The Whole Parent Podcast
The Whole Parent Podcast
How to Not Raise a Nazi (with Alfie Kohn).... #39
Key Links:
📖 Get My Book: Punishment-Free Parenting: The Brain-Based Way to Raise Kids Without Raising Your Voice – Available Now
đź“– Get Alfie Kohn's Books: Unconditional Parenting and Punished By Rewards
📝 Join My Email List for exclusive insights, parenting tips, and updates – Sign Up Here
Episode Description:
What if the very thing we’ve been striving for as parents—obedience—wasn’t actually a virtue? What if, instead of making our kids good, it made them vulnerable?
In this episode, we take a hard look at the dangers of unquestioning compliance. We start at the Nuremberg Trials, where Nazi officials defended their crimes with four chilling words: I was just following orders. We revisit the infamous Milgram experiment, where 65% of ordinary people delivered what they believed to be fatal electric shocks—just because an authority figure told them to.
Then, we bring it home.
How does this obsession with obedience play out in our parenting?
With the help of Alfie Kohn—renowned author and parenting expert—we examine why traditional parenting methods prioritize compliance, why that might be a problem, and what we can do instead. We break down research showing that demanding obedience undermines empathy, critical thinking, and moral integrity.
By the end of this episode, you’ll learn:
âś… Why most parents unknowingly work against their long-term parenting goals
✅ How punishment and rewards both create conditional love—and what to do instead
âś… The real-world dangers of raising kids to obey without question
âś… What research-backed strategies actually help kids become ethical, independent, and strong
Because one day, we won’t be the authority in their lives anymore. And the only voice left… will be their own.
Chapters & Key Moments:
🔹 (00:10) The Chilling History of Obedience – From Nuremberg to Milgram: How history warns us about blind compliance
🔹 (07:00) The Parent’s Dilemma – Why parents say they want independent, critical thinkers… but demand obedience
🔹 (12:45) The Cost of Compliance – What happens when we condition kids to follow orders at all costs
🔹 (18:10) Unconditional Parenting with Alfie Kohn – A deep dive into parenting beyond punishment and rewards
🔹 (26:40) The Real Goal of Parenting – How to raise kids who think for themselves, challenge injustice, and make good choices
📲 Follow Me on Social Media – @WholeParent
The year is 1945.
Alfie:Defendants from the Nazi regime are about to take the stand in what would later be famously called the Nuremberg Trials. Many of the defendants are going to plead not guilty, not because they deny carrying out the horrific crimes that they trials. Many of the defendants are going to plead not guilty not because they deny carrying out the horrific crimes that they're being accused of, but because, in their words, they were just following orders. Perhaps the most infamous example is Rudolf Huss, who had been the commandant in charge of Auschwitz concentration camp. Huss was personally responsible for the deaths of over a million people. Here he is describing it. I'll translate according to what's in the historical record. Treatment of prisoners was strict, but any methodological physical abuse or maltreatment was out of the question. During the summer of 1941, I was ordered to Berlin to receive orders personally from SS-ReichsfĂĽhrer Himmler. He said something like this the FĂĽhrer has ordered the final solution of the Jewish problem. We, the SS, are entrusted with executing his order. He has chosen Auschwitz.
Alfie:Hoss goes on to defend himself extensively, explaining that he had no ill will toward the people who he was violently and viciously oppressing and murdering, that the only times when he carried out any acts of barbarism or hate were in response to orders that he himself personally received from Adolf Hitler or from Heinrich Himmler, who was the ReichsfĂĽhrer of the SS, the one in charge. Haas would not be the only one who said this. In fact, over and over again during the Nuremberg trials, nazi leaders, who participated in one of the greatest atrocities in human history, defended themselves in the same way. It was just following orders. Huss explains this later in a section cited in GM Gilbert's the Psychology of a Dictatorship. Don't you see, says Huss, we SS men were not supposed to think about these things. It never occurred to us. We were all so trained to obey orders without even thinking that the thought of disobeying an order would simply have never occurred to anybody. And somebody else would have done just as well if I hadn't. I never really gave much thought to whether it was wrong, it just seemed a necessity. Listen to what Haas is saying here. I didn't think about whether it was right or wrong, I just did what I was being told.
