For this assignment, I will be relating the two articles "From Positive Reinforcement to Positive Behaviors: An Everyday Guide for the Practitioner", by Ellen Sigler and Shirley Aamidor and "Strength Based Discipline that Taps into the Resilience of Youth" by Scott Larson. These two articles take slightly different views on how to discipline and speak to children on a regular basis in order to encourage long-term positive behaviors. Neither of the two are encouraging hitting or spankings, or any other kind of corporal punishment be inflicted on the child, but rather they vary in degree of harshness.
Sigler focuses almost exclusively on the actions that an educator or caretaker should take when a child behaves the way that educator wants them to, and how to reward them to encourage that action. She does not suggest that every single action the child makes should be praised, but that those that do garner praise should always be recognized. Often, she says, people fall to one or the other sides of this argument in their actions, they either do not praise the good actions enough, or they praise seemingly without discretion, telling the child they are behaving correctly, even when that is not the case. This is bad because children are very able to tell the difference between earned praise and unearned praise, and if the praise becomes a constant, not a reward, that praise has no effect, or at the least that effect is seriously diluted.
Scott Larson chooses to talk more about how a disciplinarian should react when a child acts out, or in the least behaves in a way that is undesirable. It is important, he says, that the "badness" of the deed and the child are separated early on in the process, that just because a child has acted badly does not mean they themselves are bad, only that they have done something they shouldn't have. However, he does say that we should place the blame for those actions on the child, not making the acting out a blameless affair. For example, one could ask: "You're a good kid - why did you do _____?" This way, the child knows they themselves are not implicitly bad, but also that the actions the have been engaging in are not acceptable.
