unconditional parenting

I spent the weekend re-reading Alfie Kohn's "Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason". 

He's adamantly against rewards and punishments for a wide variety of reasons, but perhaps the key is when teachers or parents reward or punish students, we take away their sense of autonomy: did the child do/not do something because he or she reasoned that this was the best way to act, or was it just desire for the reward or fear of punishment?

Think about a beautiful woman: is her boyfriend with her because he loves her or is she just arm candy?  How will she ever know unless through age, disease or accident, she loses her looks?   People who see the couple might think he's only with her for her looks.  What about the boyfriend: does he know what his true feelings are?

That's the problem: it's not just that other people, teachers, parents, outsiders don't know what motivated the behaviour, it's that the child herself doesn't know either!  Did Mary give Tom half her cookie because she likes to think of herself as a generous person, because she noticed Tom was hungry, or because the teacher gives out gold stars to kids who share?  It may seem like the question doesn't matter as long as Mary does share her cookie, but unless we know the underlying reasons for the behaviour, we will never know exactly what kind of person Mary is...and neither will she!