Attacks of anger, crying, screaming, biting, punching . . . When it comes to educating children, sometimes we don’t really know how to stop such behaviors that aren’t right, so behavioral techniques can help us control these and other behaviors.
It will also be helpful to promote behaviors that we consider correct, as we can imagine, will require constant effort on our part, but once we start putting that into practice, are we already getting some very interesting results?And learn some helpful tips for educating children!
Education is not preparation for life, education is life itself. -John Dewey-
The behavioral techniques we are going to talk about are divided into three: reinforcement, punishment and extinction; may lead to an increase, maintenance, decrease or disappearance of children’s behavior; reinforcement will be the one that will likely make the child continue. engaging in certain behavior or doing so more often.
“The best remedy for raising good children is to make them happy. -Oscar Wilde-
Keep in mind that the booster can be positive or negative, the first would be a stimulus that appears immediately after the behavior you want to maintain or improve, for example, if you tell a child how well he did after picking up his toys, they are more likely to do the same the next day.
On the other hand, there is also a negative reinforcement, this would mean taking something unpleasant from the child once he does something that we want him to do, practically the mother is angry with her young child because she is stubborn, but if she stops to be in a bad mood when she apologizes, she will make her apologize more often when she realizes that her mother is upset.
Just as reinforcement will help us improve the behaviors we consider desirable, we can use other techniques to reduce certain behaviors in our parenting discipline. These are punishment and extinction. As with reinforcement, these behavioral techniques should be practiced immediately after the actions we want to change.
Punishment can also be positive or negative. Positive punishment means presenting something unpleasant to the child after he has done something that we consider inappropriate. When a family member scolds the child after making a joke, he or she uses this technique.
The negative punishment, on the other hand, would be to remove something that the child loves after performing this behavior that we want him to stop doing, an example of this technique would be to take away the play activity two minutes after hitting another child. or generate conflict.
I suppose some parents have seen that reprimands have not diminished some behavior, in fact, it is quite the opposite: they encourage it. Don’t worry, it can happen sometimes, why? Because this reprimand will act as a positive reinforcement for the child.
But like? It turns out that this more or less irritated conversation may not act as aversive stimulant for the child, but rather as something he likes, that is, what the child perceives in the situation can be social attention, rather than discomfort of parents with the situation. Child.
“Children are educated by what the adult does and not by what he says” – Carl Gustav Jung-
It turns out that social protection is one of the biggest positive reinforcements that exist, both for children and adults, so the child sees that the more harm it does, the more care it will receive from its parents. extinction must be put into practice.
Extinction is to remove the reinforcement from a previously reinforced pipe, that is, if the child makes an “art”, we will have to act as if nothing (we will withdraw his attention, a positive reinforcement). We’ll keep doing what we did without telling you, this way the kid will get tired of this awkward behavior. I invite you to put this into practice!
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