Failed Behaviorists at the Best Buy

It was recently brought home to us, and not for the first time, that as behaviorists we basically suck.

It’s not that we don’t buy B. F. Skinner’s basic principle: behavior that is rewarded gets repeated, while behavior that is punished (or ignored) gets abandoned. We read those studies in college about laboratory pigeons who were given food pellets every time they turned a circle in the far left corner of the cage -- they all wound up back there, happily spinning. It turned out you could keep them going without even rewarding them every time; they were perfectly willing to execute four or five pirouettes -- or more -- in order to get their favorite treats. If you quit giving them the pellets, they’d quit spinning -- though the pigeons who were rewarded intermittently persisted in the trained behavior far longer than any of the others.

Our favorite experiment was the one where the food pellets came rattling down the chute at random, unrelated to any behavior the pigeons were exhibiting. When the scientists came back to check on them after a day or so, they found each of the birds industriously repeating some action it had convinced itself was causing the pellets to appear: pecking a certain spot on the wall, hopping on one foot and squawking, etc. It’s easy to imagine these superstitious pigeons as people: avoiding ladders and sidewalk cracks, blowing on the dice, and so on.

So yes, rewards are extremely effective at shaping behavior. We tend to get a bit nervous, however, when this principle is applied too bluntly to child-rearing or teaching -- that is, to shaping people. We generally find ourselves more aligned with the school of thought (taken to an extreme, perhaps, by people like Alfie Kohn) that prizes internal motivation over external incentives, and believes that too much of the latter can undermine the former.

We're not fanatical Kohn-heads, by any means. We don’t think time outs are the equivalent of withholding love. We recognize that once in a while a little external incentive can give a kid the nudge they need to do something outside their comfort zone, and then once they've shown themselves that they can swim across the pool or hike to Wallace Falls or whatever, they won't necessarily need to be paid off every time for the rest of their lives. (It’s a matter of interpretation, sometimes: is that bar of chocolate you shared at the end of the trail a pellet-bribe, or simply a celebratory & well-earned snack?)

We also recognize that most parents are just trying to get through the day with everyone alive at the end of it. And if the promise of a pizza bagel -- or a lollipop, for that matter -- allows you and your child to make it through the grocery store without histrionics, we are in no position to cast stones at either of you.

Still, our natural parenting instinct is to avoid out-and-out bribery when possible. We try to find other ways to get our children on the same page with us about what constitutes an acceptable or desirable activity at any given moment. We spend a lot of time explaining the reasons behind our requests, listening to our children’s perspectives, and negotiating mutually agreeable solutions -- more time than some of us (to be honest) are entirely comfortable with. We go for “natural consequences”: letting the results of our children’s questionable decisions play out as a learning opportunity. We have them make illustrated lists of different strategies they might try next time. Somehow we managed to get both our children out of diapers without the benefit of candy or sticker charts. (This was only partly a philosophical choice, mind you -- there were plenty of times when we wished quite fervently that we had the mental stamina to follow through on some Skinnerian scheme or other. But aside from one summer when we collected all our fruit & vegetable labels on a giant piece of paper on the kitchen wall (and marveled at the salubrious effect this vibrant visual had on all our diets), we’ve never really been able to pull off anything so orderly as a sticker chart, let alone any comprehensive rewards program.)

We’re telling you all this to give you some idea how desperate we were when we offered to get Simon a Wii if he would spend the whole night in his own bed, in his own room, every night, for a month. We had gotten him out of the habit of joining us in our bed at 2 a.m. when we downsized from King to Queen a while back, but had subsequently lost so much sleep walking him back to his room all night long that we compromised on a mattress on the floor next to our bed, where he would happily curl up three or four times a week to finish out his final REM cycle. We meant this to be a temporary arrangement, but after more than a year our boy’s nocturnal pilgrimages showed no sign of abating. He wasn’t scared or upset; he wasn’t even awake, really. He seemed to be essentially sleepwalking into our room out of habit. And we were ready for him to stop.

We weren’t sure what kind of incentive would motivate him, but a Wii seemed like it might be spectacular enough to penetrate his consciousness even in the wee hours of the morning. We had been fending off repeated requisition orders for months, explaining that we really didn’t see the need to spend $300+ on yet another screen-based entertainment device (even an “active” one) when we spend so much energy policing his computer time already.

But like I said, we really, really wanted our room back.

Given how hard he had been lobbying, we were a little taken aback to find that Simon was totally uninterested in the deal when we first proposed it. We were mostly relieved to be spared the expense & hassle. I’ll admit it was somewhat gratifying to know that our baby boy still valued the right (as he saw it) to be close to his mama, more highly than the chance to play imaginary tennis.

Just as gratifying was the effect on Simon’s relentless Wii campaign: every time he said, “Can we get a Wii?” we would say “Sure, honey. When you sleep in your own bed, in your own room, every night, for a month.” And the conversation would be over. We were still fielding the usual battery of requests for everything from laser pointers to Facebook, but it seemed that by putting our offer on the table, we had taken this particular item off the agenda.

