Positive Reinforcement in Parenting: Why Getting a Beating Never Worked on Me

In the realm of operant conditioning my mother utilized what is known as positive punishment. While the description of what she was doing in scientific terms blows me away with its irony the more interesting notion is that it simply did not work. Spanking a child for doing something bad works in many cases and parents have every right to discipline their children, a right my mother fully embraced when I was trudging through phases and rebellion, but it never worked. Many parents don't seem to realize that spanking their children or using, no matter how bad they may be, simply isn't the way to get them to change their behavior.

Psychology calls it an "aversive stimulus" while I call it a wakeup call. In positive punishment bad behavior is weeded out by introducing the aversive stimulus, which is meant to form a connection between that bad behavior and the aversive stimulus. In my situation, it was a belt, which was used in what I classify as military precision.

The problem was that I didn't decide that I wasn't going to do what I was doing anymore because I was disciplined. In fact, all of the discipline (the belt was replaced with verbal punishment) only served to create a strenuous relationship with my mother. As I grew older my mother wouldn't be able to hurt me with a belt unless she truly abused me, which she never did. On the other hand, there was no real barrier to be built from being verbally assaulted.

Through personal experience I have concluded that the scars of a belt or hand are puny and pathetic when it comes to the scars left by words. So while the early punishment that utilized a belt simply made me seek other avenues to engage in my bad behavior (while trying not to be caught), the verbal salvos that leapt from my mother's mouth planted the firebombs that would eventually burn the bridge linking us.

There's no mistaking it, when I was a pre-teen and even a year or two into my adolescence, those words were like serrated knives digging into my chest. Later on however, her words were drowned out with beneath my breath and in the back of my head repetition of the phrase "I hate you."