Didn't Take the Bait

So I mentioned in my previous post about spending about a week with my FOO for Christmas. All of us going to the vacation house for Christmas had been something my father brought up some time early last year. Since I don't come up to house on weekends as often as I did back when I was engulfed, I thought it might be a nice way to spend time together. I also felt like I was at a point where I could handle my NM and being around her for an extended period of time.

And you know what? I was right! Even when at one point I was discussing behavior modification ideas that could help my cousin with her kids, I didn't take the bait she threw out to get us started talking about my childhood and us. For the record my cousin lives far away but calls NM all the time to talk to and for help, because her own mother is way more disordered than mine. I'd say my cousin is the closest thing my mother has to a golden child, especially after she was no longer able to engulf me.

I was suggesting the use of token economies and some of the other principles of behavior modification I mentioned my post Punishment & Reinforcement. Despite how easy it would have been to start telling how she had done it all wrong when she started mentioning her attempts of using it with me, I didn't bring it up at all. Then she mentioned trying to use a token economy, with a chart on the fridge and everything, which I have no memory of happening. But considering this alleged attempt was supposedly when I was three years old at the time that's no surprise. The best part was NM telling me how one day I stormed over, tore the chart off, and three it to the floor while declaring "No more!"

This was clearly bait to turn the discussion into one I didn't want to have, even though I didn't quite realize it until I was in bed that night with my husband. I could have told her how she was probably doing it wrong- for example, a child has to be old enough to understand delayed gratification and that's not usually until at least five years of age (even then they aren't very good at it). I just shrugged while thinking that this wasn't something I was going to discuss, drank my tea, and let her tell me more about my cousin's kids. Despite NM's claims I think this would work with the right rewards for my cousin's children as they are over the age of five, but I didn't even bother arguing that point with her, either. If I really wanted to give my cousin my advice I'd call her, instead of musing over possible helpful ideas with NM anyway.

I feel pretty proud of myself that I was able to avoid taking her bait with so little conscious effort on my part. My DH on the other hand was watching a documentary at one point and got caught in a debate with my mother about something while I was showering. Of course, there's no changing that woman's mind and getting her to drop something while you still disagree with her is always a challenge. Even when you are more knowledgeable and are in fact correct. But he managed and other than that it was a surprisingly pleasant holiday.

You're Grounded!

My NM gave out groundings like candy on Halloween, beginning probably around the time I was eight or nine. If I were to try and add up durations of all the grounding sentences E-Sis and I ever received, we would probably have still been grounded in our early 20s. The reason for this is simple: NM oscillated between authoritarian parenting style and a neglectful one. In her authoritarian rages she would hand down grounding sentences ranging from four months, to six months, even up to year long for various offenses ranging from making a mess in the bathroom to a dish coming out of the dishwasher dirty. Honestly I don't even remember what all the offenses were, but I'm fairly certain they usually had to do with messes/cleaning, and later "talking back" to her.

There was never a clear contract made of "If you don't do X or if you do Y, you will be grounded from Z". It was more of a "I'm mad you didn't do X! You can no longer do Y and Z!" a lack of an agreement makes that kind of punishment arbitrary and causes resentment because one had absolutely no way of knowing the consequences ahead of time. However, NM was too neglectful too actually keep track of all the groundings she gave out, what they were for, or how long they were supposed to last. And if for some reason she wanted me out of the house and my best friend had invited me somewhere, she would send me off. This of course made groundings a rather meaningless punishment and it wasn't like there was a reinforcement for actually doing something she wanted done. Remember, not being punished is not a reinforcement/reward. NM never actually tried to teach the behaviors she wanted us to do, only punished unwanted behaviors or  the absence of desired ones, as if she expected we could somehow magically learn them on our own with no help from her.

Also for this type of punishment to work, it requires taking away something that actually matters to the person. There was almost nothing that mattered that much to me that she could take away. I had one best friend and my sister, so there wasn't much socialization to take away. In fact, E-Sis and I became close out necessity back then because often she and I only had each other to spend time with due to the groundings and our we were relative inept at making friends. As for my best friend, I would see her at school, or NM would want me gone and let me go spend time with her, or if her parents needed somebody to watch her they would ask NM because our parents had become friends (and vice versa). It was certainly an inconvenience to lose access to the computer for creative writing (my handwriting is terrible), but losing access to the television, telephones (not that I ever called anyone regularly anyway), video games, not being allowed to play outside, etc, wasn't really a big deal. And it wasn't like I couldn't get into or do most of those things without her knowledge once we were old enough to be left unsupervised for a few hours. As you can see by the list of things I had available to lose, my physical/material needs were always well met, possibly even indulged in an attempt to avoid having to deal with any emotional needs.

