WHAT DOG TRAINING HAS TAUGHT ME ABOUT EDUCATION; OR, WHY MY DOG MAKES ME THINK OF CHARLOTTE MASON, PART THE THIRD

I've discussed the fact that all conditioning has to do with replicating desired behaviors, while not setting the person up to replicate negative ones. I've written before about Charlotte Mason and neuroscience, particularly what we understand about the brain's building neural pathways that over time make repeated behaviors automatic, on the level of reflex. 

In dog training, this looks like avoiding triggers that send Dora over her emotional threshold: crating her when new people come over, for example, and turning on a white-noise machine to screen out the unfamiliar voices, so that she doesn't get to rehearse manic let-me-at-them barking as a response. It looks like choosing walk times that minimize our chances of running into strange people and dogs, especially unexpectedly. She can pass people peacefully on the greenway trail, but if someone comes up behind us at close range, especially if they want to stop and talk about what a good little doggy she is, she will react. I do everything I can to avoid those reactions, because what I want to do is gradually rewire her neural pathways so that some other response becomes the reflex. When we do approach people on a walk, I scatter kibble on the ground for her to sniff, because sniffing is a self-calming mechanism for dogs, and because the sensation of pleasure which eating creates is the association I wish to substitute for the sensation of being threatened. I'm trying to give her both a coping strategy and a completely new reflexive response. But we'll only make progress in that direction if she isn't continually rehearsing the threatened response. 

Again, I hope you can see the applications to situations with children. The obvious example here is toddlers and tantrums, a situation in which operant conditioning is of absolutely no use. You can't bribe your toddler not to melt down, and there's not much point in rewarding him for not melting down, because that's not going to have any effect on future behavior. What you can do that's actually effective is set him up continually for success. You can make sure he's getting enough sleep and food, and not put him in potentially stressful situations when he's tired or hungry. You can pay attention to what triggers tantrum responses and to the greatest extent possible, avoid those trigger situations. In other words, you do everything you can to set your toddler up to be happy, comfortable, rested, and cheerful, rather than stressed, strung out, tired, and uncomfortable, so that what he replicates –– to the greatest extent possible, given that we all know the world isn't perfect –– the behaviors associated with the former state, and not the latter. You can't train a little child not to have tantrums, but you can manage the situation so as to maximize positive responses and minimize negative ones. (Again, that's exactly what I was doing today with Dora in the backyard, but having had toddlers, I can see the parallels pretty clearly). 

The same principle might apply to a child who is resisting lessons. Clearly you want to examine what it is he's resisting and why. Young children, for instance, generally resist things they're not developmentally ready to do, whether it's sitting still, using fine-motor skills for things like handwriting, or blending vowel sounds in phonics. If you keep pushing the lesson the child isn't ready for, you're not going to get anywhere. Nobody ever won by doing the wrong thing harder. The only lesson the child learns by this method is that schoolwork is unpleasant and defeating, so naturally he resists it. He also has the opportunity to repeat the resistant behavior –– crying, shutting down –– and encode that behavior into his brain pathways. Over time, resistance becomes his natural mode of responding to virtually anything. 

That's why you're not losing the battle by backing off. You're not rewarding him for resisting by changing what you do. What you actively want is to recreate conditions so that he is able to respond positively and is not pushed to respond negatively. You're not spoiling him, teaching him a poor work ethic, making him lazy –– you are changing the situation so that instead of rehearsing negativity, he rehearses positivity instead. 

This might look like: 

*changing the book you're reading, especially if you both hate it (though with some core books, I might keep this for a last resort)

*not changing the book or lesson, but reducing the amount and upping the pleasure. One math problem done without resistance is better than ten math problems not done because the child is having a tantrum about doing math. And you can say, "Look, I'm setting a timer. We'll do this for two minutes, and that's ALL. After that we'll do [something the child really enjoys]. And look, you can have a snack while you do the math." If it's a particular book the child is having trouble narrating and has begun to resist, have a little teatime during that lesson, with nice snacks. Let the child sit on your lap. Do whatever you have to do to make the lesson both doable and enjoyable. I would try things like this before ditching a book, but I wouldn't rule out changing a book if nothing else works. You can also just take a break from something for a few days or even weeks, and come back to it when you both feel fresh. 

