Why Do We Treat Our Children Like Rats?

Modern parenting hasn't escaped from the shadows of two weird old white dudes with bleak theories about human nature. Can we do better?

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While ‘gentle’ parenting has seized hold of thousands Insta grids, it still hasn’t toppled the positive and negative reinforcement parenting regime that exists in most American households. 

 “No dessert until you eat your dinner!”

“After you do your chores you can get $5!”

“Go to your room for hitting your brother!” 

Listen, I’m not above bribing my kid with a piece of candy to listen to my podcast in the car without her complaining, but I do recognize that this is something cynical at heart of these sort of interactions. 

Even when I worked as a classroom teacher, I relied on behavior charts, contests between classes for good behavior and rewards for grades. Motivating 8th graders was a daunting task, one time I told the class I’d cook them bacon as a reward for staying on task.

Parenting is hard AF. I’m not denying it. And bribing kids to do the stuff you want them to do and  or threatening them with punishments is admittedly the fastest way to get them to behave how we want them to. But is it the best for them? Is it even effective? And what effect does it have on our kids long term? Also, do most parents know the disturbing worldview these schemas come from?

The notion that we can shape kids’ behaviors by issuing rewards and punishments is based on a theory from the 1950s called “operant conditioning,” coined by psychologist B.F. Skinner. Unlike his predecessors, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, Skinner posited that human behavior had little to do with unresolved inner turmoil and human beings tend to behave in ways that offer reward or that avoid punishment.

His proof? The behavior of rats in the ‘Skinner Box’: rats were conditioned to hit a lever inside of a cage that dispensed a pellet every time it was pressed. They quickly learned how to repeat the process (positive reinforcement). 

BF Skinner and his Skinner Box.

Another type of conditioning was negative reinforcement, where the rats were continuously shocked until they pressed the lever. They learned to press the lever to avoid the negative consequence (think doing your homework to avoid a bad grade). 

Then there was punishment, where a negative aversive (electric shock) was given after an undesirable action. Punishment is different from other reinforcement because it doesn’t tell you what to do, it only tells you what not to do. It’s also associated with increased aggression and the rats continue to do the negative behavior after the punishment is stopped. 

Based on his rat observations, Skinner argued that mental states or even internal convictions such as beliefs, desires, memories, and plans were simply “superstitions.” The only real thing was behavior. From his Harvard bio:

According to Skinner, the future of humanity depended on abandoning the concepts of individual freedom and dignity and engineering the human environment so that behavior was controlled systematically and to desirable ends rather than haphazardly.

 Yiiiiikes. I don’t know about you but that is a very grim outlook on human behavior and one I’m not so sure that most parents who abide by the tenets of operant conditioning would share in his bleak worldview.

Cuddly man on 1971 Time Magazine cover

John B Watson was another old-timey dude (he proceeded Skinner) whose antiquated views have shaped modern parenting practices (including sleep training, more on that later) with his PROFOUNDLY horrifying and unethical “Little Albert” experiment. It was in this experiment that Watson claimed to demonstrate “classical conditioning” in humans. You may remember classical conditioning from the famous Pavlov’s dogs experiment: the dogs learned to associate a noise with receiving a treat, so much so that they started to salivate just upon hearing the noise. 

Comic by Matteo Farinella

Watson took a little boy of about 9 months of age who was frightened of loud noises. He conditioned the boy to be scared of a rat, by presenting the rat to the boy alongside the loud noise. Eventually the boy was frightened of the rat by itself (he was not scared of the rat before the experiment started) and anything that resembled the rat like a hat or another furry object, even Santa Claus. 

Watson also claimed he could erase the conditioned responses by stopping the reinforcement. This is where the idea of extinction in sleep training comes from. The idea that if you stop “reinforcing” the behavior, the crying or waking up will stop. Like Skinner, Watson actually believed that people had no free will; and we’re all just acting on our previous conditioning and positive/negative reinforcement learning experiences. 

Watson went on to publish the Psychological Care Of Infants And Children where he advised parents:

“Let your behavior always be objective and kindly firm. Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit in your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say good night. Shake hands with them in the morning. Give them a pat on the head if they have made an extraordinarily good job of a difficult task.”

I think it’s safe to assume that most parents reading that passage today would find it laughably cruel and insane? And yet, Watson and Skinner’s influence are baked into modern parenting culture. 

Look, small children are raw, wellsprings of emotion and chaos in a world that demands them to be civilized and controlled. They show up, explode our lives, re-organize our universe around them, and their emotions have the ability to change the weather. So it makes sense that we would rely on some rigid, base impulses to carrot and stick our kids into some sort orderliness. But do we lack such imagination? Isn’t that the exact quality that sets us apart from all other mammals? Especially lab rats?

Something so innocuous as “go sit in time out” that we take for granted being a normal part of parenting, but when you think about it is actually missing the whole point of parenting. We are so conditioned to think that if we don’t give our kids “consequences” they will grow up to be murderous deviants or “think they can do whatever they want”. 

What if punishments and consequences actually do nothing except teach our kids that we’re the enemy? That lying is a good idea because then you can avoid the consequence (certainly learned this in my teenage years) and that your only motivation for doing good should be extrinsic and how you feel inside doesn’t matter?

I’m not saying I have answers as to how you SHOULD get your kid to brush her teeth or get her boots on or not look you square in the eye and say “YOU’RE STUPID”, but I have to agree that negative consequences, fear and intimidation by my own parents caused me to have a strained relationship. I also didn’t trust them or confide in them. 

I can’t think of anything worse than my kids growing up resenting me and not feeling like they can come to me for anything. I want to avoid this at all costs. And I already think I’m failing. It’s so hard not to default to that “go to your room” when you’ve repeated and repeated yourself and your kids keep asking to watch TV. 

I do put some stock in Gabor Mate and his child development ideas. In his book Hold On to Your Kids, Mate argues that it’s the strength of the attachment that you share with your child that will most influence their behavior.  When you wield punishments and rewards to extrinsically motivate your kids or manipulate their behavior, eventually they stop caring about the punishments and you will lose the “power to parent”. The power to parent comes from your relationship with your child and their attachment and orientation to you as the biggest guiding force in their lives. 

These classical and operant conditioning type parenting methods do not take into account free will or human emotion and desires. I find it depressing to think we’re all just hopping through life acting on positive and negative reinforcement loops from our experiences. That we have no actual thoughts or emotions propelling our behavior. 

It is so, so hard to break free of the thoughts that if we don’t impose consequences on our kids they will run the house. This is where the rise of methods like gentle/conscious parenting come in. They allow the kid to have emotions about boundaries you may set, and natural consequences may occur, but you don’t impose some arbitrary consequence when your kid misbehaves (she doesn’t want to wear a coat so she gets cold would be a natural consequence). It’s difficult in those moments where there is no natural or logical consequence, and I admit I feel permissive in those moments. 

What to do? She just slapped her brother in the face and I’m just supposed to do nothing? 

No one ever said parenting is easy. Discipline means to teach. So what I try (and mostly fail) to focus on is what do they need to be taught in order to stop the undesired behavior? Maybe my daughter needs to be taught what to do with big emotions when she feels angry. Maybe she needs more connection with me. These “gentle parenting” methods are so new and so hard to follow sometimes it’s hard not to feel like a failure all the time. All I know is every day is a new opportunity to get it right.