Anyone who's trained animals (including children 😉) knows that rewarding a certain behaviour is likely to deliver more of it.
It's basic ‘operant conditioning’ and links back to the pattern-matching mind: if it sees itself making gains from behaving in a particular way, it'll do more of that.
Pretty straightforward.
So if a dog barked excessively for attention and got it, or was given a lovely treat every time it destroyed your shoes, you could reasonably expect a lot of noise and a steep footwear bill.
Ditto for kids and tantrums: if you cave in and reward every tantrum with the object of that little Ego Construct's 📦 desire, tantrums are going to feature heavily in your life.
It's just minds, at work.
Trouble is, it takes two to tango like this, and on the other side of the equation is a mind that would like a quiet life, and has a tendency to take the path of least resistance to get it wants, too.
So in the short term it's often easier, and makes more sense to a mind, to put a halt to said barking or tantruming by ‘giving in’ … thereby innocently reinforcing the behaviour.
(No judgement here – sometimes as a parent I will find a hill to die on and dig in for the ensuing hundred-year war; other times I just can't be arsed and roll over immediately.)
But bad parenting advice aside, I got to thinking… don't we do this with the monkey-mind, too?
🐒
It blathers and whines and barks order at us and throws tantrums and aches with desire… and we take it all really seriously, and give it what it wants, just to shut it up.
A little dopamine hit here. A spot of procrastination there. Ducking into the fridge, to placate an urge or a sad thought. Avoiding ‘hard’ conversations. A bit of light online shopping to ‘lift our mood’.
Isn't it the same thing?
Rewarding the mind's patterns of behaviour by taking the path of least resistance, thereby innocently reinforcing it and sending the message:
“I'd like more of this please.”
The good thing about operant conditioning is that it works both ways. And in the words of Hindu Yogi, Sri Yukteswar:
“An ignored guest quickly leaves.”
💟
Giles
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Giles P Croft
It's even worse when we reward identity-based stories 😱