Educational Psychology: The Appropriate Punishment

I thought it was very interesting when we discussed punishment and positive and negative reinforcement in class. I think it is very important to use positive reinforcement just as much as negative reinforcement. I also found it interesting that when you punish a child, you should do nine good things to make up for the one bad punishment. We discussed spanking in class also. I personally have never been spanked, but that is only because my father was physically abused by his father, so my dad chooses to punish his children in other ways.

However, I do not agree with the way my parents chose to punish me. When I was in high school, I went through a time where I chose not to study. I also decided to experiment some with drinking, which I would soon find out that a fourteen year old girl had no business doing this!

To make a long story short, my parents found out that I had gone to a party and consumed alcoholic beverages and I was grounded for what seemed like eternity.

Now I agree that I deserved to be grounded, but not as strictly as I was. I was grounded from the television, the telephone, my friends, and I couldn’t even do anything on the weekends. I could not even go to my grandmother’s house to spend the night. I really feel like my parents were way too harsh on me. They never hugged me or comforted me when I was about to go insane from boredom.

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I think it is very important for parents and teachers to sit down and discuss appropriate punishment with their children. This way the child at least has a little input into it. I feel like grounding your children for over a month does much more harm than good. I plan to really look at the studies that have been done on positive and negative reinforcement. Hopefully when I have a classroom of my own and my own children at home, I can use better strategies than those of my parents.