Question

Imagine that you are the parent of 4 year-old twins who are very active and continue to draw on everything in the house with crayons, despite you repeatedly telling them to not do that. A. How could you use negative punishment to decrease this behavior instead of using positive or physical punishment? B. Describe why policymakers and developmental psychologists urge parents to use alternatives to physical punishment, such as forms of negative punishment. Be sure to mention potential side effects of punishment in your answer.

Answer 1

If a parent uses negative punishment to decrease an unwanted or an undesirable behavior in their children, they will take away a positive stimulus that was encouraging that behaviour in the first place. In this case, that positive stimulus is 'crayons'. If the crayons are taken away from the twins they won't be able to exhibit this behaviour anymore. It should be noted that this punishment has to be given consistently, whenever the twins exhibit the target behavior. Negative punishment focuses on decreasing the occurrence of this behavior in the future.

Policymakers and developmental psychologists urge parents to use alternatives to physical punishment, such as forms of negative punishment as the use of such punishments is not associated with negative feelings like anger, fear, shame, guilt etc. It does not involve physical harm or mental harm whereas the use of physical punishment affects the mental development of a child. They might even learn "learned helplessness" which is a state of mind in which the victim is unable to get out of of the state of misery even when they can and just learns to deal with it. Forms of negative punishments should be used instead of physical punishments as they are extremely effective in decreasing the rate of occurrence of of the unwanted behavior. The consequence of exhibiting a bad behaviour is the removal of a positive stimulus.

The potential negative side effects of punishment are increased aggression, criminal activities (in rare cases), anti-social behavior, impaired mental health, emotional instability, learnt helplessness, angry outbursts, imitation or modelling of that behavior, disruptive relationships, abusive relationships, delinquency and self-harm.