E-Sis and I could always do things at home together when we were grounded, and I also had my own room full of stuff to do whenever I was sent to my room or didn't want to spend time with E-Sis. It would be too much work to prevent E-Sis and me from interacting for months, just like it would be too much work to take all my toys away, all my books away, prevent me from checking out books at school, and to take all my pen/pencils and paper to keep me from my creative writing. It would be too much work to try and stand over both of us to make sure we didn't do any of those things, either together or by ourselves. Even if NM had ever decided to put that much effort into her punishments, I could simply work on whatever story I was writing in my head like I would do when I (often) couldn't sleep but was of course forbidden from getting up to do anything because I "wasn't allowed" to stay up, regardless of whether or not I could actually sleep. But I digress. In sum, I had no problems sitting in my room quietly playing by myself, reading, writing, or even seemingly doing nothing. I had something she could never take away from me: a magnificent imagination.

NM's punishments, while often inappropriate and/or poorly executed, were never what was so bad about her, though. It was always the rages that accompanied them, whether it was a barely restrained lecture or full on yelling/screaming/crying, that made her so terrifying. More on that next time.

Spanking and Learned Helplessness

Today's crash course in psychology is learned helplessness. You'll see how this relates to my story of being spanked in a moment, just bear with me. Phase one: let's say I take a rat and put it in a cage with a metal plate, and following a warning buzzer, the rat receives an electric shock. At first the rat will try to do all kinds of things to try and prevent the shock once it learns the buzzer indicates it's coming, but none of these work. Eventually, the rat stops trying. It has learned that their is no relationship/contingency between what it does and receiving the shock. Phase two: I then put the rat on a metal plate in a new cage. On the other side of the cage is a safe, insulated plate. Cue buzzing followed by the electric shock. Shockingly (pun intended) the rat will not even try moving to the insulated plate. It will sit there and take the abuse. The rat has learned to be helpless! It's a very unhealthy state both physically and psychologically, but I digress.

Spanking seemed to be a logical follow up to my last post, Punishment & Reinforcement. For some reason, I hadn't mentioned spanking be a part of my early memories, but it was and deserves a post all to itself. To clarify, I consider spanking to be swatting a child's behind only with your hand, and not to the point they are bruised or can't sit comfortably. NM's mother only ever used her hand I heard, although she could make you "not sit for a week" and NM frequently reminded us how she wasn't being as harsh as my grandmother was to her, as if we were supposed to be grateful. There were also threats of spanking us like Grandma used to do it back in the day. (Yes, I say us a lot because E-Sis and I experienced these things together).

Now, don't get me wrong. I actually thinking spanking as I have described it has a time and place. I think anything that goes beyond what I described crosses over into physical abuse. When do I think spanking as I have defined it is all right? When, after exhausting all other options, a young child continues to attempt behavior that could maim and/or kill them. Do they keep prying the safety plugs out of the electrical outlets and trying to stick things in them? Do they keep squirming away and trying to run into traffic? Are they constantly finding ways to unlock the door and trying to climb on the balcony railing? When all other methods have failed, I see no reason not to give them a few swats on the butt with the palm of your hand. It's better than them getting hit by car! Much like vaccinations, it hurts but you aren't doing it to specifically hurt them.You aren't doing it angry and you should never punish in anger. You are honestly doing it to help protect them. So when used sparingly and for appropriate reasons, the relationship/contingency between the child's behavior and the punishment is clear to the child and shouldn't scar them for life.

This was not how my NM used spanking. Spanking probably continued until around age eight, and I think at least once she followed through with doing it "like Grandma used to do". This began at an extremely young age for various infractions such as fighting or making or mess, and so on. The most common of course being not picking up our rooms. The fact of the matter though is at the age all this began, it was ridiculous to expect us to be able to, without help, supervision, or even any motivating reward, pick up our rooms. I shouldn't have to say this, but to be clear, not being punished is not a reward! We were developmentally incapable of doing this on our own when she began demanding it and we were too young to possibly do so out of intrinsic motivation. It was completely wrong of her to expect this from us without providing support to accomplish the task. Sadly, many parents punish children for failing to do things that they literally cannot do at their age.

