Manny the Manny
I am a male nanny ("manny") with 11+ years of experience in taking care of children, as well as training parents and other caregivers. I enjoy everything about children, especially when they share their chocolate milk with me. Most importantly, I'm here to help. Ask me a question or send me an email.
Behavior 101 is an ongoing series about the principles underlying human behavior, and how to apply those to changing problem behavior in children, teaching children skills and maintaining positive behaviors. This installment: the principle of deprivation.
Let’s say I need you to do something for me, like that cleaning gutters example from the principle of contingency video. Given an arduous task like that, would you do it in return for a glass of water?
Under normal circumstances, almost certainly not. Water is free, readily available and not something we generally find to be overwhelmingly reinforcing. But, what if you had just spent 36 hours wandering the desert? Would you find the offer of a glass of water — probably paid in advance, under those circumstances — to be sufficient to compel you to climb a ladder and pull leaves out of my gutters?
Behavior 101 is an ongoing series about the principles underlying human behavior, and how to apply those to changing problem behavior in children, teaching children skills and maintaining positive behaviors. This installment: the principle of size.
A little over a month ago, back when I first introduced you to the principles of effective consequences, I defined the principle of size as follows:
A consequence is more effective when it matches the behavior in magnitude. In other words, does the punishment fit the crime?
If you’ve read/watched my previous in-depth posts on the principles of immediacy and contingency, it won’t surprise you when I tell you that there’s a little more to it than that.
Or, put another way, I lied again. Sorry. It was just a little one, and I’m going to clear it up right now. First, let me give you another description of the principle of size, paraphrased from L. Keith Miller’s Principles of Everyday Behavior Analysis:
Behavior 101 is an ongoing series about the principles underlying human behavior, and how to apply those to changing problem behavior in children, teaching children skills and maintaining positive behaviors. This installment: the principle of contingency.
Because of the nature of the principle of contingency, and my relative competency to explain things in the written versus spoken word, I strayed from convention this week with Behavior 101. Instead of my usual blog post, this week, you get my very first vlog!
Check it out below and be sure to subscribe to my new YouTube channel for future vlog posts.
Next week, Behavior 101 will cover the principle of size.
Oh, and if anyone fell in love with Blue, send me an email. We have too many kitties over here.
Behavior 101 is an ongoing series about the principles underlying human behavior, and how to apply those to changing problem behavior in children, teaching children skills and maintaining positive behaviors. This installment: the principle of immediacy.
“Does he ever have tantrums with you?”
Yes, of course.
“Do you ever use ‘the threat?’”
No. What is that?
“Oh, it means telling him he’s not going to be allowed to watch videos when he gets home. I didn’t do it today, but if he’s like this again tomorrow, I will. Can you let his mom know?”
Tired of Yoshi’s tantrums during the school day, his preschool teacher was looking for strategies to curb them. She and Yoshi’s mom came up with this consequence — that he would lose his screen time privileges after school when he couldn’t behave in school.
While revoking privileges is generally an excellent consequence for children, this particular strategy has a fundamental flaw.
Behavior 101 is an ongoing series about the principles underlying human behavior, and how to apply those to changing problem behavior in children, teaching children skills and maintaining positive behaviors. This installment: principles of effective consequences.
Last week, we discussed the different types of consequences and how they influence learning and behavior. In doing so, I wrote the following to define the four types of consequences:
Behavior 101 is an ongoing series about the principles underlying human behavior, and how to apply those to changing problem behavior in children, teaching children skills and maintaining positive behaviors. This installment: reinforcement and punishment.
When we learn how to behave, we do so based on consequences. When we do things for which we get rewarded, the odds are that we will keep doing them. (We don’t even have to get rewarded for them every time — that’s how casinos stay in business — but that’s a more complicated concept for another time.)
Likewise, when we do things for which we suffer negative consequences, we are less likely to repeat them. This is the old “hot stove” situation, in which we learn stoves are hot at young age by making the mistake of touching one, then spend the rest of our lives trying to avoid repeating the experience — most often, to varying degrees of failure.
Behavior 101 is an ongoing series about the principles underlying human behavior, and how to apply those to changing problem behavior in children, teaching children skills and maintaining positive behaviors. This installment: functions of behavior.
Have you ever watched someone — child or adult — do something very strange and then wonder to yourself, “why on Earth did he do that?”
(That sound is every parent of every 2-year-old ever, all nodding in unison.)
In the realm of behavior, the term for the answer to that question of “why” is the function of the behavior. Function is the motivation for our actions, the reason we do the things we do and act the way we act.
Because we think of human behavior as being so complex, this idea of function seems at first like it would be terribly complicated. When you get down to it, though, people really only do anything for one of two reasons:
