Using Conditioning Techniques on children

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  • Created by: curt703
  • Created on: 08-05-18 18:54

At Home (Disadvantage)

At home:

Techniques such as the naughty step are frequently criticised by childcare experts. Morris (2014) claims that the ‘naughty step’ can have long-term emotional effects.

Children do not have the same ability as adults to reflect on the naughty step experience. Without empathy and help with their feelings, the naughty step may ultimately have a negative effect on development.

A further issue is consistency. Parents may try to follow parenting gurus, like Jo Frost, and be calm and consistent whilst applying techniques such as the naughty step. However, the stressful life of a full-time parent means that even the most dedicated parent may slip up and demonstrate frustration and inconsistency   

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At Home (Advantage)

At home:

Supernanny Jo Frost used the ‘naughty step’ to correct inappropriate behavior. When a child is naughty, their mother may shout. This kind of attention, even though it is unpleasant, is positively reinforcing. The way to deal with this is to resist any kind of commitment.

Parental control over pocket money has long been used to increase positive behaviors, such as washing the car or tidying a child’s bedroom.

Gill (1998) asked parents to encourage chore completion by the payment of pocket money (positive reinforcement) or the postponement of pocket money (punishment). The researcher concluded that these strategies were successful because children ended up performing 20% of the household chores.

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In School (Advantage)

In School:

Education has been a major user of operant conditioning techniques to control the behavior of children. Gold stars, merits and house points are positive reinforcers, the aim of which is obviously to reward good behavior and performance. Praise is also reinforcing.

McAllister et. al (1969) looked at inappropriate talking in high school English classes and found that the increased use of ‘teacher praise’ and ‘teacher disapproval’ led to a decrease in ‘inappropriate talking’. In a control condition, there was no decrease.

LeFrancois (2000) suggests that classical conditioning can be used to improve student performance. For example, he proposes that teachers should maximise the pleasant stimuli in their classrooms (including attractive wall displays, nice smells, and laughter) and minimise the unpleasant stimuli (such as shouting, negative comments). This means students have more positive feelings about the work environment and their behavior and academic performance will improve.

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In School (Disadvantage)

In School:

Some educational approaches, such as Montessori education, believe that the rewards and punishments advocated by conditioning techniques are actually harmful to a child’s development and that they interfere with a child’s internal drives to learn.

Lepper et al. (1973) conducted research that supports this criticism. Nursery children were asked to draw some nice pictures. When children were promised a reward they spent half as much time drawing as children who were not promised a reward, suggesting that their own motivation had been destroyed by the expectation of expectation of extrinsic rewards.

Dweck (1975) found that children who were praised for doing good work on a maths test did worse on a later, more difficult test than children who had been told they were lazy. The second group had learned task persistence whereas the ‘praised’ group gave up easily. This shows that rewards don’t always lead to better performance.

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Peers (Advantage)

Peers:

A child’s peers are children who are similar in age and development. We may start off being influenced by our parents, but when moved to a nursery and later to school, the influence of our peer groups starts to grow. In order to reduce the negative sanctions of a peer group (such as exclusion and criticism) and increase positive sanctions (such as praise and acceptance), children imitate the behaviors and actions of their peers. We are conditioned by our peers.  

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Peers (Disadvantage)

Peers:

Peer group influences may not be desirable ones. For example, Bricker et al (2006) found that children as young as 10 years old were more likely to try smoking if members of their peer group smoked. This demonstrates that a child’s need for positive reinforcement from their peer group is not always a healthy option.

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Vulnerable Groups of Children (Advantage)

Vulnerable groups of children:

Lovaas (1987) developed applied behaviour analysis (ABA) to increase the frequency and quality of social interactions for children with autistic spectrum disorder. Target behaviours could include language difficulties. Initially, the child is rewarded for most behaviours but over time this decreases unless the behaviour is close to the ideal target behaviour.

Robinson et al. (1981) showed how the use of token economies can improve performance in reading and vocabulary - related tasks of children with hyperactivity issues. They used students, giving them tokens when they showed desirable behaviours. The students collected these tokens and exchanged them for rewards, which were items or activities desirable to them.

Chaney et al. (2004) reported on the use of a ‘Funhaler’ with children with asthma, which is an inhaler consider fun thus reinforcing. After two weeks parents reported children had fewer problems when medicating resulting in a more positive response to treatment.    

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Vulnerable Groups of Children (Disadvantage)

Vulnerable groups of children:

Lovaas’ technique had some problems:

  1. Firstly the treatment is mainly supported by his own research. This contained many methodological flaws including not randomly allocating children to be apart of the control or experimental group. Therefore, any conclusions drawn about the effectiveness of the treatment may not be entirely valid.

  2. Second, Lovaas indicates the treatment is intensive, approximately 40 hours per week.

    1. Apart from being incredibly costly, Anderson et al. (1987) found that an average of 20 hours per week was enough contact to allow for a significant improvement.

As conditioning techniques only treat symptoms, some believe the undesirable behaviours may re-emerge once the reinforcement has been removed.

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Conclusion

Conclusion: Parents, schools, peers and other agencies all have an obligation to ensure that children grow up able to function within the society in which they live. This process of socialisation inevitably involves conditioning as that is one of the basic routes to learning and teaching.

However, the issue is, first of all, whether such techniques are the most effective ways to manage behaviour, for example, reward systems may be ineffective. Second, there are important ethical considerations related to the manipulation of behaviour, for example in vulnerable groups of children.   

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