Assuming a child is of average intelligence for his age and with no known disorders, a child has to be exposed to parental "conditioning". I estimate the typical domestic pet to top out at 3 or 4 years old intelligence wise when compared to humans. Knowing that the animal brain is best taught by this technique it's only logical to assume the young mind of the human would react the same way to conditioning.

Our brains have something called a reward center which makes us feel good when it's stimulated. This is why if a dog properly executes a trick he gets a biscuit, his reward center is stimulated and he knows that to get that stimuli again he has to do the trick. Pretty simple in those terms isn't it?

Now let's take a mom and a kid in the grocery store. The kid flails around on the floor, crys screams and throws a big tantrum because he wants a toy, some candy, whatever. On one scenario the Mom is embarrassed and wants to stop this display at once so the she gives the kid what he wants. In the second same scenario the Mom picks the child up, straps him in the basket and continues shopping. Now the rest of us will have to hear the annoying brat for a while but we'll have to understand that it's in the interest of a lesson to the child.

In the first scenario, the mom rewards the child for bad behavior, thats how the childs subconcious mind will see it. In the second scenario the child learns that this is not behavior that will reap a reward. Conditioning has to start early and be continued as the child will continue to push boundaries.

If the parent keeps this technique going throughout childhood the child will learn to understand emotions and how getting what they want does'nt include tantrums, anger or crying. In the world of time outs and less physical actions toward conditioning is likely a good thing in that the child does not learn that violence solves problems. The part of timeout that parents sometimes fail is explaining that he is not simply being an annoyance but that his behavior in not acceptable.

Learn more about this author, Rob Purifoy.
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