Operant conditioning is an important process that affects the way humans behave. Operant conditioning is one of those things that happens, but you just don’t know the name of it. According to Myers and DeWall, “In operant conditioning, organisms associate their own actions with consequences. Actions followed by reinforcers increase; those followed by punishments often decrease”(p.290). Which means that operant conditioning is the relationship between your behavior and the consequences that come from it. The process of operant behavior happens throughout our whole lifetime. This process is extremely important when disciplining our children because in order to shape a child into behaving good we have to show them the consequences of good behavior. “In my opinion, the best kept secret of American child psychology is that children who are not spanked are, on average, the best behaved and have the fewest psychological and social problems”(Strauss, 2017, p.1). When children don’t behave good and start to act out parents choose to physically punish their children, whether it's a slap on the hand, a slap on the butt, or even a pinch in your arm. However, physical punishments are ineffective in the operant conditioning process because it has a negative influence on your child and their behavior.
When trying to explain operant behavior it can become a bit difficult. There are various steps in order to understand operant conditioning, we need to start from the beginning. As I said before, Operant conditioning is the relationship between one's behavior and the consequences that come from it. The idea of operant conditioning first belonged to Edward L. Thorndike, but he referred to it as law of effect. Then BF Skinner expanded on this law of effect and was able to develop behavioral technology. The behavioral technology that Skinner was able to develop helped with the shaping of behavior control. It first starts off with a goal. For example, let's say the goal is to help your child do better in school. Shaping is part of operant conditioning process, it helps change and guide you to a certain behavior that is your goal. To help the child do better in school, you must help shape them into wanting to do better in school. Every behavior has consequences and that is why in the operant conditioning process, there are two types of consequences. The two types of consequences are reinforcements and punishments. For the reinforcement consequences, there is a positive reinforcement and a negative reinforcement. For the punishment consequences, there is a positive punishment and a negative punishment. “Reinforcement is any event that strengthens (increases the frequency of) a preceding response” (Myers & DeWall, 2012, p.291). Which means that it’s going to increase the probability of achieving the goal. Positive reinforcement means that something is being added, so your more likely to achieve the goal. So, in order to help the child do better in school, when they do their homework they get a reward. By giving them a reward, it increases the possibility of the child do better in school. Negative reinforcement means you take something away to increase the goal to do better in school. An example of negative reinforcement is by lowering their time to watch tv. By lowering their time to watch tv, they will most likely try to do better in school, in order to avoid getting less time to watch tv. However, punishment is when the consequences of your behavior lower the possibility of you accomplishing that goal. Positive punishment is when you add something to the situation to help the child avoid repeating the same bad behavior. For example, a positive punishment to help the child do better in school is by reprimanding them. A reprimand is a positive punishment because your giving the child something negative in order to discourage the behavior of not wanting to do good in school. An example of a negative punishment is grounding them. Grounding the child is an example of a negative punishment because you are taking away the freedom of the child. So, this will decrease the likelihood of the child not doing good in school.
Operant conditioning is an important process in a child's life. It is an important process in
a child’s life because this helps teach the child that their behavior has consequences. A child starts to learn from the moment they are born. Our brains never stop processing the events happening around us. Since children are constantly processing everything going on around them, parents have to be careful what they do and say around and to their children. Parents have to chose how to behave in front of their kids because whatever they do affects them. Physical punishment is a positive punishment in the operant conditioning process. Physical punishment is ineffective in the operant conditioning process because your child will learn the act of hitting when he or she doesn’t get their way. “First, physical punishment generly, and spanking specifically, are ineffective at improving children’s behavior and, in fact, lead to a worsening of it over time”(Gershoff, Lee & Durrant, 2017, p.1). For example, if they are acting out because they don’t want to take a shower, so you spank them. In that moment they learn, when I say no they hit me. They will reciprocate the same action towards you. If they ask to go to McDonald’s and you say no, they will want to hit and probably hit you because you said no. Any parent will be mad when their child hits them, but the actions children do are learned from people at home, usually their parents. So the person to blame in these types of situations are the parents.
Physical punishment has a negative impact on children's lives. “Setting a good example for problem solving helps children develop problem solving skills” (Ballantine, 2001). Parents are the primary examples that children have. If parents set a bad example for the child, then the possibility of the child behaving this way is high. “Corporal punishment may succeed in temporarily controlling a child's behaviors. The trouble is, the children may suffer from low self-esteem and depression, become overly aggressive, and exhibit antisocial behavior later as a result”(Mitchell, 2017, p.1). It’s unfortunate that a lot of kids have have been exposed to this kind of behavior. This type of behavior from a parent or guardian is traumatizing because kids embed those memories and those punishments into their brains.
Physical punishment is not effective as one of the consequences for their behavior. A child's behavior is influenced by their parent of guardian. The operant conditioning process is important when it comes to the relationship between behavior and consequences. The type of repercussions that a parent chooses to correct your behavior is also important. There are negative and positive punishments. As I have mentioned before, the positive punishment is the physical punishment. The negative punishment would be not taking the child to the park over the weekend. There are so many other types of punishments that parents can swap with physical punishment. Physical punishment is taking punishment to another level because now the parent is risking their child becoming bullies themselves and stirring up emotions that a child should not have to experience. A child should not have to deal with emotions like fear and pain from their own parents.