Janice Persinger

PSYC 1010 WW
Kim Rhen

June 17, y

Classical Conditioning in Parenting Setting

Parents often find encouraging their children to do behaviors they may not find enjoyable

difficult to accomplish. In this essay, I will prove that by using classical conditioning, training a

child to accomplish a chore in a timely fashion is entirely possible by using the right reward or

punishment system. By using consistent behavior responses, training a child to act unconsciously

the way you request them to is easier than you think.

Grocery store trips are common amongst families across the world. Children are balls of

energy, and throughout the grocery trip they want to bounce around and look at things, and even

request specific items. In this experiment, the unconditioned stimulus is going to the grocery

store. The unconditioned response in this scenario is, in general, the child acting uncontrolled.

They run around, touch everything, and demand everything they want throughout the store, in

essence a standard trip to the grocery store with a child.

Over the course of a couple of grocery trips, you encourage your child to keep their hand

on the cart. Whether you remind them verbally or you move their hand to the cart naturally. At

the end of the grocery trip, if they have kept their hand on the cart and behaved appropriately,

you buy them a piece of candy or toy at the checkout counter. The piece of candy is a desired

item for the child, as they enjoy the joy that it gives them. This is a response they want to

continue happening.

Over the course of the next several shopping trips, you continue this behavior. You start

providing them less hints and clues on keeping their hand on the cart and their behavior under

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check, but every time they finish the grocery shopping trip with good behavior, they get that

same toy or candy at the checkout counter. When they do not behave appropriately, you don’t

comment on their misbehavior, you simply don’t purchase the piece of candy or toy. Eventually,

the child begins to associate their good behavior with the toy at the end of the shopping trip.

They then continue to make the effort to continue behaving, to ensure that at the end of the

shopping trip they get that piece of candy or toy. The conditioned stimulus remains going to the

grocery store and the conditioned response becomes their good behavior through the grocery trip.

They link that behavior with the reward of the piece of candy or toy, so they want to continue

that behavior.

As with most classical conditioning experiments, if you were to stop producing the reward

at the end of the grocery trip, you run the risk of the behavior you have conditioned becoming

extinct. They no longer see the benefit of behaving at the grocery store, as they no longer get the

reward, and the child will eventually return to it’s standard behavior.

There are many ways you can use classical conditioning when it comes to raising children,

or even potentially training a spouse or child into the behaviors you want to see. I showed one

example how using an easy reward system can classically condition a child into producing the

behavior that you require.

References

Sanderson, C.A., & Huffman, K. (2017). Real world psychology (2nd ed.) Wiley.