At a young age, and I think this extends even into young teenagers, we’re literally talking about under-developed brains. Thought processes don’t actually fully

At a young age, and I think this extends even into young teenagers, we’re literally talking about under-developed brains. Thought processes don’t actually fully function, and particularly cause/effect, moral judgement, risk aversion, empathy, logical reasoning skills, etc. Now even a lower mammal can learn instinctively through positive and negative reinforcement. I think the problem is significantly more complex in young humans because the capacity for complex reasoning is there but just not firing on all neurons properly. So your negative reinforcement is more likely at that age to just confound the situation than a simple Skinner box with a rat experiment suggests. It’s certainly not the case that punishment (or we can say “negative consequences”) are never appropriate. A negative consequence should make sense in the context of the behavior. Yesterday at the airport, a woman with a young child was waiting in a long line at the airport food court in front of me. She was scolding her child for wandering off. The child had a small backpack of toys which he was dropping on the ground and then was walking off (a few feet) and peering around things playing hide-and-seek. The mother would get angry and scold the child to pick up his bag, and stop wandering off. A few times she chased after the boy and he gleefully ran away from her. The child was clearly not mentally capable of waiting in the line. The mother was agitated because the line was long, she was afraid of losing her place, and didn’t want to lose sight of her child in a crowded space. So she told the boy if he walked off again she was going to throw away his toys. When he did that, she changed tactics threatening that she would “spank him in front of all these people”. At that point I asked if I could hold her spot for her, and she was able to focus on her child until her turn came. Now that’s a glaringly obvious example of a child being totally “outmatched” by the difficulty of standing in an airport line. I can barely handle it myself sometimes. But there’s a wide spectrum of misbehavior which ultimately boils down to just being beyond a child’s mental capability, which may be diminished because of lack of sleep, hunger, or something challenging that happened earlier in the day (which could be seemingly insignificant, like a friend wanting to play a different game at recess). Until you stop to ask, it’s just so much so simpler to assume they “just aren’t listening”. It can actually be exhausting sometimes to give the benefit of the doubt. More than once I’ve felt like an ass after jumping to a threat or knee-jerk punishment only to shake my head when my wife steps in and gets to the root cause. Luckily every once in a while the situation is reversed and I get a few of my own saves too. It never ceases to amaze me how hard parenting is, and how unprepared we go into it. I like to say that kids take an infinite amount of effort to raise.