Negative and positive reinforcement.

[bladespark]

I was reading a somewhat disturbing article about a church or possibly a cult that encourages physical discipline of children.

I had a discussion with a friend not too long about about punishment vs. reward. Punishment is held by many to be the best way to change a behavior. "If you disobey me, I shall do X to you." I have always held that reward is a better method.

If one looks as psychology, at the most basic level there are two ways to modify behavior. One is "reinforcement." Reinforcement is something you do to try and cause a behavior you wish. You can reinforce positively, by presenting a reward when a behavior is seen. (I had a teacher in elementary school who did this. She gave us little things, like glue sticks or pencils, when we did something particularly well.) You can also reinforce negatively by removing something unpleasant when the behavior is seen. (You cleaned your room? How nice, I guess I won't make you eat your lima beans after all. Or whatever.) Punishment, on the other hand, is given when a behavior you don't like takes place. Punishment is entirely negative in focus. Punishment uses fear to try and get what it wants, and the trouble with fear is that fear is a very complex emotion. Pleasure is simple. We enjoy something, we seek it. Fear is more complicated. We fear something, we may have one of any number of responses to this.

Animal tests on reinforcement/punishment have demonstrated this quite clearly. Here's a bit from the wikipedia on the subject. "Punishment is not a mirror effect of reinforcement. In experiments with laboratory animals and studies with children, punishment decreases the likelihood of a previously reinforced response only temporarily, and it can produce other "emotional" behavior (wing-flapping in pigeons, for example) and physiological changes (increased heart rate, for example) that have no clear equivalents in reinforcement." What does this mean? It means that punishment isn't terribly effective in changing behavior, especially when that behavior has already been rewarded in some way.

Sometimes negative reinforcement and punishment get confused. But negative reinforcement is different. In negative reinforcement there is a situation or condition which the subject finds unpleasant, and when the subject behaves as desired, that unpleasant whatever is removed. Punishment is when an unpleasant whatever is added after the undesirable behavior has taken place.

Or to give a simple example here, if you want to train a kid , and you give him extra chores every time he does something bad, the effectiveness of this strategy is going to be erratic, to say the least. But if you give him a regular schedule of chores, and let him off of some when he's good, then you'll get better results.

It also means that flipping hitting children does NOTHING to teach them. It may work temporarily, but it wears off, causes fear, resentment, and other emotional responses, screws up people's emotional development, and just generally is BAD, BAD, BAD.

I had really thought that in this day and age most people knew better! My grandparents spanked my parents when they were little, but my parents learned better. We KNOW better now! Anybody who's studied the subject at all (and parents flipping ought to!) should know that it doesn't work. But it seems like not. In fact it seems like VERY not. What is wrong with people that they think hitting kids is ever justified? It doesn't teach them, it doesn't improve them, it just makes them afraid and screwed up! The only thing that hitting a child does is it makes the adult feel in control of the situation, big and powerful, and anybody who gets off on that kind of power kick with children ought to be shown what it's like to be on the receiving end of some punishment.

(Note that I don't advocate removal of all forms of punishment with kids ever. I mean sometimes you do have to teach a kid that actions have consequences. But punishment really is far, far, far less effective then reinforcement, and if you are going to punish, physical punishment is NEVER the best choice.)

Comments

[2dlife.livejournal.com]

I don't necessarily agree, I think there's a place for physical punishment in raising children.

I think it depends on the child's age and maturity. Children need to learn to project in time, just like animals and when they're young they don't correlate action and future punishment. You can't promise a future punishment (even "no lima beans in 2 hours at dinnertime") in response to current behaviour. Infants respond to emotions and angry voices so there's no need for physical punishment, but at the age of two, they lose that but they don't yet have a solid grasp of temporal space. So hitting them (very rarely and very gently) in cases of extreme misbehavior is OK. Time-outs or other direct punishment (taking away toys, etc.) also works and is less abusive. But punishment is important. By five, they should have some grasp of the "if you do this, this will happen" concept and then things can proceed as discussed above and be a reward-based system.

All of this also requires a very close relationship between parent and child. If the child is craving attention, and any (even negative) attention is a reward of sorts, then you've got problems from the get go.

I think from age 6 onwards, I was raised under the rights/responsibilities system. That is there was a sliding scale of responsibilities (good behavior, chores, financial responsibility, schoolwork) and if I demonstrated that I could regularly and without prompting fulfill them, I got more rights (TV time, staying up late, allowance, going out with friends). The pinnacle of rights was the right to have my opinions matter in making family decisions. I got to the point where the one thing I was deathly afraid of was disappointing my parents.