author Marc Prensky coined a helpful distinction for this phenomenon. He refers to this technology savvy generation as "digital natives" to whom we are mere "digital immigrants." We will, that is always, lag behind a true cultural understanding of technology, we will always "speak" with an "accent" and we will always indulge in nostalgic glances back to the "home-country."

There is one marked difference, however: We are still their parents. We do have a responsibility to introduce our children into the values and tenets of our society. this is a formidable task of which we cannot let go. We have a kind of cultural power which, if used in the wrong way, i.e., to squelch kids and their new confidence, will quickly wane. If this happens, then what started as a strong potential for mutual respect, will turn into mutual disrespect. As we begin to teach our children, we will need to articulate our respect for them. This is no longer simply a respect grounded in our common humanity, but a respect that recognizes our kids' high level of (often self-taught) technological skill and know-how.

But there is a shadow cast by all this. This is the shadow of fear. As our children grow more knowledgeable about technology we, their parents and teachers, grow more fearful of them. Therein lies the problem of respect, of course, because as I said in the beginning, respect should no longer be based on fear.

So, here is the thesis: our high emphasis and hope for strategies of rewards and punishments for our children may be a function of how afraid we are of our children and their increasing power to overtake us. We are increasingly fearful of losing control of our children and to the extent that we are we have begun to search frantically for methods that will reign in our children (but that in truth are designed to alleviate our fears). However, the problem is that these methods rarely do alleviate those fears. At best they create a habitual system of vigilance, of checks and balances, that functions like a house-alarm: if someone enters or leaves without prior notice the alarm will go off. My question is, whether we can learn to trust our children. My answer is "we can." But not before we have learned to respect them and not before we have learned to trust our own modelling of respect and love.