Another aspect in this large picture might be the instance of the very sensitive child who has trouble hearing fairy tales or Bible stories in which violent events occur. What feels relevant here is the way that we work with a dog who has sensitivities/reactivity, as Dora does to people, loud noises, and so on. For a dog, again, everything is pretty basic and on the level of am I threatened, or is there food involved, but the same kinds of behavioral conditioning/brain-plasticity strategies that we use for people also work on dogs, and vice versa. The goal is always to help the subject, canine or human, to get to a place where they either aren't flooded with emotions/overwhelm, OR he knows how to redirect himself. In the case of a dog, habituating that dog to a self-soothing response like sniffing in the presence of a stress trigger helps that dog both to have a strategic response that kicks into gear automatically, and over time to reorient his whole emotional response to that trigger. With a child, the goal is for that child one day to be able to confront difficult things a little more directly, but also acknowledge that he has strong emotions about those things, which are valid. You want him to be an adult who, instead of enacting some grownup version of an emotional meltdown, can make a conscious choice –– a more conscious choice than a dog is capable of –– about how he wants to approach the difficult thing, and can deal with both the difficult thing and his emotions about it in a proactive self-regulating way. You can rest assured that he has far more capacity for this than my dog ever will! Also, maturity by itself will do a good bit of the work. He will be a grownup one day; my dog will only ever be a dog.

The thing that doesn't seem to work, for any subject, is just repeated exposure to whatever the negative trigger is. In dog-training language (maybe human therapeutic language, too), this is called "trigger-stacking." Rather than desensitizing the subject to whatever the trigger is, just continuing to expose them to it repeatedly, without any attempt at conditioning, has the opposite effect. My dog is afraid of strange people and will bark and growl if a stranger approaches her. All that happens if I bombard her with exposure to strangers is that she continues to replicate her threatened behavior and her threatened feelings. She does not feel less threatened. If anything, her feelings of being threatened get amped up, because they're being reinforced, as a habit. Her behavior will not get any better, because all she's doing is reinforcing the same equation: stranger=threat=lose my tiny mind.  Forcing  a child to experience something that puts him over his emotional threshold won't toughen him up; it will only make him more anxious and fearful and resistant. 

What does work:

*Exposure, but in small managed doses, at fairly long distances, and at large intervals, with a lot of decompression time in between. Dog-specific example: we walk on our greenway trail, but when we see people approaching, we step off to the side, and I practice having her look at the person, then at me (engage/disengage with the scary stranger), and receive a treat. When people come to our house, we work up slowly to exposure (she's in her crate, where she feels safe, then meets people on leash, with a ton of treats). We avoid situations where she's pushed over her threshold, so that she can practice being calm instead of amped up and reactive.

For a child, with something like scary stories, this would mean a) dialing back the scariness, to the extent that you can predict what's scary, b) maybe gradually upping intensity, but always keeping it below his sensitivity threshold, and c) talking about what to do if you start to feel *too* scared. Unlike a dog, a child can talk, can communicate a thought like, "I'm feeling nervous listening to this story," and can also choose whether or not to go on. Now that you know at least one thing that's kind of triggering to him, you can say, "In this story, I'm going to tell you that X happens. Do you want to try the story, or would you rather not?"

Just knowing that he has the power to choose –– to let the potentially triggering story happen or not, to skip a scene, whatever it takes –– can help defuse a lot of anxiety. It's really anxious-making to feel like the story you're listening to is going to jump out suddenly and scare you, and there's nothing you can do about it. I still leave the room during scenes in mystery shows where the detective has broken into someone's house or office where he's not supposed to be. That pushes all my buttons, and I'm 57 years old. I still watch the show with great enjoyment, but I'm fine just knowing that there's a scene where my hero might or might not get caught by bad guys and either does or does not –– I can resume watching once they either have or haven't caught him.

*Counter-conditioning: essentially rewiring the brain to have a different response to a stimulus than it has had before. For dogs, this just basically means lots of treats at the moment when a scary encounter is happening, so that they begin to associate whatever that trigger is (again, for my dog, it's strange/new people) with something good, not something bad.  For a child, this might mean reading on your lap where they feel safe, or having their back rubbed while you read to them, or something else pleasurable and comforting that they can come to associate with whatever it is that's scary. Maybe the thing will always be scary (I mean, death IS scary, even when you know your Christian hope is real), but knowing that he isn't alone with the scariness and his feelings, however you can best communicate it, can help him to grow in courage and the self-regulation that that entails. 

