As Luke helpfully taught us, negative reinforcement doesn't seem to work as well as positive. Spanking, in particular, is right out.
I've seen this claim all over the comments to Luke's post, and I don't see Luke as asserting it (or being able to). In fact, there are only two things in Luke's post that even slightly resemble this claim:
First is a warning against punishing people in a way such that the punishment could negatively incentivize the effort instead of the failure. This is a good point, but doesn't apply in a lot of cases - for example, punishing a child for hitting a sibling.
Second is the following quote:
When trying to maintain order in a class, ignore unruly behavior and praise good behavior (Madsen et al. 1968; McNamara 1987).
So I looked up McNamara 1987. It's a book chapter that reports a few studies on students getting better when praised, then says they're very weak, no one's been able to replicate them, and then goes into how a better study McNamara clearly finds more credible shows that students do worse with the sort of hokey planned praise used in the previous studies.
Then I looked up Madsen et all 1968. It's a study on three problem children, Cliff, Frank and Stan. The relevant conditions were Rules, where the teachers wrote some rules on the blackboard and made the children repeat them a bunch of times, and Praise, in which the teachers praised the students for following the rules. There was no punishment condition. Writing the rules on the blackboard didn't help much, but Cliff and Frank seemed to get better after being praised a lot (Stan was equivocal).
Poor Cliff and Frank are not a sufficient basis on which to assert incredibly broad psychological theories about how you should always reward and never punish all humans in all cases.
In the case of positive behavior/reinforcement, there's nothing particularly problematic about this, but for the negative case, you're also punishing being caught/noticed/seen, which can be problematic.
This is a kind-of-sounds-good argument, but one could make equally kind-of-sounds-good arguments on the other side. For example, rewards decrease intrisic motivation by replacing them with extrinsic motivation. Or anything Alfie Kohn ever said (I'm not necessarily endorsing him, just holding him up as an example of arguments that rewards too have their problems).
Finally, I am very suspicious of the studies in this area. Not only is developmental psych generally a minefield, but "rewards work better than punishments" is so in tune with modern sensibilities that I would be really surprised if the average researcher doesn't go out gunning for that result and quietly file anything that shows punishments are better than rewards into a file drawer never to see the light of day.
(one counterexample is a recent study that shows spanking children generally gives them better life outcomes. I've seen a zillion studies that say the opposite, and I consider the entire project of observational studies of spanking totally useless because of the confounding effects of parental choice - ie parents who decide to spank or not spank their children are probably different in many other correlated ways which are much more important - but the study exists and I don't consider the spanking field nearly as settled as you do)
To speak to goal 1 first, Bryan Caplan claims flat outcomes for goal #1 under commonly tried parenting interventions, which seems counter-intuitive. More explanation of what exactly the studies in question proved would be welcome.
I've never read Caplan, but I'm working my way through The Nurture Assumption which is probably what Caplan's working off of. Nurture Assumption claims pretty much everything is flat for pretty much all kinds of parenting and we need to drop the assumption (hence the name) that parenting matters much beyond just not starving or abusing your kid. The books presents lots of complicated evidence but the strongest is adoption studies, where children raised together aren't much more similar than children raised apart (with degree of genetic relatedness held constant). Right now I believe her about 60%.
I also don't recall claiming that positive reinforcement works better than negative reinforcement.
Also, it looks to me like what MBlume means to say is that positive reinforcement works better than punishment (a different concept than negative reinforcement), which is also something I don't recall claiming.
In any case, thanks again Yvain for your analysis of some of the relevant studies.
Planned top-level post -- any feedback very much welcome.
Obviously a followup to: On the Care and Feeding of Young Rationalists
My very first top-level post on LW was a solicitation for advice/feedback/discussion on the topic of rationalist parenting. I'd like to revisit the topic now.
Goals
First of all, let's talk about goals. I can think of four.
What We Know
To speak to goal 1 first, Bryan Caplan claims flat outcomes for goal #1 under commonly tried parenting interventions, which seems counter-intuitive. More explanation of what exactly the studies in question proved would be welcome.
As Luke helpfully taught us, negative reinforcement doesn't seem to work as well as positive. Spanking, in particular, is right out. This is in large part because reinforcement reinforces everything about what the subject's doing at the time it occurs. This means, in particular, that you're reinforcing both the target behavior and being caught at it. In the case of positive behavior/reinforcement, there's nothing particularly problematic about this, but for the negative case, you're also punishing being caught/noticed/seen, which can be problematic.
Nutrition in early childhood does seem to influence life outcomes, mostly on the low end: serious malnutrition depresses IQ -- try to avoid it.
Praise seems to be important, first of all because it is often a powerful positive reinforcer in children. Research has shown that the target of the praise is important. Praising a child for having worked hard to understand a concept seems to lead to more future efforts of the same kind than praising their intelligence.
Simply talking to children, well before they've developed language skills, seems to be important for goals 1 and 4. I plan to use mine as rubber ducks=).
Defaults to Notice and Perhaps Reject
There are some idiosyncrasies of the default in modern American childrearing that don't seem to do anyone any favors.Segregation by age:
Outside of their siblings, American six-year-olds are socialized almost entirely with other six-year-olds. Historically, it has been possible for six-year-olds to be friends with 15-year olds -- to, I suspect, the benefit of both. The older children provide near(er)-term models for the younger children of their future growth, and the older children are thus encouraged to be role-models.Extending this a bit further, there seems to be a taboo against children having adult friends who aren't their close relatives, or close friends of their parents. This taboo seems to be self-reinforcing -- any adult who indicates an interest in befriending a child knowing that the taboo exists signals that they may have suspicious intentions. I suspect that this is yet another way of infantilizing children. The solution is probably just to have lots of local close friends who can be friends to your children.
General Over-protectiveness:
We've all heard of the rise of "helicopter parenting". This article sums things up nicely.What I think I know:
In reference to Goals 2 and 3, most of the struggles I see seem to be about autonomy. Alicorn and I have both spontaneously remarked on how much we love being adults, and this is mostly a function of the extent to which we get to choose our activities from moment to moment, choose where we want to live, choose what/when we want to eat, go where we want to go, stay as long as we want to stay, etc. etc. Similarly, from watching childhood friends with their children, they seem to get in trouble -- the interaction seems to become massively Less Fun -- when they decide that, e.g. the child really must eat food X at time Y, when, as a spectator, I really can't understand why the child can't be left alone to find some food when ey want some.
This suggests increasing autonomy as an important subgoal. In particular, it points to criteria for "optimizing the build" of your child -- what skills do ey need before ey can stay home a few hours without you? Before ey can walk around the corner/bike across town to run an errand/meet a friend/etc.? Before you can safely encourage em to get a driver's license/car? Grind those skill points!
That's all I've got -- what else do we, as a community, know?