Alfie:Later in his testimony, haas goes on to name another person in particular who he claimed was directly responsible for giving those orders, outside of Hitler and Himmler, someone who had escaped to Argentina and avoided the Nuremberg trials, but who eventually faced his own trial a dozen years later, not in Nuremberg, but in Jerusalem. I'll set the scene for you. The year is now 1961. Adolf Eichmann, an unassuming, balding man in glasses testifying inside of a glass box. This is not a guy who you would think was one of the chief architects of the Holocaust. He looks like a middle school science teacher, a friend of one of your parents, someone you might see in the grocery store. He answers questions totally non-emotionally. The only sign that he's nervous at all is the way that he twists his hands inside one another. The defense that he attempts to offer, wringing his hands, sitting inside that bulletproof glass box, is the same defense. I too was just following orders.
Alfie:Eichmann's trial and the Nuremberg trials before them would go on to inspire one of the most famous psychological experiments in history. Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram wanted to answer a simple question how far will people go just because someone in authority told them to? To do this, he set up a fake memory test, two participants, a teacher and a learner. Except in this case, the learner was not actually a part of the experiment. They're an actor. The teacher, the real subject of Milgram's experiment, is led to believe that they're delivering electric shocks to the learner again, just an actor. Every time they got a question wrong. The shocks they thought they were delivering weren't real, but the screams and the protests from the learners were. This clip that I found on YouTube is around 150 volts, where the learners in the next room were instructed to start banging on the walls and begging for the experiment to stop.
Jon:Experiment. That's all. Get me out of here.
Alfie:Get me out of here. Plea se Continue, please Go right ahead.
Jon:You refuse to go on. Let me out. You refuse to go on, let me out. You refuse to go on. The experiment requires you to continue. Teacher, Please continue.
Alfie:Of the 40 teacher participants, every single one of them kept going At 300 volts. The fake learners kicked the wall and stopped responding altogether. It was at that point that the first of the 40 participants dropped off. Five of them one-eighth stopped delivering electric shocks. Another off Five of them one eighth stopped delivering electric shocks. Another four participants stopped after the next shock, a couple more after that, at 375 volts again. At this point the learner is totally non-responsive. The participants began delivering shocks labeled danger, severe shock. That express warning on the console that they thought that they were operating deterred only one of the remaining participants. The rest went all the way. The test concluded at 450 volts, the highest level which, if true, likely, could have been lethal. 26 of the 40 participants delivered that shock. Why Not?
Alfie:because they wanted to, but because an authority figure in a lab coat had told them to. This is the Whole Parent Podcast, and this episode is not about war crimes or questionable 1960s psychological experiments. This is an episode like every other episode about parenting.
Alfie:This idea that obedience is a virtue, that following rules is inherently good, is something that most of us have been taught since childhood. It's something that we've been told and perhaps we've told our own children makes us good people. Obedience in our children is often our most coveted trait. Listen the first time, don't talk back Because I said so. But what if I told you that the more obedient your child is, the less prepared they would be for the actual real world? What if I told you that the thing that we've been striving for as parents compliance might actually be the thing that's setting up our kids for failure, for manipulation, for the inability to stand up for themselves or for others, because obedience isn't the same as morality. In fact, sometimes it's the exact opposite. Today, we're talking about why traditional parenting is obsessed with obedience, why that might be a problem and what we can do instead.
Jon:I begin my workshops and lectures by asking parents and teachers, for that matter, what are your long-term goals for your kids?
Alfie:How do you?
Jon:hope they'll turn out years from now? What do you hope they'll be like? And everywhere I go, I find I get the same kind of answers. So I want my kid to be happy, to be ethical, to be caring and compassionate, to be self-sufficient and independent, to be curious learners and so on.
