How Punishment and Reinforcement does help in shaping children’s behavior

Source: Times of India

Every situation brings different challenges with itself that need to be dealt with differently. Parenting experts believe that there are mostly two ways to encourage kids to behave in a certain way- reinforcement and punishment. Both can help kids understand and realign their behavior when it needs to be modified.

Reinforcement is referred to as the introduction of a favorable condition to kids that increases their chances of repeating the desired behavior in the future. On the other hand, Punishment is an action taken to discourage undesired actions. This simply means to impose a penalty as a result of undesirable behavior.

When parents lean too much on reinforcement techniques, kids always look for some kind of reward or benefit for acting in a certain way, which in reality should be self-regulatory. The punishment parents impose on kids should be logical and easy. It should not instill fear in them, else it would backfire.

Both punishment and reinforcement have their pros and cons. Reinforcement increases the likelihood of repeating the target behavior in the future, while punishment tends to decrease the chances of recurrence of the bad behavior. Reinforcement and punishment are the fundamental concepts of behaviorism and quite effective to teach good manners to kids.

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