December 12, 2024Ben Kingston-Hughes
Ahead of what promises to be a very insightful and entertaining webinar, don’t miss Ben Kingston-Hughes reflections on straightforward behaviour in young children:
Ben Kingston-Hughes – Seeing through behaviour, to the child underneath
If we believe the behaviourists from the 1950’s then behaviour is simply a matter of conditioning. Make a child feel good about themselves and they will repeat the behaviour, punish the child and they will stop. Job done. I mean, it works with rats, so it stands to reason it works with humans, right? Put a rat in a maze, give it some cheese if it goes one way, or an electric shock if it goes the other. Repeat this enough and you have conditioned the Rat’s behaviour, and this should work with children because after all who doesn’t love cheese and who doesn’t hate electric shocks?
The most glaringly obvious answer is that children are not rats. Human children operate on a conscious level far beyond the instinctive drives and behaviours of a rat. They have behaviour influences such as empathy, ethics, impulse control and a fundamental sense of right and wrong that rats simply don’t have. A human child can consciously choose behaviour in a way that no other animal can. Even more advanced, is that children can often consciously assess the rewards and consequences of a behaviour and decide to do it based on its relative merits.
Case in point – I was once so bored in a lesson that I squirted my asthma inhaler in the teacher’s ear. I was immediately sent to the headteacher and received a loud and aggressive telling-off. I had still escaped the lesson though. In short, the short-term reward outweighed the negative. And I’d do it again I tell you!
So, it seems that human behaviour is less straightforward than the behaviourists thought. Modern psychology now tells us that behaviour conditioning is temporary and in no way reflects the element of “choice” that human beings can exert over their behaviour. So basically, conditioning works in the short term in laboratory animals but is woefully inadequate when addressing the complexities of human behaviour.
Maybe we keep repeating this extremely flawed approach, despite what modern psychology is telling us, because it is indeed more straightforward. Afterall, taking the time to understand children’s behaviour, to explore the root cause of the behaviour and then support, nurture and scaffold positive relationships, seems like a lot of hard work.
Maybe if we move away from conditioning behaviour towards actually understanding behaviour, we will realise an awful truth. Conditioning behaviour allows us to place the blame for all behaviour firmly with the child. What if by understanding the reasons behind behaviour we realise that much of children’s behaviour is not actually their fault? What if we now need to scrutinise our own behaviour and understand that we need to make environmental changes to support the child?
One common example is that a child whose attendance at school drops, is penalised by having their end of year trip taken away from them. This is because the non-attendance is clearly the fault of the child. However, if we start analysing what about the school environment makes a child not want to be there, then maybe the blame was never with the child in the first place. Maybe we need to change the environment rather than trying to change the child?
So maybe human behaviour is not straightforward at all, but I think we can simplify it. The most important question we ask about a child is not “how do I control this child’s behaviour.” The question we really need to be asking is, “what do you need?”. If we treat every aspect of children’s behaviour as a child expressing a need, then our role ceases to become that of enforcer but one of scaffolding, supporting and addressing that need. We are now not merely looking at the behaviour but at the underlying factors causing the behaviour and doing everything in our power to change those factors to support the child. The child now has a supportive adult who is guiding and steering them towards more positive outcomes rather than the human equivalent of an electric shock. I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather be the cheese. Now there’s a t-shirt slogan if ever I saw one!
About the author
Ben Kingston-Hughes is an award-winning trainer, keynote speaker and author. He is also the managing director of Inspired Children working with vulnerable children across the UK. His game changing books for the children’s workforce are available from bookstores now.
Ben Kingston-Hughes – Seeing through behaviour, to the child underneath