Here is where it's important to understand the difference between operant and classical conditioning. It's easy to think that when I scatter some food on the ground after my dog has barked at a stranger, I'm rewarding her for barking, and that this doesn't make sense. If operant conditioning is your only paradigm, then you think: barking is bad, I don't want to reward it, maybe I even want to yell at her to stop it. If that's your response, then you refuse to offer the dog any support for changing her emotional state, and you maybe even stress her out more by reacting punitively. That's the operant conditioning mindset –– or more precisely, the mindset you have when you think operant conditioning is all there is. 

In the context of classical conditioning, though, scattering food for my dog to sniff after she's had a little doggy stranger-danger meltdown does make sense. It makes sense because what I'm doing is offering her a way to bring down her emotional temperature. For a dog, sniffing is akin to deep-breathing exercises for us. It brings their heart rate down. It calms them. Meanwhile, food scattered on the ground is both an impetus to sniff –– because the reactive dog is one who lacks self-soothing mechanisms and might not do that automatically in the presence of a stress trigger –– and also a pleasurable, and therefore calming, experience. If I'm going to get anywhere with my dog, as in home from the greenway trail, then I have to help her calm down. It does me exactly zero good to punish her for being "bad." What does do me some good, and move me closer to whatever my objectives might be for that day, is to help my dog recover a frame of mind in which we still might accomplish something, even if that something is just making it home with our wits still about us. 

I hope you can see the infinity of applications here with your children and their education. If your child is crying and refusing to do her math problems, it's really not going to help for you to lose your cool with her (paying attention to your own emotional temperature, and bringing it down when you need to, is part of the whole "Education Is Atmosphere" business). You're not going to accomplish anything by punishing her for being "disobedient," except to give yourself some kind of delusion about your parental authority, and believe me, when I say delusion, I mean delusion. I mean, don't be delusional. It's also not going to help you to try to bribe her with M&Ms or screen time or whatever. If she's over her emotional threshold, nothing is going to work. She's not capable of being motivated, because she's not in control. When Charlotte Mason talks about a weak will, I think this is what she means: the child in a situation where she's incapable of willing herself to do anything. We often think of a child like this as stubborn or strong-willed, but generally the opposite is true. Other language we might use for this kind of situation is that of self-regulation. Your child who's crying over doing her math is experiencing an inability to practice emotional self-regulation, and no amount of bribing or threatening is going to make any difference. That's not the child's fault. It's just reality. 

The only thing that ever really worked for me in these situations was to send the child to her room, making clear that I was not punishing her –– that I just thought she needed a break and should go play for a little while, then come back and try again when she felt better. In her room, she could do anything she wanted for as long as she wanted. I just made it clear that she should take a break in order to let her emotions simmer down, and then come out when she felt ready. In hindsight, I really think that the fact that I did not punish her, and that I put the reins in her hand, were what made it possible for her to come back, usually within half an hour, to do a little math. Maybe we didn't get through a whole lesson, but any math you do is better than any math you don't do. And it was clear to me that a) she was stressed, and that b) denying the validity of what she was feeling right then, and refusing to support her in getting out of that feeling, was going to be counterproductive. What was productive was the most counter-intuitive thing. In other words, what worked was to give her what she wanted, because it was actually what she needed. She needed to regulate her emotions. Until that happened, nothing else was going to happen, and certainly nothing voluntary. Giving her an out, and telling her why it was an out –– you can take a break in your room and do whatever you like, so that your feelings can settle down –– was giving her both support and a strategy for coping with strong emotions. As long as I made this situation a battle, the two of us against each other, we got nowhere. As soon as I was on her side, offering productive support and a solution, we could move forward. It gave her a chance to stop rehearsing the negative behavior, to manage the feelings that had led to the negative behavior, and get to a place where she could begin to rehearse a positive one. 

I might also add that I don't think any of this is at odds with Catholicism or Catholic parenting. God made our brains. He made them to work in miraculous ways. The more we understand about how the brain works, the more truth about the human person we have at our disposal to work with, and the more we understand our children and ourselves. All of this enables us and frees us to act with grace and charity to our children, and to support them in the way of greater holiness in small and large areas of their lives. A hundred years ago, Charlotte Mason was marveling at what "physiologists" were telling us about the human mind. We ought still to marvel today, because in this as in all things, we are fearfully and wonderfully made. To acknowledge that fact is to praise our Maker. 

TO BE CONTINUED