Conditioning in Children

Conditioning in Children

Now that we have a bit of a basic understanding about conditioning, we can begin to apply it to children's lives to help us understand them. Two key things are worth noting: children are social beings, and their understanding of the world when they are youngest is very concrete and cause and effect based.

Social Beings

As social beings, children are learning how to behave in function in the world they find themselves in. They are incredibly sensitive and easily affected by the actions of those around them.

When children are youngest, they learn primarily through association. Association is learning to relate separate events (naturally related or unrelated) to each other, such that you think that one has something to do with other, whether that is true or not. Through conditioning, children will learn to associate a stimulus with an outcome or their behaviour with an outcome. So, they will mould their behaviour in a way that is most favourable to them.

Therefore, teaching them to make the correct associations from a young age without harsh methods can work possibly even better than punishments. Children understand primarily through behaviour, which is why they will model what you do more than what you say if you’re not careful.

A Concrete View of the World

Children's understanding of, and relationship to, the world, especially when they are young, is very much based on what they can see, hear, and feel right in front of them. This is the primary medium through which they live their lives. Therefore, they are very concrete in their thinking and their learning can be quite action-response based due to their concrete view of the world. The ability to understand the world at a higher, more complex level, on develops much later on.

Therefore, understanding conditioning, which is very cause and effect-based, is imperative when discussing young children’s learning and development. Their early lives are based on their biological needs and what they can readily see - as is condition. So, where a basic need is the 'reward' for a behaviour, the child may be more likely to repeat it. And where something results in a loss of those needs, they will avoid it. These can be basic needs like food, water, social acceptance, or hormonal responses like joy or sadness.

While children are often based very much in the here and now, they do begin do develop memory, and often that is through associating events. Sometimes an event can be so impactful that it doesn't even need to happen multiple times for them to create that association. It seems, though, that conditioning is one of the primary ways through which children begin their worldbuilding.

For example, a child might learn to associate screaming or breaking something with a smack, so to avoid being smacked, they do their best not to break anything. At the concrete level, they draw a direct line between the two (break = smack). They might not know the reason why exactly, but the association is there. Later in their lives, however, they will learn that certain materials break easier than others, or that their caregiver didn't want them breaking things because they were expensive or the child could get hurt. However, at their concrete understanding level, they could not fully understand that.

Classical Conditioning in Children

Classical conditioning and can be very real for younger children, especially babies. Their minds work through associating events and as they have no higher order, complex thinking skills, they navigate the world through what is concrete, so it’s very much response based. These things, when associated with survival and reflexes can become deeply ingrained and even triggering at a later stage (discussed in later Issues).

This becomes relevant when we think of the raising of children. Imagine a child who is hit with a stick or something so frequently that just the sight of the stick causes them to flinch even before it touches them. The body has learned the response. This is classical conditioning in action.

Conditioning can go wrong in that it can result in generalisations. For example, a child taught to fear a large man because they have been abused, or trust all adults just because their parents are adults.

Operant Conditioning in Children

Operant conditioning is used in parenting and discipline to train children. However, it's important to remember the consistency and timeliness of stimuli. If your stimulus happens too far before or too far after, then the child will be less likely to make the link and the efforts will be ineffective. For example, punishing a child long after they’ve done something wrong. Similarly, bad habits can get ingrained at a very young age due to conditioning. Or think of a child who gets “rewarded” every time they cry or do something well. They will learn to associate their behaviour with the response and fall into a habit.

Operant conditioning works in that If you give the child something good when they do something right, and do remove something they like when they do something wrong, you can train the child to do the desired behaviour even in the absence of the other stimulus. The good thing about this is that you can use various stimuli, so for a crying baby, the response doesn’t need to be smacking, it can be a scolding. Or for a young child, it can be taking away their toy.

Where Conditioning Stops Working

These theories, while useful to initial ideas surrounding learning, do not take into account human’s ability to think through their behaviour. Yes, a child can be trained to respond or behave a certain way, this is where discipline and rewards for learning and good behaviour come from. But this can only work for so long.

For example, you can threaten a child with no sweets or hitting when they are young, but once they are older, you can no longer use the same motivation. Or a child might learn to associate a stimulus with an outcome like in classical conditioning, but perhaps when they have a deeper understanding of the world at a later stage, they may stop making that association.

In the preschool where I used to work, children were motivated by cute little stars on their hands or their sticker charts. They really wanted that sticker and would do almost anything to get it. Those stars were like social currency, and they would sometimes brag to their classmates about them.

But a child say 5 years older (aged 10), is no longer motivated by an arbitrary drawing of a sticker because they know that it has no real world value. This is why adults are motivated by money, not cute little smiley faces. As children develop in their understanding of the world, they begin to realise what has real meaning. Meaning is determined by either social value or survival. So long as something no longer has social value or is necessary for survival, it ceases to be relevant.

However, conditioning doesn't stop working altogether as long as it evolves. The stimuli and associations can continue to be evolved like in higher order conditioning or through using a secondary reinforcer. A secondary reinforcer is something that does not require survival and not valuable on its own, but is socially meaningful or a means to survival. In childhood, this may be a sticker because it may show that you are liked, in adulthood, it may be money because it is required to buy food and other desirable stuff.

The Takeaway

Understanding conditioning is key when looking to understand children, their behaviour, development, and the foundations of their learning and worldbuilding. It can explain so much of their way of relating to the world and can even explain adults' own behaviour to themselves.

Conditioning is based on an individual's most basic, biological needs and responses, thus, particularly in the early years of a child's life, it is particularly potent. Of course, learning does not happen in such a simplistic way, but conditioning certainly has its place in the broader context of things and is relevant to understanding early learning in children.

Associations, and conditioning through associations, is one of the fundamental ways that humans learn.

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