Child development concepts and applications

Behaviorism and Childhood Development: An Educator and Parent's Perspective

"Haven't I told you a hundred times," says a parent to an errant child, "not to put your muddy shoes on the sofa!" Yes, a behaviorist might note, the parent has told the child to do so -- but the parent has not taught the child, only told the child. The act of telling the child not to muddy the sofa in behaviorist would be conveyed, for instance, by rewarding the child for removing his or her shoes after coming in the house, and forcing the child to clean up after his or her transgression. Incrementally, through conditioning over the course of a series of proceses rather than cognitive actions alone the child would be taught in such a fashion.

The behaviorist Hempel (1949) claimed that "all psychological statements that are meaningful . . . are translatable into statements that do not involve psychological concepts," but only concepts for physical behavior (p. 18). In other words, even adults do not learn by abstractions and language, but by doing. Crudely put in the words of E.C. Tolman, for example, wrote that "everything important in psychology . . . can be investigated in essence through the continued experimental and theoretical analysis of the determiners of rat behavior at a choice point in a maze" (1938, p. 34).

This may sound like a radical challenge to current feelings-centered educational pscyhology. But the behaviorist objection," wrote Skinner, "to inner states is not that they do not exist, but that they are not relevant in a functional analysis" (Skinner 1953, p. 35). 'Not relevant' means, for Skinner, means that they do no real work in the world of the classroom -- an important rememberance for teachers who must create a functional learnining environment for students with diverse educational backgrounds An adequate science of behavior," he wrote, "must consider events taking place within the skin of the organism . . . As part of behavior itself" (1984, p. 617).

However, this point-of-view need not seem as Neandrathal as it appears on the surface. It is easy to indulge in the rhetoric about sharing, for example, and much more difficult for a child to actually share his or her snack with a fellow student. By emphasizing activity, and rewarding positive activities rather than merely verbally expressing moral values or internal states, teachers and parents may deploy behaviorism in a creative and morally uplifting fashion. Teaachers must create a reinforcing classroom environment that rewards, stressing Skinner's statement that "it is in the nature of an experimental analysis of human behavior that it should strip away the functions previously assigned to autonomous man and transfer them one by one to the controlling environment" (1971, p. 198).