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12 SEPTEMBER 2008
NO 1347
Changing behaviour
From my perspective, professional child care is not about changing the behaviour of kids. In my experience most children are referred as the symptoms of adult dis-ease. The expectation is that the "cure" will allow the affected adults to get on with their routinized lives. If you really believe that kids will be happier by being strategically coerced into conformity and social success, take a look at all the conforming and successful hoards dragging around the pre-Christmas shopping malls in their search for happiness and meaning.
Socially maintained esteem, based upon competence and acceptability, is the personal treadmill of a society that is burning out on a grand scale. Don't let our medical colleagues deceive you; we are becoming sicker each year along with the environment through which we are all inextricably related. And yet we continue to see ourselves "responding" to an increasingly toxic and hostile world in which we struggle to create new behavioral strategies to deal with an ever increasing array of enemies – pollution, drugs, violence, delinquency, cancer, AIDS, parents, politicians and dictators. Surely the time has come for us to teach ourselves and our children that the solutions lie within each and every one of us and not within our behavioral adaptations or in our desperate efforts to change the world.
But in our "treatment" of children we continue to look for "technologies" that might generate adaption or competence within existing social order. We deny the inner experience of the child in order to demonstrate how the world will respond to "targeted" behaviours. And we actively encourage a dependency-based view of the Self through contrived strategies of approval for behavioral performances. It is interesting to note how the term "emotionally disturbed" has been replaced by such terms as "behaviourally disturbed" or "behaviourally maladaptive." In my judgment, this stems from our fear of our own emotions and our pathological reliance upon an archaic science that limits our senses and our reality to that which can be physically seen or manipulated.
From my perspective, it is not sufficient for the behavioral therapists to talk about such "goals" as "personal autonomy," "efficacy," or "effectiveness." Autonomy, efficacy and effectiveness to do what? Presumably to do whatever the individual chooses to do. But on what basis would the individual make such choices? Well, obviously, such decisions will be based upon a knowledge of history and upon prevailing reinforcement conditions. Some autonomy! But what about the popularity of "self-efficacy" within the behaviourist tradition? To this I must ask, "What self?" And the reply must then be, "To the self that has been learned through differential reinforcement." Some self!
GERRY FEWSTER
Fewster, G. (1991). A postscript from the edge. Journal of Child and Youth Care, 5, 2. p. 66.
