Kids can do all kinds of things to drive you nuts. How do you get your kids to
stop screaming?
So way back in shrink school, I learned a lot about behavioral
psychology and I got to tell you about this because in one of my classes,
behavioral psychology from Dr. Paul Robinson, I come in the first of the
semester, I sit down with all of my colleagues were in a doctoral program
and he announces to us that our grade will be based on a final exam, the final
exam will be taken by a chicken and then he handed us a chicken, little baby chick
and my lab partner and I, Dr. Mark Normand, a neuropsychologist in San Diego,
we both passed the class. We got this little chick and we had to train this
chick over the course of the semester to perform certain tasks, to turn this way
or to turn that way or to rotate her, to peck a little disc in a box. We had to
train it to do all of these things that were on the final and if our chick
failed, woody failed. Well we both passed the
class but I learned a lot of things from that chicken. Behavioral psychology is
pretty simple, simple enough that a chicken can learn these things. No, your
kids are very different from a chicken but some of the principles are very
useful as we try to answer questions like how do I get my kid to stop
screaming? How do I get my kid to start cleaning his room? Or how do I get my kid
to do his homework? All of these things can be tied back to some basic
behavioral psychology principles that I'm going to share with you next. So if
you look at the board, there are two basic ways to change behavior. I've
written reinforcement on this side of the board, punishment on this side. Now
punishment has kind of bad reputation out there but you're going to learn some
things about punishment today that will help to bring that into perspective.
These are simply two different ways to change behavior. On the up and down side
here, I've put a green plus sign and a red minus sign. Positive and
negative, plus and minus, I'm going to tie those together because that would be
important. We can have positive reinforcement and we can have negative
reinforcement. Now by negative reinforcement, I don't mean bad
reinforcement. You know I'm the positivity guy.
I just mean minus, okay. We'll come right back to that. Punishment, we can have positive
punishment. Huh? That sounds weird. I'll explain that or negative punishment
which doesn't mean bad punishment, it means minus. So thinking about the plus and
minus as adding, subtracting. So if we look at them as math symbols, it'll make
more sense. Now before we get into that, here's a quick definition of
reinforcement and punishment. Reinforcement increases a behavior, in
other words, if you want to see more of it, you reinforce it. Got it? Some of the
behaviors your kids have you want to see more of, right? Or some of the behaviors
you haven't seen yet you'd really love to see more of. We're going to reinforce
those. Punishment decreases a behavior. Now I know both of these words have a
reputation, let's just simplify it and say reinforcement increases behavior,
we're going to do that if you want to see more of it,
punishment decreases behavior, we're going to do that if you want to see less of
it like misbehavior or screaming or begging or whining. Okay, you with me? Let's
look at the plus and minus now, the add or the subtract. Positive reinforcement,
it's when you add something in order to increase the behavior so you're going to
add something they like so this is a payoff, this is like that the reward for
what they're doing so you'd give them a treat, you give them a sticker, you give
them something that they want. See, your adding
something that's a positive reinforcement and it's tied to the
behavior that you want to increase. You with me? This is a fun game. Negative
reinforcement, remember, negative doesn't mean bad, it means subtract, you're going
to take away something in order to increase a behavior. What are you going
to take away? You're going to take away something they don't like in order to
increase some behavior. You know what? Kids are really good at this one, whining
for example, okay. When your kid is whining, "Oh please. I want this." or begging
right? Pretend like you're at the store. "Oh please, will you buy me some candy?
Please. Will you buy me some candy?" Do you like the whining? No. What's the
kid trying to do? Well, the kid's trying to get you to buy him the candy, right? What
does the parent do? Finally they're like, "Oh fine. Here just take it." They buy him
the candy. What does the kid do? Negative reinforcement, they take away something
the parent doesn't like in order to increase the behavior of buying the
candy. Brilliant. We can do it as parents too but what we're taking away is
something that the kid doesn't want in order to increase the appropriate
behavior. Let's go over to the punishment side now. Okay, now punishment isn't a bad
thing, remember punishment is just something that decreases a given
behavior. So in positive punishment, we're going to add something and because we
want to decrease the behavior, we're going to add something they don't like.
So this is where you give them something that they don't want as a result of
whatever behavior you're trying to decrease. Treking all this? For example,
extra chores. Do they want extra chores? No but a positive punishment
would be to add something that they don't like in order to decrease any
particular behavior. Okay, so they act up in some certain way,
they get extra chores. That's an example of a positive punishment. What
about negative punishment? Remember, negative doesn't mean bad and neither
does punishment. Negative means minus, subtract. So we're going to take away
something that they do want in order to decrease a behavior. Got it? Taking away
something that they like is an example of a negative punishment and common
examples of that are taking away access to games for example, electronic gaming
systems. Alright, that's something they do want
and to lose that is a negative punishment because it takes away
something that they like. Now why did we go into all this detail about behavioral
psychology? Because you've got a lot of tools as a parent. Now let's go back to
our first question, how do you get kids to stop screaming or whining or begging?
These are things you don't want to see, you want to decrease that behavior so
you're going to use punishment in order to decrease that behavior. If it's
something we wanted to see more of, which one would we pick? Reinforcement, exactly.
That's why it's important to understand the behavioral psychology.
Now which punishment would be most appropriate to decrease the screaming or
the whining or the begging that you're hearing from your kids? Here's another
little piece of child psychology, see if you can figure out why they're doing it.
Now you'll hear all the time "Oh, they're doing it for attention." Well are they?
Maybe. Often it gets them what they want, often they're putting that in there so
that they can use negative reinforcement on their parent to get you to do
something that they want you to do and they'll take away the whining as soon as
you do it, it's not fair, is it? But we're going to turn the tables and make sure
that we understand the behavioral psychology so that we can help our kids
to have more appropriate behavior. Usually, for something like screaming or
begging or whining, we want to use a negative punishment by taking away
the thing that they want in order to decrease that behavior. Basically you're
taking away the payoff. What if they're doing it for attention? You may have
heard the saying "Bad breath is better than no breath at all." And for kids,
that's probably true, they want to have that attention even if it's not positive
attention so taking away the payoff is what often is going to decrease
that behavior. You take away your attention to it, you simply ignore it.
Now here's what's tricky about that, it's called the extinction curve. This is
another thing I learned from a chicken. The extinction curve is when you start
to ignore something, a behavior, you take away the payoff for that behavior, the
kids first thought is, "Oh my gosh. I must be losing my touch. I better turn up the
volume." So they turn up the volume on you, it gets worse at first. What if you cave
in right then and give them what it is that they want? Well that's a
reinforcement to them, they're getting something that they want, they're more
likely to do that behavior again. You got to outlast among this, sometimes
that behavior will increase before it drops off. Be consistent, hang in there,
you'll see that, yeah, it'll increase a little bit and then it'll
drop off because they're not getting the payoff for that behavior. Hopefully that
gives you a few ideas of what you can do about the screaming, the yelling, the
whining, the begging, behavioral psychology that will give you some good
tools as a parent. Wow, that's a lot of behavioral psychology today at Live On
Purpose TV. Hopefully you'll find that useful and maybe you know somebody else
who would benefit from this, please share.