Techniques For Educating Children: Reinforcement, Punishment And Extinction

Tantrums, crying, screaming, pinching, slapping… When it comes to the education of children, sometimes we don’t know how to stop these inadequate behaviors.  Some techniques can help us control these and other unpleasant attitudes.

At the same time, they will serve to consolidate the attitudes that, conversely, we consider suitable. As you can imagine, a constant effort on the part of the parents will be required, however once they are put in motion, they will serve to obtain extremely interesting results … Read on and you will learn some useful tricks for the education of the little ones.

The first technique: reinforcement

The techniques we will see today are three: reinforcement, punishment and extinction. If applied, these strategies can favor the child’s attitude, make it remain unchanged, reduce it or make it disappear. The  reinforcement is the element that will bring the baby to continue to adopt a certain conduct or that the present more often.

Well, reinforcement can be positive or negative. In the first case we mean  a positive stimulus to be presented immediately after the behavior we want to maintain or reinforce. Example: if we compliment a child immediately after he has tidied up his room, we will have a better chance of it happening again the next day.

On the other hand, negative reinforcement also exists. This supposes the disappearance of an element considered negative by the child after inducing him to do what we want him to do. In practical terms, for a small child, it can be very unpleasant that his mother is angry with him; if the mother passes the anger when he apologizes, the chances are that the child will come back to apologize when he notices that his mother is angry.

The second technique: punishment

Just as reinforcement serves to enhance behaviors that we consider positive, there are also other techniques that parents can implement during the educational phase. It is about punishment and extinction. The three techniques  must be activated immediately after the occurrence of the child’s behavior that is to be changed.

Punishment can also be positive or negative. In the first case, the intention is to put the child in an unpleasant position for him whenever he behaves according to terms deemed inappropriate. When a family member yells at the child after the child has committed a prank, this technique is being implemented.

Negative punishment, on the other hand, is to deprive the child of something he likes after he has shown the conduct that we would like him to go away. An example of this is when we stop playing for a few minutes because our child has had a fight with another child or has generated some kind of conflict.

The latest technique: extinction

Let’s imagine that as a parent you have already noticed that  your reproaches have not helped to make a certain attitude disappear. Indeed, perhaps the opposite has happened: they have served to foment him. Don’t worry, it is a phenomenon that often happens. Because? Because your lecture worked as a positive reinforcement for the little one.

How is it possible? Well … it seems that sometimes the reproaches, more or less heated as they are, do not have an unpleasant effect for the child, but appear, on the contrary, desirable. Let’s explain it better: it may happen that the child does not perceive the discomfort of the parents towards him, but instead interprets the scolding as a dose of social attention. 

Social attention is one of the most powerful positive reinforcers there is, for both children and adults. In this sense, the child understands that the bigger his pranks are, the more attention he will receive from his parents. In these cases, it will be appropriate to activate the so-called extinction technique.

Extinction consists in repressing the reinforcement of a conduct that was previously reinforced. In other words, if the child misbehaves, we will have to behave as if nothing had happened (we will withdraw attention, positive reinforcement). This means continuing to do what we were doing without saying a word. In this way, the child will eventually repress that inappropriate behavior. Interesting techniques, aren’t they? We invite you to put them into practice.

Images courtesy of Zivile & Arunas, Alexander Dummer and Hunter Johnson.