Behavior Management in Education -- Empowerment, not Punishment
When having a conversation with an educational colleague who does not believe in the concept of behavior management for young children, one would first explain what exactly the concept of behavior management is.
Fundamentally, behavior management is an empowering educational tool by which students are rewarded for exhibiting positive and desirable behavior in the classroom towards others and in regards to their learning, and discouraged from exhibiting negative behaviors.
This is accomplished by only rewarding positive behavior examples and by punishing children not through punitive measures so much as withholding the stimulus of a reward.
The strategy of behavior modification can be employed in a variety of age-appropriate settings, varying the demonstrable reward with the child's level of intellectual and emotional maturity. The issues of age appropriateness is particularly important to the theory of behavior management because the child must comprehend, not simply that his or her behavior is pleasing to an adult or results in a reward, but that he or she has the ability to bring about change in his or her environment through his or her own...
If a child is punished with a behavior modification system the child must also comprehend not simply that he or she is being punished, but that the punishment is the result of his or her behavior.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs and the age-appropriate nature of behavior management are particularly integral to one another, in that Maslow outlines a pyramid of needs, based upon the basic desires of food and shelter as its core. Maslow also suggests that foundational need such as food and shelter must be satisfied first, before the individual can be concerned with other needs being met. Children must first have basic care before they can be worried about being kind to others, for instance. All children must have a sense of security in a system of reliable rewards and punishment before they cab create a personal and social system of morality that ultimately results in fulfilling the pinnacle of the hierarchy, a sense of emotional and intellectual fulfillment of moral and societal principles.
In behavior management, a young child must first be shown how his or her needs can be met, through appropriate behavior, on a basic functional level. For instance, a very young child must understand that if he or she…
