Thanks for Nothing Skinner

Throughout the past few months I have learned a great deal about how the behaviorist culture has penetrated, and arguable poisoned, our society. We have be "conditioned" (to use the term B.F Skinner and his behaviorist cronies coined) to use a system of rewards and punishments in daily life. In the classroom, at home, with our children, in the workplace, in communities. If you aren't buying the argument ask yourself the last time you put forth more effort in something just because you wanted to. Not for a shiny gold star or Christmas bonus, or to avoid losing a teddy bear or receiving a lecture. Well, possibly this is a different argument for a different time, today I will focus on this Skinnarian type thinking in regards to parenting.

Effective, active, unconditional parents operate on the following principle: don't change the behavior, meet the need. If you are more concerned about what your child is thinking, feeling, and deciding (and ultimately what they are becoming) than what they are doing, you have hit on the key aspect of parenting.

Meet the needs of your child, not just focus on correcting behavior. If you have a child who clings to your leg with surprising strength for such a little person and is constantly hanging on you, don't just label them as annoying and push them away to change that behavior. Meet the need. They as desperately pleading for attention with these actions. Give it to them. And then the secret: they will stop clinging to you and making your day difficult. They just are thirsty for attention, give them that tall drink of time and caring and they will be refreshed.

Why is it so important that we train our children like Skinner's pigeons? What is the motive? Ultimate control? Isn't there something slightly disturbing about ultimate control over another person. Your children have needs, meet them. They have certain behaviors that will annoy you, if unnecessary, don't seek to correct and control them. Let's focus on what our children are becoming and not just whether they can be "conditioned" to avoid behaviors that annoy us. After all, your child is a person not a pigeon.