 Ethics, I know, it's ethics. That's right, it's not bad. Especially when you're learning all these powerful tools, you want to be ethical with them. Punishment is controversial. This is a hot topic, especially today. It's just one of those things that, especially in schools, can you punish? Can you not? How you punish? Can you use time now? Can you keep the kid off the recess thing? Can you spank them? I know when I went to school, I got spanked by my principal with a paddle. I doubt that's going to be going on today. It's controversial because it can border on abuse. If you overdo it, it's abuse. So, I don't know, this is just one of those ones that you want to be cautious with it. I generally tell people, don't bother. Don't bother with punishment, unless it's some type of verbal punishment. If you're in the schools, you're working with other people's kids without the express permission of that parent or that person to tell you that it's okay to use punishment, then I wouldn't, period. Just, they may be okay with time out because they might not realize that's negative punishment, but I would just generally avoid punishment. When working with other people's children, right? Might be different for the parents in the class here because you're deciding what's right and this is a tool that you can use. If a non-pain-inducing alternative is available, use it. Pain is your last resort. Does it work, you bet. But do verbal reprimands work? Yeah. And depending on the family, depending on the individual, depending on the culture, sometimes those verbal reprimands are even bigger than pain, right? Some cultures are very sensitive to things like shame. So, adding shame can be a huge punisher and it's not pain. You didn't hurt the person physically. You may have hurt them a little emotionally, but that shaming sort of thing, like I'm ashamed of you or I'm disappointed in you or you have shamed the family or you have embarrassed us, that type of thing. That's still punishment and it may be very effective. But generally speaking, if you've got another alternative other than pain, use it. Response prevention can be useful, right? Where you actually prevent a particular response from occurring, but it also prevents the appropriate responding from happening. So, this is an extreme example here is prison, right? You go to prison for doing something wrong. Maybe it's something like stealing a cake or something like that, okay? You run into Costco, you run out, you steal the cake, blah, blah, blah. You may go to prison for that, not likely, but you get an example here. And it also, it prevents you from stealing in the future, at least while you're in jail, but it also prevents you from learning how to go into a store and not steal, okay? So that's, it is problematic to do response prevention. I like response prevention for a lot of things, but this is one of the drawbacks of it. Generally speaking, in the culture right now, the most appropriate situation to use punishment in is when you have severe problems. Is the child hurting themself? Are they hurting others? Is there a health issue, okay? Is someone going to be physically harmed as a result of this behavior continuing? If so, punish immediately. And that is ethical to use punishment in that situation. And that's generally acceptable. There's all sorts of issues with timeout. We could talk about this forever. But long story short here, timeout is only effective if the child does not have access to reinforcers during that timeout period. And timeout is only effective, should only be used in terms of one minute of timeout per year of age. In other words, if you hear a teacher saying, or a kid saying, hey, I got sent to sign timeout for 30 minutes today, red flags all over the place because they should, let's say a sixth grader, right? They're 11 or 12. So they should be receiving no more than 12 minutes of timeout. So what are they doing with 30 minutes? Timeout is very effective. And it's effective if used properly. And one of those proper uses of it is being quick with it. And it's just like, okay, guess what? Timeout. And you go into your timeout, and you say, yeah, four minutes. And we'll talk about more issues with other rules. You can attach onto that timeout thing. But generally speaking, one minute per year of age. You don't wanna leave the kid unattended. You don't wanna put them in an exclusionary timeout and leave them unattended. So you do have to kinda watch to make sure they're okay. But you don't wanna reinforce them during that process. So it becomes a challenge. Timeout is hard to use. It's a little easier to use at home. You can have a timeout rug or something like that where you go to that timeout. You sit on that rug for the next four minutes or five minutes, whatever it is. And I'm not gonna interact with you. I'm not gonna talk to you. You don't get to play with any toys. You don't get to play with the dog or whatever it is during that time. So that's rather effective. But you can still keep an eye on it. Exclusionary timeout at school, there might be a room that you have to send the kid to. Nowadays, most schools, if they have a timeout room, they have a timeout monitor. Somebody's keeping an eye on the kids in there. And sometimes they even have a timeout room where you actually have to be touching the door in order for it to remain closed. Like you have to touch a handle or something like that. And if you let go of that handle, then the door automatically opens and the kid can leave. That's so you don't forget about the kids in the room. Which, that sounds kinda funny, but it's happened. And we don't want that to happen. That becomes abuse at that point. More ethics. Punishment will produce negative effects. People aggress. So if you punish somebody, they're likely gonna get aggressive either towards you or towards somebody else. It causes emotional reactions. People are gonna flip out when they get punished. They're gonna get upset. And that can lead to other problems. Excuse me. Escaper avoidance is one of those common things that happen with punishment, namely lying. If they know they're gonna get punished for something, so all they have to do is lie about it and avoid the punisher. And this is going to lead to all sorts of problems. So we wanna make sure that any escape or avoidance is minimized. It's just one of those, this is frustrating. It's a hard thing because that's what happens with punishment is they learn to avoid the punisher altogether. Hopefully they're learning to avoid the punisher by doing something appropriate. But unless you specifically reinforce that, it's not gonna happen. It does not teach new responses. Flat out, we already talked about that one. The other issue is that punishment is modeling. The punisher is modeling punishment. So if somebody watches you use punishment, like let's say a kid is watching all their teachers throughout school use punishment and they see that it works, it keeps the kids under control, guess what they're gonna like to try in the future? Or guess what they're gonna try with their friends. So you're modeling that punishment and they're gonna turn around and try it themselves. Punishment in itself is self-perpetuating. In other words, if I punish you for something, your behavior stopped because it was successful, right? So my punishment was successful, so your behavior went away. Well, that's reinforcing for me. It's negatively reinforcing for me. So it develops this nasty little cycle where I'm more likely to use punishment in the future because it gives me the results I want. The problem is, like I said above, it produces aggressive behavior. It does not teach new responses and so on and so forth. So the punisher themselves are getting reinforced. And that's why when I say not done properly, I'm saying that you're not teaching new responses in the meantime. So you always gotta teach that appropriate response as well as punishing the inappropriate one. Okay, that's pretty much it for punishment. So we will come back and talk about escape and avoidance next, talking a bit.