Is it better to punish or reinforce a behaviour?
Rubie Paucek
2025-06-15 15:39:30
Count answers
: 13
Many a child developmental professional will advise parents to try to ignore children's bad behavior and reward their good behavior. Rewards are more effective than punishment. Their work involved 8/9 and 11/12-year olds who were given the opportunity to learn some basic tasks by means of positive, rewarding feedback or negative, punishing feedback. Repeated running of the task showed that performance improved substantially when the feedback was positive in the case of the younger children, telling them they did well when they did, rather than negative, telling them that they did poorly when they did in fact do badly. Just the opposite proved true in the case of older children, who functioned just like young adults aged 18-25 who were also tested. That is, negative feedback improved performance more for these individuals than did positive feedback. We now have a better idea why rewards work better than punishment with pre-adolescent children.
Chaya Moen
2025-06-15 15:10:22
Count answers
: 11
Reinforcement can be used to teach and implement communication, social, self-help and table manner skills. When a parent recognizes the need to change a behavior, they will likely end up using either reinforcement, punishment, or a mixture of both. Since reinforcement focuses on increasing a desired behavior and punishment focuses on reducing an unwanted behavior but does not teach a replacement for it, it is typically recommended to use positive reinforcement when trying to make a behavior change. Punishment does not need be extreme, it is simply a stimulus that is used to discourage or decrease an undesirable behavior. Although punishment does not replace the negative behavior like reinforcement does, it is still a resourceful technique. Yet, whether you choose to use punishment or reinforcement, the key to successfully using these approaches, is to remain consistent. Remain hopeful even when you don’t see results right away, it will take time, patience, kindness, love and understanding.
Read also
- How to not reinforce bad behavior?
- What is an example of avoidance negative reinforcement?
- What is an example of accidental reinforcement?
- What is negative reinforcement for bad behavior?
- Does avoidance reinforce anxiety?
- Why do psychologists prefer negative reinforcement to punishment?
- What does inadvertently reinforce mean?