Hello and welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John Payne. You know, I've been thinking this week about more discipline related issues around setting loving limits for kids. And I was having a conversation with a dear mother about behavior modification in particular, you know, the system that became really popular in the 1980s when Dr. Skinner, you know, came up with this whole system based on rewards and punishments, removal of privileges, giving of privileges, gold stars.
And you know, many parents bought into it and the problem with it is that it worked. And it worked for, you know, a couple of months, maybe six months. But the kids eventually work out how, how to sort of gain the system really.
And I was talking to this mom about who'd been using behavior modification and she said, you know, is it terrible? Is it really an evil thing? I did it and it really seemed to help and boy, you know, what can I do now? I'm feeling guilty about it, but it seemed to work. And, you know, it was a really, it was a great conversation because it's a lovely mom. And, you know, today in the Simplicity Diary, what I want to do is just outline a few of the the dangers of behavior modification and then and then to sort of soften that a little bit by saying, well, you know, if you are doing it, if you are doing the if then thing, like if you do that, then you will not be able to, you know, it because basically the if behavior modification can be summarized in just two words, if then, and and if those two words appear in one sentence, you're using behavior modification, right? But it gives kids, excuse me, it gives kids a lot of choices and often choices way ahead of their brain development and their ability to understand cause and effect, to understand truly the implications of their choices.
And, you know, in the Soul of Discipline book, I had a lot of fun in pulling out notes from these notebooks that I walk around with of things that I have actually heard kids say to parents. And I want to read a couple of them out to you because they they're kind of amusing, but at the same time sort of hard as well. So the first one, and this is a danger of BMOD, of behavior mod, is when kids sort of start to get involved in the bargaining chips, and they say things, and I heard a child say this in a supermarket line once, well, I'll do it.
I'll do it for three cookies and a soda. And I expected the mother to say, you know, this is not up for discussion, honey, this is what's happening. But no, she what she said was, no, you only may have one cookie and a soda.
And so the conversation went on. You can imagine where that one went. There's also what I call cost benefit analysis, where I heard a kid, a parent once say, if you don't stop that young man, you will not be having any lasagna tonight.
And then the child answered the mom right, right, sort of right there, right at her, well, I don't like your lasagna anyway, so I'm not going to stop. Do you know when that happened, I could almost see the kids wheels turning, the little like synapsal activity in his brain as he figured it out. I heard a dad once say to his son, if you don't stop that, then we are not going to go to Sophie's place to play this afternoon.
I'm sorry. And then the child, you could see him thinking, and he said, he said to the child, he said to his dad, well, I don't, I don't like Sophie anyway. She's boring.
You like her mother. And the dad turned beetroot red and like, where do you go to after that kind of conversation? The other thing that behavior modification, when you're rewarding and punishing and so on, is it you turn your kid, if you're not careful, into an expert negotiator. And again, you know, you, you, you can turn them into what we call in Australia, bush lawyers, like amateur lawyers.
And here's what a child told her mom when the, when the mother wasn't going so well. And it was right in the waiting room of, of the clinic I was working in. And she said, you didn't see anything.
You didn't see anything. So there can be no consequences. You have to prove it first.
And the mom later told me, said every small point is up for negotiation. And it's utterly exhausting and humiliating to be spoken to that way by a five-year-old often in public, right? I remember one mom in response to that pulled when a child would continually say, prove it, prove it. The mom would keep this tiny little notebook in her pocket and pull it out and, and, and read from it of what was said and, and the time it was said.
And the child would say, no, I didn't say that. And it was, gosh, you know, I felt so sorry for that mom who'd basically, you know, it's almost like the feeling of the, of the incredible shrinking adult, you know, because the child is five and the mom is not five, right? It's just not attractive. And then there's upping the ante.
And this is, this is all about privileges. You know, the privileges you're given and the privileges that are taken away. And this, you know, I actually heard a younger child say to a father, no, the privilege needs to be better.
And it's like, oh boy, that's hard, right? And the dad was trying to think up how the privilege could be better. Then there's sort of leverage removal. And this one is a, it's a tough one because the kids, this comes through like three, four, five months into behavior mod regime where kids just say, no, I don't want it because you're just going to take it away.
No, I don't want any privileges. And they actually will refuse to accept things from parents because if they don't accept them, don't accept gifts, don't accept any, you know, number of different privileges, then, right? Then they can do whatever they want because they've got nothing to be taken away. It's kind of like discipline zen in a weird way.
And then there's hostage taking, right? And that's, that's really hard where, where, you know, you're offering a child, you know, rewards or marbles or whatever for, let's say for going to sleep. All right. And the child basically figures it out and says stuff like, I'll only go to sleep if you lay next to me.
And you feel like you're being held hostage, right? And that all these things come out of very well-meant, you know, behavior modification. No one means to mess up a child by doing this. No one means to sort of create a hostage taker, you know, or a sort of a negotiator or a cost benefit analyzer.
But these are the things that can happen. So I was talking to this mom about this and she said, well, I've got to back out of this a little bit more gracefully. If I go cold turkey, if I had to stop doing this, then it's going to be really hard.
And so I sort of reached into, you know, my memory and I've worked with quite a number of parents and chatted with them about how to do this. What we did is we came up with an idea and the idea was that basically if a privilege is given, a reward is given, the reward should be kind of secondary to connection. What I mean by that practical example is that if you're going to, for example, give a young child a sticker, and let's say it's the classic one, it's a gold star.
What about sitting with a child and saying, you know, it was really helpful today when you helped me unload all those groceries. This is speaking to a young child, right? And you were such a good help. And we're going to, I'm going to give you, yep, that sticker that you wanted and then put the gold star sticker on the page and then draw a picture around it and sit with the child and do a lovely picture that actually incorporates the star so that the star is a reward of sorts, but the real reward, the real affirmation comes from connection with the parent so that over time you can begin to dial back the reward punishment thing if you've got into that and dial up the connection.
And when that's been done over the years of meeting with parents and chatting with them, it goes very, very well because that is what the parent, that's what the parent wants is connection, that's what the child wants is connection. But as you're drawing, and here's the sort of undercurrent or subtext piece of this, you can be chatting with a child just a little bit about why it was that you were so pleased that they helped with, or when they were asked to do something, they just did it, and you can chat with them about how helpful that was to you and emphasize the relationship that you're talking about, not the reward. And in a nutshell, that's a way to move on or layer down from just pretty mechanistic behavior modification is to focus on relationship rather than reward.
And that was a few practical ways and examples of how that's done. So I hope that was helpful. There's the rescue package from behavior modification.
It's all about relationship and not about reward. Okay, I hope that was helpful. Bye bye for now.
