Cultivating behavior

An interesting article in the Atlantic discusses parenting. The basic idea is that punishment does not actually mold proper behavior.

"Not so, says Alan Kazdin, director of the Yale Parenting Center. Punishment might make you feel better, but it won’t change the kid’s behavior. Instead, he advocates for a radical technique in which parents positively reinforce the behavior they do want to see until the negative behavior eventually goes away."

Kazdin recommends a three-part approach.

What it amounts to is an area of research that's called applied behavior analysis, and what it focuses on are three things to change behavior: What comes before the behavior, how you craft the behavior, and then what you do at the end.

....

And now the behavior itself. When you get compliance, if that's the behavior you want, now you go over and praise it ... very effusively, and you have to say what you're praising exactly.


Based on his experience, Kazdin believes that this can work even on teens.

The basic fundamental approach is, what is going on before the behavior that you can do to change it? Can you get repeated practice trials? Can you lock it in with praise? What happens is that parents think of discipline as punishing, and in fact, that's not the way to change behavior.

This works for all ages. Let’s say you have an adolescent daughter and she says to you, “Mom, you are such a bitch. What have you ever done for me? You only think of yourself.”

That makes parents want to jump out of their windows, because their whole life has been devoted to that damn child. So how do we get rid of teen attitude? We call it positive opposites: Whenever you want to get rid of something, what is it that you want in its place? Because getting rid of it is not going to do it.

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You proceed from easy to more complex behaviors, and soon you have Marion outside the dinner table, staying nice things. We train parents to jump on those occasions that will build it up, and pretty soon you don't get the, “you're a bitch,” anymore, you build positive opposites. You don't try to suppress— “Don't give me attitude for all I've done for you!” What research shows is that it will lead to escape behavior on the part of the child. It will lead them to avoid you as soon as they get home from school and it will model negative interactions toward you.

One interesting idea:  you should always give a choice. The choice itself isn't important, it's simply the appearance of choice that makes the difference.

Here is the link to the full article:  http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/03/no-spanking-no-time-out-no-problems/475440/