Can I just ask: is anyone else out there feeling overwhelmed by the tide of technological innovations our children seem to be swimming in so effortlessly? Hey, Mom, my Club Penguin account expired, what’s your Parent Password? Can I sign up to play the Tech Deck Beta Game? Will you register me for Pirates Online -- you just have to download this one thing. I want a digital camera. Why can’t we get Photoshop? I want a new cell phone -- look, the EnV VX9900 works with our plan! Mom, they have the “superheroes” episode of Mythbusters on iTunes -- can I download it to your iPod? Don’t worry, I know the password already. Why won’t GoogleEarth let me go underwater? We did it at Max’s house! Can we get Gmail, please, Mom, it’s way better than Yahoo, because there aren’t any ads. And they have live video chatting, but you just have to download this one thing. Oh, and I have to lie and say I’m thirteen, is that okay?

And all this stuff looks absolutely fabulous, of course -- but also vaguely risky. Aren’t there evil people out there plotting to abduct our children, or steal their identities, or infect our computer with a deadly spamming virus? Isn't it a bad idea to lie about your age to get on Facebook? Is Dungeons & Dragons Online too graphic? Does someone who can’t spell “attachment” really need an e-mail account? The answer, of course is: How the hell am I supposed to know?! We never had any of this stuff when I was a kid!

But honestly, aside from the basic screen-time issue -- and the expense, though often the stuff is ostensibly "free" -- we actually don’t have any serious objection to most of these things. And so once in a while we say yes. Not every time -- not all that often, even. But with enough frequency that, like intermittently rewarded pigeons spinning in the corner, our children are motivated to keep trying forever. They’re not whining, exactly. They’re asking repeatedly, putting forth reasonable arguments, addressing our objections. They are advocating. (And God help the elected official, opposing counsel, or obstructionist bureaucrat who stands in their way twenty years from now.)

The thing is, saying yes is never the end of the story -- far from it. Sure, you just have to download this one thing... Only the Mac version isn’t available yet. Or you’ll need to register, which means making up a username on one else has thought of and a password you will forget instantly. (Oh, sure, we try to use the same one for everything, or at least write them down somewhere -- but you have to remember, we’re the people who couldn’t get it together to implement a basic potty training sticker chart.) And then you have to wait for a confirmation e-mail so you can activate your account. But the confirmation e-mail never arrives. No, honey, it’s not in my spam folder either. Yes, honey, I looked again today.

But let’s say you’ve successfully deciphered the instruction manual, installed the software, and accepted the obscurely menacing Terms of Use. Let’s say you’ve found a way around the age requirement without actually lying, and squinted sideways until you could make out the “security image” you’re supposed to transcribe in order to prove you’re not a ‘bot. And lo! The future has arrived: your children are actually video chatting with the children two doors down -- children who, you can’t help pointing out, they used to chat with at the kitchen counter, simply by walking across the lawn. Is this the highest and best use of our society’s bandwidth? Shouldn’t these people be out climbing trees? Well, maybe. Lexi once reminded me that kids should be allowed to have fun the way they want to have fun, not the way we think they should have fun. And believe me, they are having fun -- laughing and singing and carrying on...

For about three days. And then somehow out of the ether they will hear about a whole nother amazing device/program/service that nobody even dreamed of back when you were listening to mix tapes on your Walkman and calling your mom from the payphone at the mall. But of course everybody in their class has it, and it’s so awesomely awesome, and you just have to tell them your credit card number and they’ll handle it from here, promise.

We suspect the Wii will fall into this general pattern -- hopefully with a proportionately longer honeymoon period than the $6 laser pointer. And we are about to find out, because as of last weekend, Simon has officially held up his end of the bargain, and we are officially on the hook.

What happened, you ask? Well, as part of January’s Great Room Rearrangement (in which Josie got a bigger bedroom and Mikala got an office) Simon wound up with a snazzy new twin bed and desk, and a zebra-striped beanbag chair that matches the zebra-striped comforter I bought at the Springfield Mall on my second day at college. With all his project supplies arrayed on the desk, the Nerf armory in the corner, and a Goodwill swivel chair at the helm, the room suddenly felt enough like his that he decided he was ready to inhabit it all night long.

He had not forgotten about our offer, of course, and immediately began counting down the days to Wii-dom. Aside from a brief Jaws-induced relapse (two nights of scary dreams brought on -- just to be clear -- by a conversation about Jaws, not a viewing of the movie), he seemed to have no trouble adhering to the new regime. And every morning he would wake up in his own bed, run a quick calculation on his fingers, and announce rapturously, “Sixteen days” -- or whatever it was -- “until I get a Wii!”

Last Saturday was The Day. Simon and Andrew did some quick internet research and then headed down to Best Buy in Tukwila... Where they discovered, to their shock, that there was not a Wii to be had between Tacoma and Everett: not for love or money or a month of good sleep. Not one. We had steeled ourselves for expensive but necessary add-ons, for trouble reconnecting the TV (banished to the basement in the Great Room Rearrangement), and for all the frustrations inherent in the steep learning curve of a snazzy new machine. But it had quite frankly not occurred to us that Nintendo’s manipulative false-scarcity-creates-fanatical-demand marketing strategy would still be in effect a full two months after Christmas.

We plan to keep checking back every couple of days, like the Best Buy guys said. We may even decide to order online and pay triple for double-quick overnight, super-instant express delivery. You see, it only took about two days for Simon to start wandering back into our room at 2 a.m. again. (But of course: children practice behaviorism too.) And, having compromised our integrity by setting up this ridiculous quid pro quo, we find our parental authority now depends on upholding our Skinnerian credibility; thus we are highly motivated -- both internally and externally -- to follow through.

No Wii, no sleep: it sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? But hey, it was our idea to link the two. We have only ourselves – and B. F. Skinner -- to blame.