Behavior Modification

People, including B. F. Skinner, often talk about the philosophical proposition that operant principles reduce humans to animals whose behavior is determined by features of the environment, denying the be-loved construct of free will. For a variety of reasons (just one here: Read Dan Wegner’s excellent The Illusion of Conscious Will), I am pretty well convinced that those principles of stimulus control, reinforcement, punishment, shaping, and etc. explain great deal—even virtually all—of human behavior.

Mayhaps in another series of posts, I’ll write about the freedom-determinism question, but in this post I’m going into a simpler concern about freedom: Allowing children the freedom to do things on their own. If children are denied the opportunity to function in free-operant situations (i.e., those enviroinments where many different behaviors may occur and repeated), it will be very difficult for them to learn contingencies that exist in those environments.

Lenore Skenazy, who also writes an op-ed column in the the New York (NY, US) Sun, writes a blog called Free Range Kids in which she advocate that parents be less protective and controlling of their children.

Do you ever…let your kid ride a bike to the library? Walk alone to school? Take a bus, solo? Or are you thinking about it? If so, you are raising a Free Range Kid! At Free Range, we believe in safe kids. We believe in helmets, car seats and safety belts. We do NOT believe that every time school age children go outside, they need a security detail. Most of us grew up Free Range and lived to tell the tale. Our kids deserve no less. This site dedicated to sane parenting. Share your stories, tell your tips and maybe one day I will try to collect them in a book. Meantime, let’s try to help our kids embrace life! (And maybe even clear the table.)

I consider this a splendid idea! With reasonable preparation, children are wonderfully capable of doing things on their own. Some readers might find my embrace of both the perspective that kids should have the opportunity to do things on their own and the principles (and philosophy) of behaviorism as confusing, if not down right contradictory. I don’t.

I do not mean to imply that, absent careful preparation, children should be put in situations that are fraught with danger. There should be gradual progressions from relatively more- to relatively less-controlled conditions.

You see, I in my view the very reason that educators (and parents) should be teaching children how to do things on their own. Behavior modification is not about controlling children. It’s about teaching them how to behave, how to do things, how to be effective on their own. If teachers fail to fade prompts, to move from more highly structured contingencies to self-managed contingencies, to teach discriminations about when certain behaviors are and are not appropriate, they will be fostering dependency; their students will always need them around to provide the prompts, manage the contingencies, and assess the environment to determine the whether a behavior is appropriate.

The goal of behavior modification is not to keep children from having freedom, as in the opportunities to do things independently, but to prepare them well for freedom, as in the capability to do things well independently.

Check Ms. Skenazy’s post about whether we stunt our kids’ by action we take to increase their safety for a good introduction to her views.