punishment doesn’t work

In Justice (and Parenting) punishment is the social imposition of consequences for another’s behavior that do not naturally arise from that behavior.

Research on some poor rats summarized in Psychology Today confirms what I knew as a child and am re-learning as a parent:

punishment does not change the tendency to engage in the behavior that was punished. Instead, it makes the person or the rat want to avoid the source of punishment.

Punishing the rat (with a shock) for some behavior it was conditioned to engage in had zero effect on how much it continued to engage in that behavior.

nonviolent communication highlights the critical importance of the second question to ask when it comes to changing some behavior:

Question 1: What do I want this person to do?

Question 2: What do I want this person’s reasons to be for doing it?

Why We Punish

1. Punishment looks like it works (at least with children) because it stops them from engaging in the behavior while you’re still around. The punishing parent may get that immediate satisfaction of feeling in control, even if it has no lasting effect.
2. Punishment indulges the punisher’s own anger. It feels good to lash out at the objects of our frustration, even if that tends to make things worse in the long run. Now who’s acting childish, eh?
3. “Regression to the mean” gives the illusion of punishment working when behavior is largely random. In other words, we have good days and bad, and if you punish someone every time they have a bad day and stop when they finally have a good one, it might appear that your punishment is causing the good days when in reality you’re just forcing a lagging correlation with random chance.

Alternatives to Punishment

As my former therapist (a father of five) told me, there are only two ways to influence a child’s behavior:

1. Ignore the behavior you don’t want to see. Consistency is essential: ignoring bad behavior only some of the time actually reinforces it more than if you indulged it all the time (this is called intermittent reinforcement)
2. Reward the behavior you want to see. This works best when the reward is inherent to the behavior itself, rather than arbitrary. Think “If you cooperate in the bath we’ll have more time for stories after” rather than “If you cooperate in the bath I’ll give you a chocolate.”

Though I would add a third, from a systems thinking perspective, which is to understand the conditions and systems which give rise to the behavior you don’t want to see. Does my kid have a hard time calming down before bedtime? Maybe the problem isn’t their choosing to be difficult, but but the fact that I give them a sugar-laden after-dinner dessert just before bed, and addressing that is where I’ll find the most success. Or, from a criminal justice perspective, is there a problem with theft of food from grocery stores? Maybe we don’t need ever-more-draconian punishment to “deter” theft, but to address Poverty so people aren’t forced by hunger to steal food in the first place.