No Spanking, No Time-Out, No Problems

Punishment is often the simple way out when you are too tired to really put the effort into doing it the proper way. Making sure you observe proper behavior and complement on that requires more effort. If I got a good amount of energy I am also usually able to convince my child to go with what I want them to without shouting, or threaten with punishment. But that often requires more imagination and when you are tired and worn out, there is no energy left to be imaginative.

And yet getting caught in the act of doing something wrong and being "punished" (harsh words in the case of a dog) is remarkable effective, particularly in combination with positive reinforcement for the things done well.

> We adopted a puppy a little more than a year ago and this was the exact advice we were given for how to train her

This works remarkably well until you have a dog for which it doesn't work. We've adopted several dogs - some as puppies, some grown - and found that most of the time, for most of the animals, these practices work. But sometimes -and for some dogs - they don't work at all, or with greatly reduced effectiveness.

It depends on what drives the dog and that dog's personality.

> Our baby is only six months old so we'll have to report back in a decade as to whether this approach works well with kids too. :)

Yes. And no. It depends entirely on the personality of your child - and to a limited extent, your own. That's the frustrating thing about these kinds of articles (as well as dog training articles). They position themselves with such authority that we seem to be expected to believe that they're handing down a Great Universal Truth*.

It's not. In my opinion, there is only one - living things (dog or child) are complicated creatures. There are so many variables unique to each living thing in your care that there's not much room left for The One True Way.

[1] My favorite of these is a popular dog trainer who - with all sincerity - says that when you pull on a dog's collar, the dog will pull back because it's physics. The dog must provide an equal and opposite reaction. It's amazing how many people buy into the rationale. What the trainer advocates is perfectly fine in many cases - but I can't get past the pseudo-scientific non-logic.

I don't naturally get angry, so I simulated anger just to see if it worked. My experience is that anger and scolding sort of kind of works but is very inefficient and often has diminishing returns. You reach a point where simply getting more angry doesn't work. Quite the opposite it just makes things worse.

I was positively surprised by how much more efficient positive reinforcement was. Just a little bit could often create a lot bigger change than lots of screaming and shouting could produce.

The problem is that it is often far more complicated to do. It requires more thinking, because it is not always obvious what the opposite of the bad behavior is and when you should praise.

E.g. my second child would go ballistic on the changing table. It became almost completely impossible to put him there because he had so many negative associations from being held in place while being changed. I realized I had to make it into a positive experience. My solution was to bring him there when he didn't need clothing or diaper changes and only put him there to do fun things. Gradually I got him to think positively about lying on the changing table, and then I could actually start praising him for complying with getting changed. But just realizing I had to take him there to do something entirely different from what the purpose of the changing table is wasn't obvious to me at first.

So my advice is, try to figure out how you child thinks. A lot of this comes down to having empathy with your child and seeing the world from their perspective. Once you know that you can more effectively employ various best practices.

Wow, this is very well put.

This helped us realize that, in this case, we really were the problem. We needed to, in some cases, be more firm. At first this resulted in a lot of tantrums, but once the child's expectations changed then he behaved with us similarly to with his speech therapist.