Is punishment an effective behaviour modification strategy in children?
Punishment can be defined as the negative consequence of an action and usually is done in the form of a penance where the one who has committed a mistake has something of importance taken from them. This form of behaviour modification is one of many and contrary to popular belief is effective as it teaches compliance. However one report stated that it reinforces negativity in the child and can become the root of adolescent waywardness due to lack of understanding shown by adult figures, mostly due to the overly frequent use of physical punishment. Furthermore, apparently detrimental outcomes have been found for every alternative disciplinary tactic when investigated with similar analyses and all three reports explore the effects of both positive and negative reinforcement.
Child Outcomes of Nonabusive and Customary Physical Punishment by Parents, (Robert E. Larzelere), focused majorly on the causal effect of punishment on children and aimed to determine if the short-term outcomes of spanking were beneficial. In this report, the emphasis was placed on non-abusive physical punishment, primarily spanking, without completely focusing on the severity of its use or its comparison to other types of physical discipline. A great amount of research was obviously put into the article from various sources such as Psych Lit. The accuracy of this report was evident as it methodically and logically eliminated measures dominated by severity or abusiveness (eliminating 37 more studies) and measures focused on nonspanking tactics. Finally, the average age of the child when spanked had to be younger than 13 years (eliminating 42 otherwise eligible studies). Overall, the 38 q...
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...egative reinforcement are necessary to improve a child’s behaviour and furthermore punishment is effective in not only strengthening mother-child relationships but also increases obedience as opposed to constantly monitoring their activities. However, the limitations to these experiments make them reliable only to a certain extent and my own judgment is that punishment must be used scarcely and with reasoning.
Works Cited
1. Dishion T.J. and McMahon R.J. (1998), Parental Monitoring and the Prevention of Child and Adolescent Problem Behavior: A Conceptual and Empirical Formulation, Vol 1
2. Acker M.M. and O’Leary S.G. (1987), Effects of Reprimands and Praise on Appropriate Behavior in the Classroom, Vol 15 No4 p549-557
3. Larzelere R.E. (2000), Child Outcomes of Nonabusive and Customary Physical Punishment by Parents: An Updated Literature Review, Vol 3, No4
Spanking is the most effective form of discipline when a child knows doing something is wrong, but the child does it anyway. A child who is properly disciplined through spanking is being taught how to control her or his impulses and how to deal with all types of authorities in future environments. Parents can control their child’s future
Holden (2002) reviewed Gershoff’s (2002) meta-analyses of eighty-eight (88) studies and noted that there were both positive and negative outcomes associated with the punishment of spanking. According to Gershoff’s (2002) analysis, the one positive outcome was immediate compliance by the child (Holden, 2002). This result was found to be consistent in five (5) studies. Immediate compliance was defined as the child complying to the parents directive within five (5) seconds. In stark contrast, there were four (4) negative outcomes. The analysis showed a negative effect on the quality of the parent child relationship, the child’s mental health, the child’s perception of being a victim of physical child abuse, and also impacted aggression in adulthood (Holden, 2002).
In the early 1960’s Stanley Milgram (1963) performed an experiment titled Behavioral Study of Obedience to measure compliance levels of test subjects prompted to administer punishment to learners. The experiment had surprising results.
Smith states in his introduction “many studies have shown physical punishment — including spanking, hitting and other means of causing pain — can lead to increased aggression, antisocial behavior, physical injury and mental health problems for children.” Throughout the article, many studies show that children do become more aggressive however, there were also studies mentioned that support the use of physical punishment on children between the ages of two and six years old. This does show that his research is thorough however, it still leads to room for error in his broad statement of physical punishment causing harmful effects to
In this paper I will be discussing the information I have learned from the article “From Positive Reinforcement to Positive Behaviors”, by Ellen A. Sigler and Shirley Aamidor. The authors stress the importance of positive reinforcement. The belief is that teachers and adults should be rewarding appropriate behaviors and ignoring the inappropriate ones. The authors’ beliefs are expressed by answering the following questions: Why use positive reinforcement?, Are we judging children’s behaviors?, Why do children behave in a certain way?, Do we teach children what to feel?, Does positive reinforcement really work?, and How does positive reinforcement work?. The following work is a summary of "Positive Reinforcement to Positive Behaviors" with my thoughts and reflection of the work in the end.
