Speaking of Psychology: Disciplining children effectively, with Alan Kazdin, PhD

Deciding how to discipline a child can be one of the hardest parts of being a parent. Even parents of generally well-behaved children can find themselves at a loss when trying to discipline a defiant toddler or a surly teenager. In this episode, psychologist Alan Kazdin, PhD, discusses corporal punishment and the most effective techniques for getting the behavior parents want.

Alan E. Kazdin, PhDopens in new window, is the John M. Musser Professor of Psychology and Child Psychiatry at Yale University and directs the Yale Parenting Centeropens in new window. His more than 700 publications include 49 books that focus on interventions for children and adolescents, cognitive-behavioral treatment, methodology and research design, clinical assessment, parenting and child rearing and interpersonal violence. 

Kazdin served as American Psychological Association president in 2008 and his work has been recognized with APA's Outstanding Lifetime Contributions to Psychology Award and Distinguished Scientific Award for the Applications of Psychology and the James McKeen Cattell Award from the Association for Psychological Science. His research has been supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, the William T. Grant Foundation, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Rivendell Foundation of America, the Leon Lowenstein Foundation and Yale University.

Audrey Hamilton: Deciding how to discipline a child can be one of the hardest parts of being a parent. Even parents of generally well-behaved children can find themselves at a loss when trying to discipline a defiant toddler or a surly teenager. In this episode, psychologist Alan Kazdin discusses the most effective techniques for getting the behavior parents want – techniques that are backed up by hundreds of research studies. Dr. Kazdin also addresses the question of spanking. Does it work? He tells us what decades of research have shown about the consequences of corporal punishment. I’m Audrey Hamilton and this is "Speaking of Psychology."

Alan Kazdin is professor of psychology and child psychiatry at Yale University and director of the Yale Parenting Center. He was the 2008 president of the American Psychological Association. He has authored 49 books on topics related to parenting, child psychotherapy and violence. Welcome, Dr. Kazdin. 

Alan Kazdin: Thank you so much for having me. 

Audrey Hamilton: Let’s start with aggression in children. When does aggression in children become a serious problem that might warrant professional attention? 

Alan Kazdin: Well, one can look at three, three criteria usually. And the first one of these is impairment. And impairment means that somehow the functioning in everyday situations is a problem. And this is true of all of the psychiatric disorders for children, adolescents and adults. In the child’s case, the functioning at school and in peer-relations might start breaking down and so that would be one criterion. Is the child impaired in daily functioning?

The second one is unmanageability. Parents and teachers do all sorts of things to manage a child and usually these work pretty well. And if they don’t work and now the child’s not manageable, now, some interventions, some professional help is likely to be needed. 

And the final criterion is related to harm or danger. And this refers to the fact that the child might be dangerous to himself or others. For example, among the children I see, sometimes a child will drop a baby sister or brother or slap them or be really cruel to animals in some unusual way. And here’s a case in which there’s danger involved and that’s definitely the moment to seek professional help. 

Audrey Hamilton: So, let’s imagine you’re a parent of a child like you’re describing. Possibly, there’s a mental health issue, a really challenging behavioral problem. You know, I imagine it’s not always easy to find the right treatments for their children once you get to that point when you’re ready to find treatment. What can these parents do? 

Alan Kazdin: Well, it’s a wonderful question. For one thing, in the United States, for children, adolescents and adults about 70 percent of the people who need psychological services receive absolutely nothing. So, it’s very difficult for people to get services under any circumstances – and among the reasons is that many professionals are in urban areas and they’re in large cities and not all of the psychology problems, psychiatric problems, occur in those situations. 

But going back to parents and children, it is very difficult to get care for children, in part because a couple of groups – children and the elderly, in particular, do not have as many services as are needed compared to the adult situation. 

Audrey Hamilton: Interesting.  

Alan Kazdin: So it’s very hard to get services. And then, what services are you getting? There are now approximately 320 evidence-based treatments. But, most of the treatments used in practice have never been evaluated so it’s not clear what one is getting when one does receive treatment. 

So, my usual issue is to ask parents to make sure that they are informed and ask questions. Seek professional help. The state psychological associations usually have a referral source to help parents. And then when you find someone, ask them “What will be the goals of treatment if I bring my child here? What will be the ways you obtain those goals? Will you talk? Will you have the child? Will I be involved? What is the evidence for these procedures that you’ll be using? What is the time frame that I might be able to see some change?”

