3 Behavioral Techniques For Raising Children: Reinforcement, Punishment And Extinction

Anger, crying, screaming, biting, slapping… When it comes to educating children, sometimes we don’t really know how to get them to stop having certain behaviors that we consider inadequate.  So behavioral techniques can help us control these and other behaviors.

They will also help us to ensure that those which we consider to be ideal are fomented. As you can imagine, this is going to take a constant effort on our part, but once we get going, we get some very interesting results… Keep reading this article, and learn some useful tips for the education of children!

The behavioral techniques that we are going to see can be divided into three: reinforcement, punishment and extinction. They can cause children’s behavior to increase, maintain, decrease or disappear. A reinforcement will be the one who has the probability of ensuring that the child continues to have a determined behavior or that he does something more often.

However, the reinforcement can be positive or negative. The first would be a stimulation which arises immediately after the conduct that one wants to maintain or which is favored. For example, if a child is told that he did well after picking up his toys, he will be more likely to start over the next day.

On the other hand, there is also negative reinforcement. This would mean removing something unpleasant for the child once he has done what we want him to do. Conveniently, for a young child, the fact that his mother is angry with him can be unpleasant, but if the mother calms down when he asks for forgiveness, it will lead him to ask for forgiveness more often when he notices that his mother is. angry.

Just as reinforcement will help us promote certain behaviors that we consider desirable, we can use others to reduce them to our parental discipline; it is about punishment and extinction. As with reinforcement, these behavioral techniques must appear immediately after these acts that we want to modify.

Punishment can also be positive or negative. Positive punishment will involve presenting something unpleasant to the child after he or she has done what is believed to be inappropriate. When someone in the family scolds the child for doing something stupid, all they do is apply this technique.

The negative punishment, on the other hand, would consist in withdrawing something that the child likes after this behavior that one wants him to stop having. An example of this technique would be to prohibit the child from playing for two minutes after hitting another child or after generating a conflict.

Some parents will surely have noticed that scolding is not always effective in reducing certain behaviors. In fact, the reverse occurs: this behavior is fomented. It can happen sometimes. Why ? Because this reprimand will act as a positive reinforcement for the child.

But how ? As a result, this more or less heated conversation may not act as an unpleasant stimulation for the child, but as a temptation. In other words, it may be that what the child is perceiving here is the social attention rather than the parents’ unease about it.

As a result, social attention is one of the greatest positive reinforcements there is, for children as well as for adults. Thus, the child sees that the more silly things he does, the more attention he receives from his parents. On this occasion, what we will tend to do will be to start the extinction.

Extinguishing consists in removing the reinforcement of a pipe which has been reinforced previously. In other words, if the child does something stupid, what we will have to do will be to act as if nothing has happened (we withdraw the attention, a positive reinforcement). This supposes that one continues to do what one was doing, without saying anything. Thus, the child will stop carrying out this annoying behavior. Interesting, isn’t it? We invite you to put this into practice!

Images by Zivile & Arunas, Alexander Dummer and Hunter Johnson