All parents and Psych majors out there know about negative reinforcement, right? If your child does something bad, rather than punishing her, you are supposed to take away something she wanted. A popular suggestion, and one that works well for us, is television. We are still working on the timing issue since Allison does not yet have a good sense of time. We wouldn't want to say, "If you don't put away your toys you cannot watch TV for a week," because a) After about a day, she would not remember what she had done to lose her TV privilege, and b) In our house at least this would not be feasible. We might say she could not watch TV for the rest of the night or she cannot watch Scooby Doo tomorrow.
But here's my question: Let's say we are at the dinner table and she is not eating. I say, "If you don't eat your dinner you cannot have ice cream." Clearly this would be considered negative reinforcement. But what if she didn't know before I said this that we were even going to have ice cream? Then, even though my words project negative reinforcement, the message becomes, "If you finish your dinner, I will give you ice cream." In effect, it becomes a bribe, right?
It relates to the whole issue of intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation. Basically, we should not reward every good behavior; children should behave well because they want to. For example, good grades should not be rewarded with money or treats, because then children will try to get good grades only for the money and treats. This type of motivation will not last. But if a child does well on her own and finds out what it feels like to get good grades, she will be intrinsically motivated to keep getting good grades.
Unfortunately, I have no idea how a child becomes intrinsically motivated to eat healthy.
When, if ever, do you think it’s OK to bribe?
Do you use time outs? In what context? Do they work?
I have been using timeouts for the big behavior problems, currently the hitting. It may, however, take a half-hour to give her a 3 minute timeout. She just will not stay put. We’ve been putting her in her room for timeouts and I recently read that she should stay in the same room with us, so I’m going to try that. What do you do?