The general rule here is we need a much more informed public so that it’s not just getting help. It’s easy to get help that will make no difference. It’s easy to get the wrong help. And the parent it’s not as easy to get help as let’s say in medicine or something like that. So, we must have parents who are more informed. 

But the overall point is that there are these very effective treatments. We’re having trouble connecting them with the parents who need them. 

Audrey Hamilton: Let’s talk about discipline, just every day discipline. There continues to be a debate among psychological researchers and practitioners about whether spanking children is effective, you know? Where do you stand on that question and why? 

Alan Kazdin: Well, first of all, I think about this in a different way. It is not so much where I stand or it’s not even my opinion, which I would not regard as very important. Our science has amazing evidence and the evidence is not confused at all in a few places related to spanking and it goes like this: Moderate to heavy spanking in a child has the child at great risk for academic dysfunction, physical health and mental health problems. How serious is this? If it’s enduring and there’s stress on the child, we know now that violence in the home, including excessive punishment, can change the child’s immune system in a permanent way. And when the child grows up, he or she is more likely to die of cancer, heart disease and chronic respiratory disease as a result of early stress in the home. 

Audrey Hamilton: Stress, yeah.

Alan Kazdin: Second point to make is that punishment, now we know a lot about corporal punishment or not does not develop behavior. It does not change behavior very well. The behavior returns. So, spanking or hitting or shaking or shouting makes a child stop its behavior right now.  And that traps the parents into behaving as if it were effective. But in fact, it doesn't change anything. And so we know now from our science what is needed is to train the behaviors you want. So, if you want to get rid of behavior, you could do some mild punishment – maybe a brief timeout – but you wouldn't want to depend on punishment to change the behavior. Model the behavior you want. Reinforce the behavior you want with praise. When you see it occur in the community, point it out and say, “Look at that child doing that.” These are the things that change behavior. It’s really well studied. 

A couple more points. Punishment has side effects, even when it’s ineffective. Punishment fosters aggression. It deteriorates relationships. It leads to emotional reactions and none of those things is related to changing behavior. You can hear a parent say, “You should be upset.” What does the research show? Being upset has nothing to do with changing behavior. Ok? 

And so one of the issues is the side effects of punishment. And the final thing, and this one is personal. The one I find most compelling. There’s no evidence at all that spanking is needed to change behavior and tremendous evidence that there are alternative procedures that psychology should develop to develop the behaviors you want. And so discipline doesn't usually mean change behavior. It means, “What am I going to do to punish my child?” As psychologists, we’re more concerned with how can we get the behaviors you want. And the role of punishment in that is very, very minor. 

Audrey Hamilton: What are some other techniques that you've recommended to parents, specifically of younger children, to get them to behave? 

Alan Kazdin: I would use brief timeout or very brief periods in which a privilege is taken away. 

Audrey Hamilton: Can you explain what a timeout is? 

Alan Kazdin: Sure. So, a timeout is a period of time in which the child is removed from the situation usually in which reinforcers are not available. It could be isolated but it could be being ignored and it might be a minute or two or three. And a privilege would be something like you cannot do this or that for one day. 

Now the natural tension is from a psychological science standpoint, very brief punishment is all that is needed to have the effect you are going to have. And so that is the science part. 

But from a parents part, there’s another part that we neglect. That is, the parent has an interest in justice. And so you can’t tell a parent, “I know your child has just destroyed the ninth generation heirloom of jewelries and necklaces from the old country and deserves a one-minute timeout.” The parent will look at you and say “Doctor, you can’t be serious?” 

And so parents have a different agenda. When it comes to changing behavior, brief privilege loss, brief timeouts are all that you need. And they won’t work unless you’re developing the positive, opposite behavior. And so the key – whenever you want to get rid of behavior, we train parents all the time. The first thing is, what is the behavior you want? Let’s develop that. And that works really well. 

Audrey Hamilton: What about discipline techniques for older children and teenagers? 