Alfie:This is Alfie Kohn. He's a writer and educator, and he's been one of the leading voices in rethinking traditional parenting and schooling for more than 25 years. If you're one of the thousands of parents who's been impacted by my work or my book, you've been impacted by his research and his philosophy, even if you didn't know it, and he's a provocative voice. He's not only anti-punishment, he's anti-rewards too. We'll get to that, but what he's saying here is pretty uncontroversial, right? I mean, who wouldn't want their kids to grow up to be happy, kind, independent, lifelong learners? But ask those same parents what they want from their kids today, and most will say something like I just want them to listen, listen, obey, follow directions the first time. It sounds reasonable, but there's a big problem. Those goals the short-term and the long-term goals of most parents are mutually exclusive. Last week, I polled my Instagram followers for three questions. The first two were questions that respondents could either agree, disagree or neither agree nor disagree with. The first was this I want my kids to listen and do what I ask the first time. Over 60% of the nearly 3,000 parents who answered this first question agreed. Another third of the parents neither agreed nor disagreed. Only 5.5% of the parents disagreed with this statement. To be honest, I think these results are actually pretty skewed by the population who follows me. If I polled the general public, my guess is it would be over 90% of parents who agreed.
Alfie:The next question I asked was whether parents had the goal of fostering empathy and critical thinking in the long term for their kids. The results were more pronounced here Nearly 97% of the parents agreed, with less than 1% disagreeing. It was over 3,000 parents. But I'll admit those two questions were mostly just a setup for this third question. Instead of agreeing or disagreeing, parents had to choose between the two goals. If you had to choose between obedience and empathy and critical thinking, which would you choose? Over 93% preferred the long-term goal. In other words, while we might like compliance, we would actually rather our kids be empathetic, critical thinkers. Obedience might make our lives easier in the short term, but, given the choice, more than 9 out of 10 of us would trade it away if it meant that our kids would be happy, healthy, good people. Here's Alfie, continuing where we left off.
Jon:So what I do for a living is I say to people you say you want this, so why are you doing that? Because here's the research showing that, that the common practice actively undermines your own long-term goals. Never mind that I don't like it. And so in the latter half of Unconditional Parenting, I talk about broad strategies, not specific scripts, not one-size-fits-all recipes, so that you just stand here and say the following in this tone of voice to get what you want. But you begin by asking, as you put it, you know what's the goal here? Because you say you want your child to be happy and ethical and caring and so on.
Jon:But is that consistent with what you're doing on a given Thursday evening? Because it sure looks like your actions and even the questions you ask of parenting experts are geared to getting obedience as opposed to how is my intervention or my lack of intervention here going to help? And of course I'm a parent of two children and I know what it's like to just want to get the kid into or out of the damn tub or car. But most of the time we need to be thinking beyond that short term to thinking about the long-term goals. We need to be moving from a doing-to approach, to a working-with approach. We need to be thinking about the question, not how do I get my kid to do what I want, but what does my child need and how can I help to meet those needs?
Alfie:What Alfie's saying here is, in short, that obedience, compliance and control totally undermine the long-term goals that most parents set for their kids. When kids are raised to obey without question, two things happen. First, they become passive, blindly following rules, never questioning authority. This passivity on a grand scale is where we began the episode. When humans learn to ignore their internal moral compass and comply with authority, catastrophic things can happen. This is why, historically speaking, nearly all of the atrocities in human history were carried out by members of a totalitarian regime. Take a moment to think about that. It wasn't Hitler himself, or, for that matter, even Himmler, who murdered 6 million Jews. It wasn't Stalin himself who sent 20 million of his own people to die in gulags. It wasn't Mao who starved tens of millions during the Great Leap Forward. It wasn't Mao who starved tens of millions during the Great Leap Forward. It was ordinary people soldiers, police officers, government workers, teachers who carried out every single one of these crimes, not because they themselves were evil, but because they had been conditioned to obey. And before we start to self-righteously think to ourselves well, I wouldn't do that, or my kid wouldn't do that, I want to return you again for a moment to the Milgram experiment. Prior to conducting the experiment, stanley Milgram writes in his own paper that he believed that the majority of participants would stop at or before the 300 volts, that point where participants would stop responding altogether. The experiment, in part, was actually conducted to undermine the testimony of the Nazi officers that they were just following orders. Surely normal American citizens raised with the cultural values of liberty and freedom would stop when they heard screams and protests from their fellow American citizens. At least they would stop when the participants became incapacitated Right. Instead, none of the participants heeded the pleas of those they believed that they were harming and only five of them stopped when they believed that the learner had been shocked unconscious. 65% of them delivered shocks that any reasonable person in that situation must know could have killed the learner. 65% of normal people, people who you go to work with, who you sit in class with, who you go to church, with. 65% of the people, people who you go to work with, who you sit in class with, who you go to church, with 65% of the people who you see at the grocery store or taking out the garbage on trash day in effect obeyed in order to kill. But our children's passivity does not only extend to their compliance and harming others. It also includes being willing to accept harm themselves.
