Taking A Look At Operant Conditioning

In today’s child and family counseling setting, parents are very concerned with the behaviors of their children. Gary Sibcy in his lecture, Emotion Coaching with Kids, stated that many parents he meets with are due to behavioral problems within the child and thus, parents are searching effective discipline styles to modify the behaviors and incorporate into the family system (Sibcy, 2006). There are a few widely known discipline styles that are used by parents and professionals that have proven to be very effective: positive reinforcement, brain integration, and emotion coaching. While there are various discipline styles besides the few mentioned, these specific methods focus on positive responses towards the child rather than negative reprimanding.

Luckily, over the years child development professionals have provided parents with various methods that they can begin to apply. These are a few:

Positive Reinforcement

Positive reinforcement is widely known within the psychological community as an effective strategy that presents desired behaviors. However, in order to understand positive reinforcement, it is valuable to have knowledge of Operant Conditioning. Operant Conditioning has its beginning in the 1890’s with Edward Thorndike as its founder: at that time it was known as the law of effect (Ormrod, 2016). Thorndike began his method by placing a cat inside of a “puzzle box”, which had a door that would open when the cat would manipulate a certain device inside the box. Thorndike discovered that when in the box the cat would try to make its way out of the box through trial-and-error behaviors. Eventually, the cat made its way out of the box by manipulating the correct device. Thorndike placed the cat in the box over and over again, and each time the cat escaped in a shorter period of time than before. Thus, Thorndike concluded learning involves

Clinton and Sibcy (2006), mentioned that often times parents view their children in a negative light when they experience their child’s “negative” emotions and behaviors (p. 170). That is, they describe their child as being “out of control.” However, that is not the case: the child’s behavior does not necessarily make him or her a bad kid. What is actually being revealed is that the child is, at that moment, unable to regulate his or her emotions on his or her own. As stated within the brain integration method, a child’s brain develops from the bottom up; that being said, the emotional part of the brain is found towards the bottom, whereas the rational part is found towards the top of the brain. According to Sibcy, in his lecture titled Childhood Development-An Attachment Perspective, as a child’s brain develops they begin to rely on their emotions because the part of the brain that regulates the emotions has already begun to develop. This is important to let the child feel his or her emotions while leading him or her in rational decision making (Sibcy, 2006). When parents begin to understand this process, they can begin to help their child work through those “negative” feelings. Unfortunately, most parents choose to ignore their child’s feelings, and instead of teaching them to