How Kids Learn by Pushing Buttons
(from the archives, December 2016)
by Chris McGinnis, PhD, BCBA-D
This room, full of unlabeled buttons, is the world into which a child is born. It is the child's job to find out what each button controls. The more buttons labeled, the smarter the child becomes.
He or she pushes a particular button, sees what happens, and goes, "Huh."
He pushes the same button again, and if the same thing happens, he goes, "That's... interesting."
He pushes the same button a third time, and if the same thing happens, he goes, "I understand" and makes a label for that button. The button is now labeled clearly. The child may revisit that button any time he wants that same response from the world around him.
He then pushes a new button to see what happens. If that button fails to produce a consistent result, it remains unlabeled.
This is a nice way of thinking about how children learn about the world, especially during their first five years or so prior to their gaining wisdom about morality, perspective taking, and the Golden Rule.
If your child has somehow come to label a number of these buttons incorrectly, you may have already discovered that resorting to logic and reason will never succeed in talking him into removing or replacing the label he placed on the button.
You simply need to go behind the console and rip the wires out from underneath the button.
The child then approaches the button he already has labeled, pushes it, sees to his dismay that the button fails to produce the result he expected - he then pushes it in rapid fashion, still without the expected result. He cries, pounds on the button, and still the expected response eludes him.
Saddened and defeated, he woefully removes the label. He is now quite motivated to hear your thoughts as to what button you've already labeled should be pressed.
Traditional discipline and behavior modification tend to focus on getting the child to not push buttons. What works so much better for everyone, however, is to allow the child to push buttons only to find that some work and some don’t. And we get to decide which ones work. We’ve ripped the wires out of the rest.
Dr. Chris McGinnis is a family psychologist in private practice based in Jupiter, Florida. His website is www.mcginnisbehavioral.com.