Positive Reinforcement And Negative Reinforcement

Positive Reinforcement and Negative Reinforcement

When raising a child, an important factor of parenting is the method used to discipline and teach children. Should a parent focus on rewarding the goods, or disciplining the wrongs? The question comes down to teaching through fear or teaching through pleasure. And the most important question, which is more effective and the best for a child? Although it is easiest to just discipline a child, psychologists actually claim that positive reinforcement is the best for teaching a child rather than negative reinforcement.

Although positive and negative reinforcements are considered opposites, they both have one similarity. Both types of reinforcement are used to influence a child to complete a task

An example of a negative reinforcement could be a child putting away toys so the child’s parents will stop yelling at them. Another example could be a child being excused from the dinner table after eating all their food. Negative reinforcement may seem like the most practical option for teaching an individual to associate a more favorable situation with completing a certain task or meeting a standard but is not because of how inconsistent negative reinforcement can be. When negative reinforcement is not practiced consistently, the result is a failure for individuals to properly associate completing a task in order for a consequence or displeasure to be removed; this results in the second flaw, which is manipulation. Examples of manipulating negative reinforcement could be a child that does not want to eat vegetables, so rather than eat them, the child could just wait for the parent to look away or leave and just throw the vegetables under the table for the dog to eat. Another example could be manipulating negative reinforcement so the effects are reversed; for example, when a child wants something, the child could just scream or cry until the parents are tired of hearing the child and eventually give the child what they want. Repetition of manipulating these flaws of negative reinforcement is how an individual begins to associate an

Similar to negative reinforcement, negative punishment also removes a factor in a situation, but rather than remove the negative aspect for a more favorable outcome, a positive aspect is removed, resulting in a negative outcome. The most common example of negative punishment is receiving a timeout when a child misbehaves. Another example of negative punishment could be two siblings fighting over a toy, so the toy is removed by a parent. Although negative punishment is a frequently used technique, it is usually unreliable. Negative punishment is unreliable because it is harder to consistently practice. An inconsistency in both negative reinforcement and negative punishment can cause resentment and confusion for the child. Because of the inconsistency, negative reinforcements are usually only effective in certain