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Some questions I have been asked by readers of my newsletter: 1. Do special needs children understand cause and effect and also rewards versus punishments? Do they comprehend the same way as other children? The interesting thing is that this is not an issue. All creatures great and small have an interest in reward versus punishment to some degree. Think about the bottom of the food chain such as a cockroach. Cockroaches despise the light and live to move around in the dark hours of the night. They associate good feelings with dark and bad feelings with light. They might not think about it in those terms or even at all. Turn on the lights and the roach goes scuttling for darkness. In a very basic sense, light = punishment and darkness = reward. The behavior of escaping from light to dark is rewarded, and so is repeated. Roaches don't have a memory and can't be instructed like we can. Canines can be instructed because they have a wonderful memory. They know, for example, if they hear the word "stay" they will stay in place in order to receive a treat or reward. The more you go up on the ladder of life creatures, the higher memory functioning. Improvement of awareness and analytical skills surfaces. When these attributes increase, you need to vary the intensity of the rewards and punishments to have any effect. What reward and punishments should you dole out? Easy. Try first by experimenting with different rewards and punishments based on your own experience. Have a system of rewards and punishments that will affect your child's behavior. Make sure that you are consistent. If their behavior changes then you have accomplished your goal. If it does not then take these two things into consideration: a) either the rewards/punishments were not sufficiently motivating (again, see the book for details) or b) your child could not create a link between the behavior and the reward or punishment. If you wait too long to respond to a behavior then your reward or punishment may have little or no meaning. This is especially true when dealing with younger children. So, when you see that your system is not working. You step back, have a think about it, modify it, and then try again. Ultimately you will either succeed in changing the behavior, or you won't. Which leads to the second question: ====== 2. What do you do when all your best efforts to change a behavior have failed? Richard (the Dad) has been struggling with his child, Tim, who has PDD. Tim is supposed to do a few hours of physical therapy each day. But guess what? Much of the time he is not too keen on the idea! Richard has read the book. He has experimented with just about every reward, punishment, incentive scheme he can think of. He has tried to make the therapy more exciting and fun. But despite all of these efforts, half the time the therapy just does not get done. So what is one to do? Well you have two options here: a. You could become all upset and flustered about it. You get mad at yourself for your apparent failure. You feel like you are no service to your child. You want to find the magic trick that will make your child want to do his physical therapy session. b. You stop and look at your situation. You take a deep breath and look at things realistically and logically. You are okay with the fact that half the time the physical therapy session may not happen, but this is still an improvement from how much physical therapy your child was accomplishing last year. Is (a.) or (b.) the more productive option? The downfall of (a.) is that you will amp up your stress level which affects everyone negatively. You are not having a good time and your results won't improve this way. Sometimes you just have to learn to live with the fact that your child may never be totally motivated to do the physical therapy. It's sad, but true. It is better to work with what you have then cry about not achieving perfection. Is it not better to dial back the expectations and the striving, and aim to achieve the best that you can GIVEN THE LIMITATIONS YOU FIND YOURSELF UNDER? And, surprisingly, often when the stress is relieved, and the fun returns, then performance improves. But even if it doesn't, which would you rather have: a) 50% performance and everyone is miserable or, b) 50% performance and everyone is happy? The key point is to not try to compete to an ideal level when it might not be a realistic goal.
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About the Article Author
Wish you kids would behave?? Take a look at Dr. Noel Swanson's excellent website packed full of parenting advice There are also articles on children's special educational needs that are worth checking out.
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