Science and Spanking

I can’t believe we are still discussing this as if there is any scientific debate about it anymore. Spanking doesn’t work. There is no valid reason to do it and since there is no valid reason to do it – it’s abusive!

Parents, please start parenting humanistically.  Your job is to raise autonomous adults who know how to make decisions and who have a desire to be moral and do good in the world.  Spanking does not help you do that!

Studies have shown that spanking is linked to detrimental child outcomes and that there is no difference in outcomes between kids who are abused and kids who are spanked. So – stop doing it.  (see: http://psycnet.apa.org/?&fa=main.doiLanding&doi=10.1037/fam0000191 )

Additionally, if you are hoping to get an obedient kid (which is different from a kid who makes good decisions), it turns out that spanking is detrimental to long term compliance as it creates kids who are anti-social and who have mental health problems.

Don’t believe me? Here is a link to the science that shows exactly what happens when you administer punishment.   Hint – it has a short term impact and then the animal gets used to the punishment and goes back to doing what they wanted to do anyway. http://eileenanddogs.com/2016/08/20/punishment-callus/

If you took the time to link through to the Eileen and Dogs article – what you will find, in addition to a lovely graph demonstrating what every single study ever done on any animal has ever shown about how animals (including humans) respond to punishment, you will find out why how you think punishment works isn’t. how. it. actually. works!

What does the science tells us happens when we punish? Well – Eieleen states it well so I am going to quote her.
“Two of the most common outcomes of using punishment are:
• a spiral of ever-increasing punishment intensity that the animal learns to tolerate; or
• a shut-down animal.”

Still don’t believe me? How about this from the University of Texas. The Risks of Harm from Spanking Confirmed by 5 Decades of Research!!!  http://news.utexas.edu/2016/04/25/risks-of-harm-from-spanking-confirmed-by-researchers

To recap: Punishment (spanking) doesn’t work to create obedience. It doesn’t work to help your child learn how to make good decisions. And it causes lasting harm to the child’s mental health. It is indistinguishable from abuse, because it is abuse. Unnecessary and counterproductive.

What does work?  Yeah – neutral responses and positive reinforcement. Don’t get sucked into the positive parenting thing either. That can get a bit wooey.  What you want is realistic parenting.

You are looking for resources that will help you be ‘authoritative’ not authoritarian with your child.

In the meantime, get my book The Bully Vaccine http://amzn.to/2bjXX6H   In it I teach how to stop unwanted behavior using behavioral science that actually works.  It doesn’t matter if the unwanted behavior is bullying, or a child who won’t go to sleep. There is only one technique that works. Learn it, use it and I do promise at some point to create a parenting program to teach it. But for now, get the book on bullying so you can at least understand what it is you need to be doing with your child.

Feel free to visit my website too and join my blog - https://bullyvaccineproject.com/ 

Deltas – Positively Reinforced

This is for parents who would like to have more positive relationships with their children despite the need to say no!

One of the main things I teach is how to use operant conditioning to improve interpersonal relationships.  I am also a parent and yes, I use these techniques on my child and my husband and no – it’s not manipulative, it’s positively reinforcing the positive behaviors I want to see in myself and them.

Disciplining a child – a lesson in humanistic parenting.

Are switches and hitting a good discipline technique?  After all, NFL star Adrian Peterson has been accused of hitting his 4 year old son with a switch. Many people, myself included are horrified. This is child abuse. Others, like Sean Hannity, think it’s a valid discipline technique.  Who is right?  Well – I am of course!!!

Let me address this as a former animal trainer. No good trainer uses physical violence as a training technique. Ever. Anyone who does is an idiot who doesn’t know what they are doing. And if they do this to an animal, they would be brought up on animal abuse charges!  It’s not considered acceptable to beat the crap out of your dog because it’s not consider a valid training technique anymore.  And, if you wouldn’t use physical battery with a potentially deadly weapon to train a dog, because it’s unnecessary, counterproductive and brutal, why on earth would you do it to a child!

