Our Family, Our Strength - Principle #14: Positive Reinforcement - Rabbi Yirmiyahu Abramov

continue in the series of twenty five basic principles of Jewish child rearing we are now by principle number 14 which will call positive reinforcement sometimes a parent can walk into a child's playroom and find the whole room in what we call a tremendous balagan a tremendous mess and the parent can stand and say what's going on here how can you live like this how can you have such a such a mess in this place this discarded apple cores and there's bits and pieces of foodstuffs and strewn amongst the toys and the puzzles and it's all one huge huge calamity zone it looks like and a parent can will berate the child and say come on you can't live this way let's get this room cleaned up and very often the response as the child as the parent walks out of the room can be the typical raising of shoulders not and just ignore this bereavement of the parents now there's one way which is almost failed safe it always works imagine the same parent walked into the room and he looks around the room and he sees this room which looks like a catastrophe zone which is strewn and there's mess all over the place and he looks around the looks and finally identifies a little corner where there's actually nothing there it's actually clean and you walk up to the corner and period it and look at it carefully and call the kids come over your kids coming on come over here and they're all looking what is a parent looking at and he says you see this little corner it's so nice and clean I wonder if the whole room can look this way now this is not going to evoke a negative response because you've been positive you have identified something positive i'll be at something very small and minor but you've identified something positive and you've said come let's see if we can all make the risk the room look like that clean and tidy little corner the response would inevitably be a very positive one because you've come positive we've identified something positive we're reinforcing it and we saying let's look for more and this is a very well-known principle in management of people and at all levels of management where a the clever bus the clever employee instead of running around his workers looking for something negative to berate he'll run around and make rounds amongst his workers until he captures one of them red-handed doing something great and you say wow I've caught you doing something good and your call others and Sehwag everybody have a look at this everybody wants to get this compliment everyone wants to have this positive reinforcement to what he's doing and you'll find a situation very often and there are many great organizations that are run in this matter run in a very positive manner no one's looking at the half empty cup but everyone's looking at the other half the half that it's full half of this cup is full it's not a half empty cup it's half full cup so when we come to our children and we want to try and modify certain modes of behavior so we can nag them we can berate them we can beg them we can shout at them we can punish them and probably this pattern will go on creating more and more tension in the home creating more and more resentment or we can just flip the whole thing into something positive and say I know you capable of more I know you've got great strengths I know that you can really speak nicely to your parents whatever the issue is I know because I know you and both find identify something which is very very positive this will create a positive atmosphere because the child were much easier accept criticism when it's necessary the challenge is therefore to focus on the behavior and positive behavior and reinforce it in most cases the child will try and live up to it because we have now labeled them and identified them as someone who's capable of doing something very positive they will want to rise up to the challenge they will want to behave in a in a positive way living up to the compliment that we've given them and repeating this positive behavior