From: elg@elgamy.sccsi.com (Eric Lee Green)
Date: 13 Aug 92 12:46:18 CDT
Newsgroups: misc.kids
Subject: Re: Rewards (Was: Re: Mischievous Child (3 YO))
Distribution: world
Organization: Eric's Amiga 2000 @ Home

From article <1992Aug12.191114.4669@novell.com>, by janines@novell.com (Janine Schenone):
> I just read J.L. Tyrer's post describing her how she will reward
> Mitchell for cleaning his room: 3 stickers = 1 Batman toy and
> 10 stickers = Crashing Dummies (or something like that). Now I
> have a question:
>
> When do you reward a child, and when do you simply expect them
> to do it because you want them to do it?
>
> I am very new at this positive discipline and rewards game, as my
> daughter is only 18 months old. I give her a lot of positive feedback
> for behavior I want to encourage. (She picks up her toys without my
> asking at 18 months! You can rent her once in a while if you want ;>)
> But my positive feedback consists of praise, smiles, hugs, kisses.
>
> Do you feel that it's necessary to offer a reward for positive
> behavior, or is it that you're turning a request you're not crazy
> about ("I want Crash Dummies") into a chance to work on some
> behavior of his?
>
> I am all for "Discipline Without Yelling or Spanking," as one book
> title puts it. And I also like the idea of fostering behavior you want
> in a positive way. So could people explain how rewards such as new
> toys fit in this picture?

Definition of a reward: anything which causes a behavior to become more
probable in occurance.

Thus praise, smiles, hugs, kisses are indeed rewards, if they cause a
behavior to become more prevalent.

I think one mistake that a lot of people, including a lot of teachers, make
is that they percieve rewards to only be things like M&M's or little toys,
and forget that the most potent reward most children can get is his or her
parent's time and attention and positive regard.

In the end, it is a parent's time and attention which detirmines whether a
child will end up behaving okay or not... you may explicitly work on
certain individual behaviors via explicit reward systems, but society
doesn't work like that, so you'll eventually have to "fade" that anyhow.
Not to mention that most of the behaviors involved in being a productive
human being are far more subtle than those that we can explictly identify
and reward. I prefer to think of it as an op-amp voltage follower
circuit... the output veers below the input, you provide feedback to get
the output back up, the output soars above the input, you provide feedback
to get the output back down, and eventually the system approaches total
stability with the output matching what you want... but there's some little
ripples in there that we can't even measure, even then.
     All of this generally happens without us being conciously aware of
what we're doing. This is why I think Dr. Spock isn't totally wrong when he
says "trust your instincts". If you generally enjoy being with your kid,
you think of your kid in a positive way and interact much with your kid in
a positive way, generally the kid will turn out okay no matter what you do
because this feedback system will tend to get things back on kilter. If
your instincts say there's something wrong here, though, if you're at the
end of your wits and you don't like being with the kid anymore and the kid
is just always into some sort of mischief and .... well, then it's time to
talk about getting some professional advice, because the feedback system
isn't working right anymore (maybe there's some bleedover to the "+"
terminal of the op-amp, causing rampant instability).

Gee, I wonder how many other teachers model behavior in terms of op-amp
circuits? Evidence of a depraved childhood, obviously :-).

--
 Eric Lee Green  elg@elgamy.sccsi.com         Dodson Elementary
 (713) 437-6908  uunet!nuchat!elgamy!elg      Houston, TX
                "Kids are kids, no matter what"
Newsgroups: misc.kids