Alfie:This is a story submitted by a listener who has chosen to remain anonymous. I'll just call her Mary. I was raised by an authoritarian narcissist who was, ironically, trained in early childhood education and development. It was a completely toxic environment where I was gaslit to believe that my dad wanted nothing to do with me. For as long as I remember, I was emotionally manipulated, psychologically abused and physically abused, and later, when my stepfather came along, I was sexually abused. The thing is, because I was raised to be unquestioningly compliant, I didn't even realize how bad it was. I have little to no memory before my teenage years, and what I do remember isn't pleasant. My psychologist describes it as horrific, but I don't know any different. So for me it was all normal. That's what being raised to be obedient at all costs led me to. I normalized the abuse because it was being done to me by the grown-ups that I was supposed to obey. Becoming a parent myself and learning about parenting has made me realize that all the emotions that I should feel about my childhood are missing. I feel empty. I'm numb. I was raised being told that compliance was what love looked like, but in fact there was no love at all. That's the thing.
Alfie:What Mary highlights here is massively important. When we teach kids to follow directions of those in authority without question, we teach them to follow directions without question. And what about when their future boss is that authority? Do we really want them to be such good employees, so obedient to their employer that they're willing to compromise their ethics or values when they're asked to lie to save the company from a potentially damaging lawsuit? Or what about their romantic partners suit? Or what about their romantic partners? Do we want them to be so compliant to their future spouse that they endure years of gaslighting and abuse to do whatever she or he wants them to do without question? What about their high school football coach, who offers them a way to gain a little extra muscle overnight, guarantee their spot as the starting, running back with a couple doses of something that they're encouraged not to look too closely at? How do we feel about their obedience to that authority figure? Or perhaps one of our greatest fears?
Alfie:What about when our children are put into the same situation as Mary? What about those far too common scenarios where the dad or older brother of their middle school friend who acts inappropriately towards them, asks them not to tell. Unquestioning obedience all of a sudden doesn't seem like such a good goal for our kids, does it? Sure, it was handy when you wanted them to shut up and get into the car at four years old, or when you wanted your two-year-old to be quiet on their very first flight, but at what cost. So what is the cure? If there is a cure to this obedience mindset, how can we teach our children to be ethical, critical thinkers? Since Alfie was my guest on this episode, I wanted to give you his take. He points to this concept of unconditional parenting as the solution. I'll let him describe it.
Jon:So the book begins with the premise that it's not enough for us just to love our children, or even love them a lot, because not all love is equal and what children need what we all need actually, but especially children is to be loved for who they are, not for what they do. That means that even when they fail to impress us or do something that disturbs us, they know that our love won't be turned off as if we're turning off a tap, that we'll continue to love them no matter what. That's what unconditional means. We love them, as a friend of mine likes to say, for no damn good reason. We love them, as a friend of mine likes to say, for no damn good reason. And it's not just that if we are asked, we say, of course I love my child, no matter what.