Now because we would be spanked for a variety of reasons, we could not see clear relationship/contingency between our behavior and the outcome. For example, times when we did manage to pick up our rooms, but were spanked later for something else (or the other way around), it contributed to obscuring the relationship/contingency. We didn't understand that different behaviors that elicited the same punishment weren't actually related to each other because we were too young to for that kind of reasoning. So what did we learn? We learned helplessness, basically, and we carried that forward as we got older. We learned that our behavior could not change or prevent NM from spanking us. This made us even less motivated or interested in doing what she wanted, because in our minds we were just going to spanked regardless. Due to these early experiences, messy room problems became an ongoing theme of our struggles with NM. Anyway, instead of doing what she wanted we did things like trying to hide from NM or padding our underwear with tissue! Of course she would always start counting down, and we knew if she got to "three" before we came out (or if she found our padding) there would be hell to pay.

So NM would spank us, we would cry, and she would feel better. Her anger was assuaged. Still no help or supervision would be offered afterwards to get our rooms picked up, and they would remain as they were until the next round. Eventually we stopped caring and stopped crying. When she realized spanking no longer caused us to react (never mind it have never taught us the behavior she desired, either) she switched to grounding us. But that is a tale for next time!

Punishment & Reinforcement

I was reading Upsi's latest post on Discipline and it reminded me of my learning theory course in undergraduate school. Since I've kept all my college notebooks, I pulled out the one for that course and looked at my old operant conditioning grid. I've made a graphic of it for this post. I think it will help explain one of the main theories of behavior modification.

So these are the four contingencies of operant conditioning. In order for them to work however, this requires the person or animal to be able to see the contingency (relationship) between their behavior and the reinforcement/punishment/etc. If they can't see this, they can't learn, and you can't change their behavior with these methods. However, these methods have their own problems and pitfalls.

Positive Reinforcement: If the reward isn't meaningful to the person, then it won't work. It also best delivered as soon as possible for young children who don't yet understand the idea of delayed gratification. One should also be careful not to accidentally reward behavior unknowingly. By yelling at a child who acts out a parent may think they are punishing the child, but if the child is seeking attention, any attention, even bad attention, can be reinforcing!

Extinction: If you take away a pleasant stimulus, you are not likely to extinguish the target behavior unless you are also teaching a desired, alternative behavior. This technique can also prompt aggression and typically there is a spike in the undesired behavior before extinction begins.

Punishment: Type I punishment, aka positive punishment, may prompt aggression or avoidance toward the punishing person. It also does not teach the behavior you DO want. Many parents punish but fail to reinforce desired behaviors or teach desired alternative behaviors. Furthermore, it does not extinguish the behavior, it simply suppresses it in the presence of the punishing person. Punishment should never be an outlet for anger and should never been done in anger, which is another mistake parents, like my NM, make. It's far too easy for an angry parent go beyond mere punishment and into physical abuse!

Type II punishment, aka response cost, is also often used in anger, without a contract set ahead of time between the parent and the child. Without a clear agreement being made between the two parties, there is no clear contingency. When the relationship between the behavior and punishment is not clear, learning is difficult or impossible. Type II punishment shares all of the other pitfalls that Type I has. My NM liked to use this one, too, especially as I got older. It also requires taking away something that is meaningful to the person. If losing the privilege/object doesn't hurt, then the punishment is ineffective.

Negative Reinforcement: Difficult to use outside laboratory as it requires presenting an aversive stimulus for constant periods until the desired behavior occurs. My old textbook gives an example of a man wearing a device that beeps a warning and that makes an irritating noise when he slouches. It shuts off when he straightens his posture and helps him learn to sit up straight all the time, lessening his back pain.

This is of course just a brief overview. It's important to note some people use different terms for the things I have described and these are merely the ones I was taught. I think others use the term "response cost" differently than my professor did. But in sum, it is far better to use techniques that don't require the use of aversive stimuli. Not only are they more effective, they don't inflict harm on anyone.