It would be wrong to think that parents have decided not to provide concrete consequences for their children's behaviour for theoretical reasons. Parents just want something that works. If we are faced with atrocious behaviour we are not really concerned with which theory the idea comes from or whether it is currently in fashion. We will do anything and everything that has the faintest chance of working. When our own resources are exhausted we seek advice from relatives and friends, read many books and often speak to various professionals. Greedily we take up and try all of the strategies suggested to us. Parents have instictively been using rewards and sanctions with children since caveman times and we rarely give up on our attempt to provide consequences. We will have tried being more positive; being more friendly; explaining carefully; being more firm or more strict; completely ignoring them; threatening and using punishments; promising and supplying rewards. We will have attempted to tell them off quietly; tell them off loudly; take away pocket money; take away computer time; take away that party; send them to bed early; put the into "time out". Promise them X or Y if only they will do as we ask. In desperation we will may also have smacked them lightly; moderately; or very hard. But nothing works. It is not that we don't believe in consequences it is that we cannot find an effective way of providing them. "Punishment does not work" I have been told this by parents many times over the years. If sanctions and rewards really didn't work then it would mean that children either didn't like some things and dislike others - clearly they do - or that somehow it makes no difference to them when the things they like and the things they don't are interchanged. All we need to do is look at the incentives at work in our own lives to know that this cannot be right. Rewards and sanctions are at work at every level from inside the home to the largest scale, they are the generating force behind the Capitalist Economy and it seems that without them Communist systems flounder. When parents say "Punishment does not work" it is always perfectly true but they omit one word - My - . "My Punishments don't work". It is the way parents currently impose rewards and sanctions that isn't working. The main intention of subsequent pages in this book is to provide the framework in which sanctions will work. The well know American educationalist and writer Alfie Kohn also began to believe that rewards don't work. He describes a study where two groups of children were given the same mathematical puzzle. The first group was promised rewards if they completed the puzzel, with the other group no mention was made of rewards. The rewarded group didn't finish, appeared bored and were focused upon the reward rather than the maths. It was the "the group that was not rewarded" who worked together, worked faster, completed the task, and then asked for more puzzels. I have heard this and similar experiments described as proving that rewards or sanctions are not effective. This is not what they show. What they do show is that intrinsic rewards and sanctions, i.e. those occuring naturally within an activity, can be far more effective than "tagged on" ones. They also show us that we need to question continually what children really find rewarding and sanctioning. |
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