What happened to Peterson’s son was battery with a weapon. There is no other lens with which to view what happened.  With all due respect to the Sean Hannitys of the world who think beating a toddler with a stick is a good way to teach them a lesson, it’s not. There are decades of research with more evidence than can be cited here that show if you want to get a behavior to stop – the best way to get it to stop is to stop rewarding it while you give the animal a different way to reach their reward.  Negative reinforcement – which is what physical punishment is – is still reinforcement and it is counterproductive.  So if you really wanted to discipline a child, wouldn't you do so in a way so that they would actually learn what you want them to?  Yeah – I thought so.  Beating a toddler with a stick doesn’t teach them anything except to be afraid. And ... there is a lot of science to back that up.

Additionally, there is new research that shows hitting also impacts brain development negatively.  So, not only does hitting a toddler with a stick not produce better behavior, it causes brain damage.  It’s abusive and unnecessary and counterproductive.

People really do need to learn alternate ways to get their kids to comply with their requests. The good news is those alternate ways are way more effective at helping kids learn to be powerfully ethical and self-sufficient. No hitting required.

What are these other more effective techniques? I’m glad you asked. 

I am a Humanist and a parent. I have a very well behaved child. I have never hit him. He is given consequences and we use the Socratic method to help him choose behaviors that will benefit him and our family. He is free to choose his actions, but there are consequences, both good and bad depending on his choices.  My goal as a Humanist parent is not to have an obedient child. I want a child who can make good decisions for himself, including going against authority if authority is wrong. That requires me to help him learn how to make decisions. The Socratic method is fabulous for this. As soon as he could talk – we started reasoning with him.  It takes a bit more effort on the front end, but it pays off in spades as they grow.

We also used time outs. These are not considered punishments.  They are an opportunity for you to collect yourself and your emotions and to get your emotions out without harming those around you. Mommy and daddy take time outs when we need to and our son has been taking time outs for himself for several years now (he’s 9 as I write this).  Again – it’s not a problem to be frustrated or angry, our goal is to not do something we will regret while we are frustrated or angry. And sometimes, you just need to go somewhere alone and vent. We all do.  As a result, when we have disagreements in our home, they are settled rationally and without yelling.

If my son starts to do something he shouldn’t, I ask him if he really wants to do that.  The answer is usually no. If he starts to negotiate and it’s something we can be flexible on – we negotiate. If it isn’t negotiable – like getting a shot or something, we tell him – this isn’t something you can negotiate. We rarely have problems anymore.

A non-violent approach to child discipline works incredibly well. Anyone who meets my son will attest to that. So, stop hitting your children and teach them how to make good decisions for themselves.

The Power of Negative Attention

What to do when someone is acting badly to get your attention

If you have a child, you know that when you ignore them, like say – you are on an important telephone call, your child will try politely to get your attention and then turn to ever more drastic measures to get your attention. this is the power of negative attention.

The same thing happens with animals. Most of the time when someone comes to me with an animal behavior problem or a child behavior problem, they don’t realize that they have been positively reinforcing the negative behavior they don’t want. They don’t realize that they themselves are the problem, not their child or animal

If you want to encourage good behavior, you have to catch the animal, or your child, doing something good in the moment and reward them for the good thing they just did. the more you do this, the better their behavior comes.

If you ignore them except when they are bad, you perpetuate the bad behavior. Why? Because even negative attention is better than being ignored!

Check out this article from Counselling Resources on The Power of Negative Attention:
http://counsellingresource.com/features/2010/12/07/the-power-of-negative-attention/ 

You will notice the author, Gordon Shippey, talks about the same operant conditioning dynamics I teach in my bullying book and in my humanistic parenting and management programs. He talks about extinction bursts and “ignoring” problem behavior.

But he also brings up a really important point, which is that completing the extinction protocol is REALLY hard to do. It’s much easier to train up the good behavior you want and reward the positive behavior you do want than to extinguish the bad behavior you don’t want. Both require you to control your own behavior and responses so that you can catch people being good so that you can reward them.

Don’t underestimate how much behavior, good and bad, is done just to get attention. If you want to encourage positive attention seeking behavior, you have to become more responsive to your child’s attempts to get your attention and reward them with your attention instead of forcing them to become little monsters before you give them your time.

Be present. You and your child will be happier.

How to parent like a Humanist

Why taking a responsible, compassionate, ethical and respectful approach to parenting benefits you, your children and the society in which we all live.

Humanism is a philosophy that encourages us to think of every human we meet as being worthy of dignity and respect. This includes children. And, it includes our children. A Humanist parent does not think of their children as property. They are autonomous human beings, ones that we have particular responsibility for by virtue of being their parent.

