The mom looked down, shocked, at her bare legs and worn underpants. She was standing at the edge of a crowded gym. Her 4 year old crowed triumphantly, holding the skirt he had just tugged to her ankles, his eyes on her face and ready to run.
She snatched up the skirt, snagged him by the waist, and strode from the room.
I never saw her again.
She had been asked by the YMCA instructor to watch her older son, who was maybe 8 years old. Her eldest was enrolled in a Tang Soo Do martial arts class. The teacher was having trouble with him, and had asked her to come to see if she could offer some insight and help before the son was asked to leave.
From the beginning, her four year old had been unhappy.
It was a big gym, with 20 or so kids lined up in disciplined rows from the most to the least experienced. The parents were huddled at the back, mostly sitting in the crowd of folded chairs, reading or talking quietly while they watched. Someone gave her a chair when she walked in, seeing how antsy her young one was.
He started out on her lap, but got up as she ignored his squirms. He played for a minute or so on the floor, then started wandering around and behind the gymnastic mats. After a few passes, he began to walk and then run faster and faster, back and forth along the end of the gym. His mom stood up next to the door, ignoring him, her eyes on the class. As he ran by, he would hit her leg and she would glance down, say hush, then turn her eyes back to her eldest.
Now his running was faster and more and more into the room. He started making loud swooshing sounds as he banked his turns. His hands become more grasping as he snatched at her skirt as he ran by.
She ignored him.
Finally, he ran up and stopped, grabbing the elastic waist of her skirt, and tugging it down. He looked at her expectantly.
The whole interaction had taken, maybe, 5 minutes.
It takes a lot of training for a child to be so effective at getting his mother’s attention.
Gerri Patterson is a developmental psychologist who has studied parent-child relationships like this since at least the 1960’s. His background is in traditional behaviorism and social learning theory, which he has used elegantly to help understand why sometimes parents can train their kids to act exactly how they don’t want them to, and how some kids can train parents to parent them badly.
The tools are simply: reward, punishment, negative reinforcement, and modeling.
Psychologists use words very specifically and in ways that don’t always match our day-to-day usage of them. To a behaviorist, the words reward, punishment, and negative reinforcement are defined by whether or not they increase or decrease the likelihood that the behavior that preceded them are going to happen again. It has nothing to do with whether reactions themselves are pleasant or unpleasant.
- A reward is anything that increases the likelihood that a behavior will happen again. You give me flowers, I tell you I love you, you’re more likely to give me flowers again. Saying “I love you” is a reward. Stealing a cookie and eating it without getting caught is inherently rewarding.
- Punishment is anything that decreases the likelihood that a behavior will happen again. You give me flowers, I don’t really pay attention, you’re less likely to do it again. When my dog comes up to me expectantly, begging to go out, and I ignore her, it decreases the likelihood that she’ll do it again (i.e., it is a punishment) and increases the likelihood that she will meet her needs in other ways (i.e., by peeing on the floor).
- Negative reinforcement can also be thought of as escape conditioning. Here the word ‘negative’ means the absence of something (like ‘negative space’ in art – the space around an object). The key thing in negative reinforcement is that you are in a situation that you do not like. Getting away from that situation is rewarding. I yell at you. You leave the room and feel better. You hold a gun to me and ask for my wallet. I am terrified and hand it to you. You put the gun away. Your taking the gun away (withdrawing the aversive stimulus) is rewarding and makes it much more likely that the next time someone holds a gun to me I’ll do whatever they say. Negative reinforcement.
The tricky part of all this is figuring out which is which and in what situation. For example, if you study hard for a test and get a B, that grade is rewarding if you thought you were going to fail. It is punishment if you hoped for an A. If you had gotten drunk the night before and thought you were going to fail the test, not failing would increase the likelihood that you’d get drunk again before your next test.
Understanding what is a reward and what is a punishment is especially difficult when you’re talking about something as complicated and nuanced as the interactions between kids and their parents. But it is really important to think about what is being taught (often accidentally and always by both parties) because parents and kids have hundreds of opportunities to reinforce each other’s behavior every single day. Parents shape kids and kids shape parents.
By carefully following kids from toddlerhood into early adulthood, Patterson has found that the kids who grow up to get in trouble – arrests, drug use, and jail time – tend to have experienced a particular pattern of reinforcement. There are lots of other ways to grow up to get in trouble too, obviously, but this is one clear pathway.
It begins before the child even starts school.
Step 1: Begin with a lively, active, stubborn, or difficult child.
Step 2: Teach the child that disobedience makes rules go away.
It’s easy. Ask them to put away their toys. When they don’t, ignore it and pick them up yourself. Or yell at them, but don’t make them do it. If they cry or whine or yell, tell them they can do it later. Or tomorrow. When they hit their brother instead of picking up the toys, send them both upstairs in separate rooms, where their other toys are. All parents do this sometimes. Parents whose kids grow up to get in trouble tend to do it a lot.
Step 3: Let the child teach you not to ask them to do anything they don’t want to and not to correct them when you don’t like how they behave. It is exhausting working with an uncooperative kid. Why ask them to turn off the tv, when last night it wound up in a two hour tantrum that left you both exhausted and angry? One of the most important steps to training a kid to behave badly is simply to stop trying to parent them because it is so, so hard and it never seems to work. Reinforcement works in both directions. And the more you’ve trained them not to listen, the better they can train you not to parent them.
Step 4: Fail to reward behaviors you like. Or, better still, punish good behaviors and reward bad ones. This is both subtle and important. When you’ve had a hard day and your child is playing happily – or even just zoning out in front of the tv – sometimes you just want to ignore them, hoping that it will last just five minutes longer. Parents whose kids tend to get into trouble ignore their children when they are well behaved and only pay attention to them they are bad. Bottom line: if you want attention, you’ve got to misbehave. The cliché that you should try to catch your kids being good has a lot of truth to it.
Parents can take this a step further by inadvertently punishing their children for being good. The toddler brings you a flower and you dismiss it as a dandelion. They proudly show you their drawing and you criticize the way they drew the tree. They swear at you and you laugh at the incongruity or tickle them when they hit you.
Step 5: Let the child teach you that they’re not fun to be around.