Jon:Almost everybody says that it's that children experience that unconditionality. So the problem is that the vast majority of parenting resources are not just failing to emphasize this point and this distinction, but are actively encouraging us to use strategies to make kids obey that amount to the opposite, where our care, our attention, our approval are made contingent on their acting the way we want, so that kids know they will get that excitement from us, that high-five, that fist bump, that big smile, that hug, that praise only when they are impressive or well-behaved, and the way that that conditionality manifests itself typically is through some variant of either threats or bribes. That's what makes the love conditional. Did you catch what Alfie's saying here?
Alfie:That's what makes the love conditional. I was just at the museum and I was sitting next to a parent who was doing a really great job In fact, the overwhelming majority of parents that I see out in public are doing a really great job but this parent, not really knowing what to do in a moment of dysregulation I think we've all been there starts talking about what their child will get as a result if they stop throwing a tantrum. I'll get you this. This can be your reward If you eat a little bit more of this healthy food. I'll get you this Stop throwing a tantrum, acting right.
Jon:Here's Alfie idea that when you punish people, we'll just talk about kids here, since that's our focus in this conversation, but this applies with how teachers treat students and how managers treat employees as well. But with our children? When we want them to do something, we often threaten them by saying, in effect, do this, or here's what I'm going to do to you, and punishment basically is we're threatening to deliberately make them unhappy in the hope of eliciting mindless obedience. And a vast number of parenting resources are all about calling that by sweeter names, you know, instead of forcible isolation of young children when they need us most, we call it timeout, you know, because that makes us feel better, about making children feel terrible. And punishment of whatever kind, you know from timeout or spanking or withdrawal of privileges, can only succeed ever at getting one thing, which is temporary compliance, but at an enormous cost. And there's a huge amount of research on how punishment of any kind, you know, and for any reason, isn't just ineffective. In the long run, it's actually counterproductive.
Alfie:Well, at this point I would be a little bit remiss to say that I don't talk about this extensively in my book. I do. I have multiple chapters about this and, in fact, one of the best parts of my book that addresses this specifically is the chapter that I read a long section from two podcast episodes ago. You can go listen to that and think about how you might parent differently if your goals weren't obedience and compliance, following directions. I'll also say that, as I'm in the process of beginning to write proposals for my next book, this is probably going to be the chief and primary focus. This is probably going to be the chief and primary focus. I don't know exactly what that's going to look like yet, but if you're staying tuned with me, if you're on my email list, you will hear much more about this going forward.
Jon:Back to Alfie continuing here about rewards. So I got to looking at the research and discovered that virtually everything I've just said about punishment is also true of rewards. Rewards are not really an opposite to punishment, they're just the other side of the coin. Now, instead of saying, do this, or here's what I'm going to do to you, we say to them do this and you'll get that. It's still about doing things to children rather than working with them.
Jon:And the research finds that rewards, exactly like punishments, can be effective only at getting one thing ever temporary compliance, but at a huge cost. What rewards tend to do is, first of all, they warp our relationship with children. Now, instead of seeing us as enforcers they have to fear and hide from, they see us as giant goody dispensers on legs, which is no closer to the kind of caring alliance that helps kids to flourish. But a huge amount of research, which I did for that other book and then periodically updated, shows that the more you reward people for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward. So just one example is studies have continued to show that children who are frequently rewarded or praised by their parents tend to be less generous and caring than other kids.
Jon:You might buy the behavior of getting them to do something, but now the point is to see that activity as a means to an end. So if you wanted to destroy children's interest in reading, you would give them a prize for reading a book, or give them a good grade or a sticker, or pat them on the head and say good job, you're such a good reader. You could almost watch their interest in reading evaporate before your eyes because now you've taught them that reading is just a tedious prerequisite to getting the doggy biscuit, you devalue whatever it is they have to do to get the reward. That includes reading, it includes caring, sharing, whatever your goal is. So, exactly like punishments, rewards, a way of doing things to kids, make it less likely that kids will grow up into the kind of people we hope they will.