This impacts all aspects of parenting and influences our parenting style. Because our children are fully human we have an ethical responsibility to treat them compassionately, ethically, and respectfully. We are also privileged with the task of raising them and caring for them. And even though that is difficult task and it never seems to end and there is always something that we have to deal with, it is satisfying. Why? Because being responsible feels good. Living up to and taking our responsibilities seriously feels good. It’s difficult but it gives our lives meaning and purpose. And isn’t that something that most people struggle with?

Embracing that responsibility fully is part of how a Humanist parents. And because we are Humanists we do spend some time thinking about how we want to parent so that we aren’t just reactive to our children, but proactive in providing them with learning experiences and support and encouragement so that they can grow into an adult we like, as a human being.

I tell my son every day that I love him. The other night he said, you tell me that all the time. When I reminded him that it feels good to be told and to say it, he said, but you have to love me. I said, no I don’t. There is no rule that says a parent has to love their child. I happen to love mine not only because he is adorable, but because I genuinely like him and like spending time with him and I derive a great deal of pleasure caring for him. If I didn’t recognize him as fully human, I can’t imagine feeling this way. My responsibilities towards him would be more of a burden. By acknowledging his humanity, I am able to connect with him as a human and therefore as a Humanist.

How does a Humanist parent? For me it means I parent with compassion, respect and in an ethically responsible way. How has being a Humanist influenced you as a parent?

Positive Parenting vs. Humanistic Parenting

Is there a difference between humanistic parenting and positive parenting? Do the differences matter?

To answer these questions, we have to first understand what positive parenting is and how it might contrast with Humanist or Humanistic parenting is. So what is positive parenting? Positive parenting is a parenting style also known as positive discipline. This all has to do with child behavior and how to discipline children effectively so that we raise well behaved adults who embody the values we care about as parents.

It turns out there are a lot of different parenting styles and positive parenting is a reaction against the forms of parenting that use negative discipline or punishment. How to discipline a child is an ongoing discussion for most parents. I know I get asked a lot of questions about it. Now, as a Humanist parent, I do engage in positive parenting or positive discipline. Why? Because it works. Humanism is ultimately a very pragmatic philosophy. We want to do what works.

Here’s why, and if you’ve read my book The Bully Vaccine, you already know this. Psychologists have studied human learning and how best to cause learning and it turns out that punishment is incredibly counterproductive to learning. In fact: if a child or any animal is doing something you don’t want them to do, punishing them isn’t going to get them to stop. Negative reinforcement is still reinforcement. It turns out that if you want them to stop, you have to remove reinforcements entirely, which is why positive parents use time outs and natural and logical consequences to discourage their children from behaving in a way that is not ok. So yes, according to what we know about these matters, The positive parenting style is a good style.

So how does this contrast with Humanistic Parenting? Well, it doesn’t much. Really, it just as matter of why we approach parenting the way we do. A Humanist approaches the question of how to parent compassionately, respectfully, responsibly and with an eye towards raising ethical, compassionate responsible adults. We start with the assumption that the child is an autonomous human being. They are responsible for choosing their behavior, just like we all are. Our job as parents is to help teach them how to make good decisions for themselves. We still have to discipline and encourage our child to behave better, the issue is how.

Most Humanists seem to prefer an authoritative parenting style. (See: http://psychology.about.com/od/childcare/f/authoritative-parenting.htm for more information) To me, positive parenting addresses only the question of how to discipline a child. Humanist and authoritative parenting goes beyond that into also addressing how to get a child to think for themselves to choose good behavior on their own.

Because they don't rely on negative discipline or punishment, positive parenting classes and programs focus on alternative ways to gain child compliance with the needs of the adults and fellow family members. So negotiation, discussion, active engagement of the child in problem solving, natural consequences, removal of rewards and more are all part of the alternatives used. Most Humanist parents use all those tools and more. I think the only real difference is that a Humanist parent is going to prefer those methods that most encourage autonomy and the ability to think independently.


So to answer the question, is there a difference? Yes and no. Positive parenting is just one of the many tools a Humanist parent uses. We are as concerned with raising good thinkers and ethically compassionate kids as we are with raising well behaved kids and our parenting style reflects that emphasis.
What do you think of positive parenting? What parenting style do you prefer?