Operant Conditioning: Conditioning a Child\'s

¶ … Operant conditioning: Conditioning a child's behavior

Although they may not realize it, parents regularly make use of operant conditioning when disciplining young children in the grocery store. Parents must teach their children how to exercise appropriate impulsive control, even when the children are bored or impatient, Learning to sit still, keep one's hands to one's self, and to behave well in anticipation of a reward or to avoid a punishment are all necessary parts of becoming a school-age child and a social being. Operant conditioning, as developed by B.F. Skinner, is a learning model that involves schedules of reinforcement; selective reinforcement of good and bad behavior; the control of a stimulus by the experimenter to 'shape' behavior; increasing the emotional motivation for performing positive behaviors, and decreasing the motivation to exercise negative behaviors (Skinner 2007). One of Skinner's most famous examples involved conditioning a rat to press a pellet whenever the rat was hungry. He starved the rat; put it in a controlled environment, and soon the rat learned how to press a lever to obtain food.

This was very different from Pavlov's dog coming to associate food with the sound of a bell. In Skinner's experiment, "when the lever was pressed by the rat a small pellet of food was dropped onto a tray. The rat soon learned that when he pressed the lever he would receive some food" (Rubin 2007). The action of pressing the lever was reinforced by the positive stimulus of the food. Skinner also observed "If pressing the lever is reinforced (the rat gets food) when a light is on but not when it is off, responses (pressing the lever) continue to be made in the light but seldom, if at all, in the dark. The rat has formed discrimination between light and dark. When one turns on the light, a response occurs, but that is not a Pavlovian conditioned reflex response" (Rubin 2007).

Learning to behave with discrimination and exercise appropriate behavior in given situations (whether in the light for the rat or in a social context for a child) is often aided through the use of operant conditioning. For example, many small children often cry at the prospect of being taken grocery shopping. If the child does not cry in anticipation to being taken shopping, the parent will reward this behavior with positive stimuli, perhaps raising his or her voice in a cheerful fashion, or allowing the child to bring along a favorite toy. This is an example of positive reinforcement.

When the child cries in the store, the parent will rebuke the child, and inform the child that there will be consequences, if the behavior persists. This is an example of punishment in operant conditioning terms: the parent uses harsh words to silence the child. or, the parent may use the technique of 'extinction,' that is, ignoring the child until he or she ceases crying. Good behavior on the part of the child is rewarded, either with praise "you're such a good boy" or with another type of reward pleasing to the child. For example, the child may enjoy helping the parent, and allowing the child to pick out produce or to help make choices about the week's meals may act as a positive reward for good behavior.

In contrast, negative behavior such as pulling things off of shelves, running away, or taunting a sibling, may result in the small child being forced to hold his mother's hand, and the privilege of being permitted to wander around is thus withdrawn. This creates a type of operant conditioning known as negative reinforcement: the child does not like being constrained. The parent tells the child: 'if you behave, I will let you walk by yourself." To escape the child agrees, and the negative stimulus of the parent's hand is withdrawn.

Because of the nature of the situation, most parents use the conditioning interval known as fixed, in that their conditioning stimulus is applied immediately upon the child's response. However, many also apply a kind of variable ratio, whereby if the child is very good and exhibits a number of positive behaviors, the child will be rewarded by a special treat at the end of the trip, like candy or a small toy (Huitt & Hummel 1997). As the child gets older, the schedule of reinforcement may also be more variable -- a series of good behaviors gains an eventual reward, rather than an immediate reward being bestowed for every good or bad behavior.