Alfie:Years after his infamous obedience experiments, stanley Milgram reflected on why so many of the people had followed the orders, even when they knew what they were doing was wrong. He said the disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority. This is the cost of unquestioning obedience, the cost of just following orders. This is the cost of a parenting philosophy that prioritizes compliance over connection. We want our kids to listen, yes, but more than that, we want them to think, to ask questions, to challenge unfairness, to know that their voice, that their judgment matters, because one day we won't be the authority in their lives anymore. One day they'll face decisions where we aren't there to guide them, and when that moment comes, the only voice left will be us, their own. And so, contrary to what traditional parenting seems to teach, the real goal of parenting isn't raising obedient children. It's raising kids who can stand on their own two feet, who can weigh what's right and what's wrong, who will say no when it matters, even when no one else does, who will say yes when the world desperately needs them to. We don't need more rule followers. We need more critical thinkers, more ethical leaders, more kids who will grow into adults who do the right thing, not because that they're afraid of what will happen if they don't, but because they know that it's right. Obedience is easy. It takes real courage to raise a child who questions.
Alfie:But here's the uncomfortable truth. We say we want kids to think for themselves until they think differently than we do. We say we want them to challenge unfairness until the unfairness that they're challenging is ours. We say that we want them to stand up for what's right, but then they refuse to say I'm sorry, when they don't actually mean it, or they call out our hypocrisy at the dinner table or they ask why, one too many times, when all we needed them to do was just listen. We want them to question authority, but what happens when we are the authority that they question? Because here's the thing the first system that they will ever challenge is us. The first power that they will ever speak truth to is ours, and that thought makes us uncomfortable. And maybe it should, because if we demand blind obedience from them now, if we treat every act of defiance as disrespect, if we crush their resistance instead of teaching them how to use it wisely, then one day, when it really matters, when they're asked to do something that they know is wrong, when they're pressured to conform at the cost of their integrity. When the moment comes to say no, they might not. They might stay silent when they see aid being stripped from the most vulnerable people in society. They might stay silent when they see companies abandon efforts to promote diversity, equity and be more inclusive. They might stay silent when people who look different than them are at risk of being deported, put on trains or planes, put in camps or eradicated entirely. They might stay silent as they watch the next fascist dictator attempt to seize control. Not because they're bad people, but because they never learned how to stand up to power, because they spent their childhood learning that questioning was dangerous, that pushing back meant punishment, that their voice didn't really matter meant punishment, that their voice didn't really matter. And so if we truly want to raise kids who can stand up for what's right, we have to let them practice now with us. It's easy to say that we want to raise leaders. The hard part is raising kids who practice leading, even when it means that we have to be the ones who follow, because parenting isn't about control, it's about guidance. And if we want to raise kids who will change the world, we have to be willing to let them change us first.
Alfie:Thanks for listening to this episode of the Whole Parent Podcast. I have three quick favors to ask you before we end the episode. No-transcript. It's the single best way to help more parents find this show. It'll take you less than a minute. Just scroll down on your podcast app, tap those stars and, if you've got an extra 30 seconds, leave a couple words for me to let me know how this podcast has been helping you.
Alfie:I read every single review it. I read every single review. It really means the world to me Number two. After you rate it and review it for the masses, I really want to encourage you to think about what we talked about in this episode and send it to one parent in your phone who you feel like might benefit from this specific episode. It's great to have ratings and reviews and, yes, they help so much, but there's nothing like a personal recommendation from a friend. Hey, you got to listen to this. It's really been helping me.
Alfie:Last, if you wanna go deeper with me, get exclusive parenting insights, free resources and updates on everything that I'm doing, go ahead and join my email list. It's where I share things that I don't get to get into. On the podcast, I also will let you know about upcoming episodes and events and, best of all, it's completely free. You can sign up at wholeparentacademycom or just go to the show notes below and there'll be a link there. All right, that's it for now. Thanks again for listening and thank you in advance for doing those three quick favors. For me, this has been the Whole Parent Podcast.