Studies indicate that positive parenting, including normative development, monitoring, and discipline, clearly affects whether children will become delinquent. Adequate supervision of free-time activities, whereabouts, and peers are critical to assure that children do not drift into antisocial and delinquent patterns of behavior. Surprisingly, little is known about normative and moral development with the family as they relate to delinquency. Single-parent families, and in particular mother-only families, produce more delinquent children than two-parent families. Research indicates that parenting practices account for most, but not all, of the ...
...orce the good behaviour with rewards and decrease the likelihood of negative behaviour being repeated. The structured discipline of both parents and teachers help the child to appreciate that good behaviour is much more beneficial than bad behaviour but without this structure in one or both of these settings, could lead to the child not understanding, leading to it being much more difficult to correct behaviour that isn't wanted without resorting to drastic measures of physical or psychological punishment that would do more harm than good. Further research into helping the children in these sort of circumstances would be much more beneficial to the topic of child behaviour and punishment.
This essay will discuss whether it is thought that punishment is effective and whether it is currently thought to work, additionally it will examine the best ways to change a child’s behaviour in terms of positive and negative reinforcements. The issue of child punishment has received considerable critical attention within many cultures. Punishment towards children can be argued to be a very controversial area. It is argued that many people have been brought up with distinctive beliefs about punishments toward a child. A child’s upbringing is argued by many researchers to be key to how they will go on to treat their own children in the future. This can surely be argued to be a negative effect of physical punishment. It is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the effects of what severe punishment may have on a child. Later convictions of violence and the evidence of damaging effects on well-being, corporal punishment has on children is overwhelming. However, it is not ingrained that corporal punishment is definitely damaging. There is also sufficient evidence to corporal punishment being an effective form of discipline, if used appropriately. It is thought that corporal punishment helps parents retain control over their children’s behaviour. This essay will consider the various forms of punishment, such as physical punishments and whether they are considered to work. This is essay will also consider effective ways of changing a child’s behaviour including the use of classical and operant conditioning and studies that support the theories and how they can be applied to real life. Classical conditioning for example uses learning through association, memory prompts the person to associate an object/ sound to a certain behaviour. ...
.... I feel that in most cases, once a student has been punished through negative reinforcement for doing wrong, the student will attempt to correct such behavior in the future to avoid punishment. In addition, positive reinforcement should be given for those students who are the majority and behave, as well as for the students who are occasional troublemakers because positive reinforcement helps show what is correct behavior in response to bad behavior.
...E. (2000). Child Outcomes of Nonabusive and Customary Physical Punishment by Parents: An Updated Literature Review. Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review. doi:10.1023/A:1026473020315.
I agree with Baer’s opinion that behaviors need to be punished to produce upright morals for generations. It is through punishment that a parent will reduce the need to punish her child more at any time in their life. However, many parent’s, when punishing their children put much emphasis on the punishment itself rather than the behavior that caused the punishment (Family Education, 2015). Punishment need to be embraced and applauded by the community when a new punishment technique is brought about by the experts as it only serves to create a global morally upright
According to Charlie S (2016), positive reinforcement has been seen to be a more viable procedure than punishment. Actually, it can make children to concentrate on the positives and encouraging them is a valuable approach to guarantee good behavior.
Positive Discipline is a concept that can be extremely misinterpreted and when it is misused it can cause more harm than good. A common form of discipline for children is punishment and it is widely used because it is the believed to be very effective. “However, discipline comes from the Latin word discipulus or disciplini, which means a follower of truth, principle, or a venerated leader” (Nelson, pg. 15). Punishment in itself is not a positive method nor is it a positive form of leadership to follow or exert. (Quote) By eliminating punishment, using the kind but firm technique, and having mutual respect, child abuse can be significantly reduced or even prevented.
Physical punishment may cause a child psychological problems. First, if the physical punishment starts at an early age the child will be used to being physically punished, therefore, his or hers self-esteem may severely negative as he or she grows up. Second, it is a life-affecting act to physically punish a child because they will be traumatized. Eventually parents should think twice before they can physically punish their children. What they should think of is what problems they are causing the child in its life.
Due to the negative effects of corporal punishment on children’s futures, parents should not physically discipline their children. Corporally disciplined children tend to be more aggressive because they learn by example that violence is an acceptable way to interact with others. Physically punished children have lower rates of high school graduation and college attendance. These lowered rates, combined with increased aggression, may lead to greater incidence of misconduct, crime, and arrest as they grow older, which affect all aspects of the now-grown child’s life.