Brain Rules for Baby (John Medina) / quote 79 of 91
Punishment must be firm, consistent and swift
How not to punish kids? Try the 1979 movie Kramer vs. Kramer. The film is about a divorcing couple and the impact of the experience on their young son. Dustin Hoffman plays the workaholic, unengaged dad whose parenting instincts have the subtlety of dog food. The scene opens with the little boy refusing to eat dinner, instead demanding chocolate-chip ice cream. “You’re not going to have any of it until you eat all your dinner,” the dad warns. The son ignores him, gets a chair, and reaches up for the freezer. “Better not do that!” dad admonishes. The kid opens the freezer anyway. “You’d better stop right there, fella. I’m warning you.” The son brings the ice cream to the table, acting as if his dad were invisible. “Hey! Did you hear me? I’m warning you, you take one bite out of that, and you’re in big trouble!” The boy dips the spoon in the ice cream, staring intently at his father. “Don’t you dare! You put that ice cream in your mouth, and you are in very, very, very big trouble.” The kid opens his mouth wide. “Don’t you dare go anywhere beyond that.” When the boy does, his dad snatches him up out of his chair and throws him in his bedroom. “I hate you!” the kid yells. The dad shouts, “And I hate you back, you little shit!” He slams the door. The coolest heads, obviously, were not prevailing. The following four guidelines show the way to punishment that’s actually effective. • It must be punishment. The punishment should be firm. This does NOT mean child abuse. But it also doesn’t mean a watered-down version of the consequences. The aversive stimulus must, in fact, be aversive to be effective. • It must be consistent. The punishment must be administered consistently—every time the rule is broken. That is one of the reasons why hot stoves alter behavior so quickly: Every time you put your hand on it, you get burned. The same is true with punishment. The more exceptions you allow, the harder it will be to extinguish the behavior. To borrow a familiar phrase: Let your yes be yes and your no be no. Consistency must be there not only from one day to the next but from one caregiver to the next. Mom and Dad and Nanny and stepparents and grandparents and in-laws all need to be on the same page regarding both the household rules and the consequences for disobeying them. Punishments are obnoxious by definition—everyone wants to escape them—and kids are unbelievably talented at discovering loopholes. You can’t give them the opportunity to play one caregiver against another if you want them to have a moral backbone. All they’ll form is cartilage. • It must be swift. If you are trying to teach a pigeon to peck on a bar but delay the reinforcement by 10 seconds, you can do it all day and the pigeon won’t get it. Shrink that delay to 1 second, and the bird learns to peck the bar in 15 minutes. We don’t have the same brains as birds, but whether we are being punished or rewarded, we have remarkably similar reactions to delay. Researchers have measured…