Alan Kazdin: Well, for teenagers it all begins with negotiating. So, when things are calm and there’s no particular crisis and no one’s rolling eyes at the other person or giving obscene gestures, sit down with your teen and say, “These are the things I want to be especially mindful of and careful about and we should talk about these. One of them is I always want to know where you are. And so, when you don’t let me know, what are we going to do about that? I’m going to have to do some punishment. Can we negotiate how to handle this?” And so, whenever you can you want to sit down and chat with the teenager. Why? Because when you give choice, when you give discretion, when you give an opportunity, it’s more likely that you’ll come up with something that the child will actually do and cooperate with and that’s from psychology research so again, for our science, that’s a plus.

And again, we want things that are brief. So if you take a privilege away, you don’t want to say, “You've just lost the first year of college” to your 17-year-old. That’s excessive.  You want to say there’s something you can’t do for maybe a day. And one also has to be very careful. You don’t want to take away something that might itself be adaptive. So, for example, time with peers is not negative, it’s usually positive. And so you want to be very careful about what you’re using as punishment. And then again, you want to model the behavior and reinforce. So for example, this is a pet-peeve of parents I see all the time. My teenager rolls her eyes, gives me obscene gestures, is so disgusted with me, tells me I’m selfish. And I’m shouting really hard. I scream at her and tell her she can’t go out when I do that. That’s going to lead to no effect at all. It’s actually going to make things worse. 

So what can you do? So we find times in which the teen isn’t always rolling eyes. So at breakfast they said “I’m going there after school.” So you stop and you say “You know what, this is so good, I love talking to you when you talk like this. Thanks for doing that.” And just leave it alone. Don’t go on and add, “How come you can’t be like this all the time!” That’s called “caboosing” and it ruins the effect of praise. So, what we tell the parents is catch the child, the adolescent, at those other times. And increase those and this other part drops out. And so don’t get into a punishment and battle with your child. You can’t talk to them, “I’m your parent” is going to make the child talk to you more like that. So, parents are doing a number of things normally, that is called normal parenting, that make things worse. And we can often redirect them to make it so that doesn't happen.  

Audrey Hamilton: Let’s switch topics a little bit. School shootings have been covered widely in the news media and in many cases these shooters are quite young. How can psychology better equip schools to identify these students? 

Alan Kazdin: I think psychology can do a massive amount but let me begin by saying what people think the solution is. The solution seems to have been that legislative bodies and people advocating for more mental health services. And I don’t think that’s going to be an answer or actually even very helpful. And the reason I say that is because the system probably isn’t working very well now. And to put more money into things that probably aren't working very well is not very wise. 

Where does psychology fit? Well, it’s not about providing treatment. It’s actually about early identification. And here, psychology is on its home court. And the reason I say that is this is about better screening and better assessment. We need to assess all children on a regular basis in school in user friendly ways. And there are user friendly ways in psychology that are really good. So for example, we want to ask at the end of every school month, let’s say, how was this child doing in school? Teacher can fill this out. How is the child interacting with friends? Does the child engage in any activities or social competencies out of school? Playing an instrument? Being part of some sport? Is the child a bully or a victim, or what’s worse, a bully-victim, which is someone who does both of those? And their adjustment problems are very serious. And has the child been isolated or ostracized? We know so much about ostracism. And ostracism has a couple of effects. One of them is eventually leading to aggression against the system and people who ostracize you. And one interpretation of school shootings could be that these children have been ostracized and are doing what we know to be the standard response to extreme ostracism. 

So, my view, what psychology could do, assessments that could take five or 10 minutes a child, could be done on a regular basis. And they would pick up these children better. And over time we could make that measure better and better. Now the context for this is not about school shootings. We know now from excellent studies in the United States that approximately 25 percent of the children, adolescents and adults walking the street meet criteria for at least one psychiatric disorder. That’s right now walking around the streets of this country. And so, we want to stop and minimize school shootings, of course, but we want to help children as well. And if we had a better way of picking them up in their everyday system, we could do much more. 

Audrey Hamilton: Well, Dr. Kazdin, thank you so much for joining us today.   

Alan Kazdin: Oh it’s a privilege. Thank you for having me. 

Audrey Hamilton: For more information on effective child discipline techniques,visit our website . With the American Psychological Association’s “Speaking of Psychology,” I’m Audrey Hamilton.