Modern parents are terrified of two frequently juxtaposed words: discipline and punish. They evoke images of prisons, soldiers and jackboots. The distance between disciplinarian and tyrant or punishment and torture is, indeed, easily traversed. Discipline and punish must be handled with care. The fear is unsurprising. But both are necessary. They can be applied unconsciously or consciously, badly or well, but there is no escaping their use.
It’s not that it’s impossible to discipline with reward. In fact, rewarding good behaviour can be very effective. The most famous of all behavioural psychologists, B.F. Skinner, was a great advocate of this approach. He was expert at it. He taught pigeons to play ping-pong, although they only rolled the ball back and forth by pecking it with their beaks.101 But they were pigeons. So even though they played badly, it was still pretty good. Skinner even taught his birds to pilot missiles during the Second World War, in Project Pigeon (later Orcon).102 He got a long way, before the invention of electronic guidance systems rendered his efforts obsolete.
Skinner observed the animals he was training to perform such acts with exceptional care. Any actions that approximated what he was aiming at were immediately followed by a reward of just the right size: not small enough to be inconsequential, and not so large that it devalued future rewards. Such an approach can be used with children, and works very well. Imagine that you would like your toddler to help set the table. It’s a useful skill. You’d like him better if he could do it. It would be good for his (shudder) self-esteem. So, you break the target behaviour down into its component parts. One element of setting the table is carrying a plate from the cupboard to the table. Even that might be too complex. Perhaps your child has only been walking a few months. He’s still wobbly and unreliable. So, you start his training by handing him a plate and having him hand it back. A pat on the head could follow. You might turn it into a game. Pass with your left. Switch to your right. Circle around your back. Then you might give him a plate and take a few steps backward so that he has to traverse a few steps before giving it back. Train him to become a plate-handling virtuoso. Don’t leave him trapped in his klutz-dom.
You can teach virtually anyone anything with such an approach. First, figure out what you want. Then, watch the people around you like a hawk. Finally, whenever you see anything a bit more like what you want, swoop in (hawk, remember) and deliver a reward. Your daughter has been very reserved since she became a teenager. You wish she would talk more. That’s the target: more communicative daughter. One morning, over breakfast, she shares an anecdote about school. That’s an excellent time to pay attention. That’s the reward. Stop texting and listen. Unless you don’t want her to tell you anything ever again.
Parental interventions that make children happy clearly can and should be used to shape behaviour. The same goes for husbands, wives, co-workers and parents. Skinner, however, was a realist. He noted that use of reward was very difficult: the observer had to attend patiently until the target spontaneously manifested the desired behaviour, and then reinforce. This required a lot of time, and a lot of waiting, and that’s a problem. He also had to starve his animals down to three-quarters of their normal body weight before they would become interested enough in food reward to truly pay attention. But these are not the only shortcomings of the purely positive approach.
Negative emotions, like their positive counterparts, help us learn. We need to learn, because we’re stupid and easily damaged. We can die. That’s not good, and we don’t feel good about it. If we did, we would seek death, and then we would die. We don’t even feel good about dying if it only might happen. And that’s all the time. In that manner, negative emotions, for all their unpleasantness, protect us. We feel hurt and scared and ashamed and disgusted so we can avoid damage. And we’re susceptible to feeling such things a lot. In fact, we feel more negative about a loss of a given size than we feel good about the same-sized gain. Pain is more potent than pleasure, and anxiety more than hope.
Emotions, positive and negative, come in two usefully differentiated variants. Satisfaction (technically, satiation) tells us that what we did was good, while hope (technically, incentive reward) indicates that something pleasurable is on the way. Pain hurts us, so we won’t repeat actions that produced personal damage or social isolation (as loneliness is also, technically, a form of pain). Anxiety makes us stay away from hurtful people and bad places so we don’t have to feel pain. All these emotions must be balanced against each other, and carefully judged in context, but they’re all required to keep us alive and thriving. We therefore do our children a disservice by failing to use whatever is available to help them learn, including negative emotions, even though such use should occur in the most merciful possible manner.
Skinner knew that threats and punishments could stop unwanted behaviours, just as reward reinforces what is desirable. In a world paralyzed at the thought of interfering with the hypothetically pristine path of natural child development, it can be difficult even to discuss the former techniques. However, children would not have such a lengthy period of natural development, prior to maturity, if their behaviour did not have to be shaped. They would just leap out of the womb, ready to trade stocks. Children also cannot be fully sheltered from fear and pain. They are small and vulnerable. They don’t know much about the world. Even when they are doing something as natural as learning to walk, they’re constantly being walloped by the world. And this is to say nothing of the frustration and rejection they inevitably experience when dealing with siblings and peers and uncooperative, stubborn adults. Given this, the fundamental moral question is not how to shelter children completely from misadventure and failure, so they never experience any fear or pain, but how to maximize their learning so that useful knowledge may be gained with minimal cost.