Khazan, Olga. "No Spanking, No Time-Out, No Problems.

" The Atlantic [Washington

D.C.] 28 Mar. 2016: n. page. Web. 27 Mar. 2017.

This source seems to be quite reputable because of both the author and

newspaper; The Atlantic. The author, Olga Khazan, graduated magna cum laude from

American University with a B.A. in political science and also has her MA in online

journalism from the University of Southern California. Khazan writes for The Atlantic on

topics of health and gender. This article, No Spanking, No Time-Out, No Problems, is

part of her series on child abuse.

The article by Khazan is an interview with the director of the Yale Parenting

Center, Alan Kazdin. They discussed the ways a parent could stop a childs negative

behavior without using punishment. They discussed that a common problem with

disciplining children is when the child is only told not to do something. When this is the

only form of discipline, children are not likely to change their behavior. However, applied

behavior analysis research shows that there are three things a parent needs to focus on

to change behavior, what comes before the behavior, how to craft the behavior, and

what you do in the end.

The parents actions to prevent any bad behavior should be gentle. When trying

to get a child to do something, a parent should ask the child kindly rather than telling the

child what to do. As stated by Kazdin, Choice among humans increases the likelihood

of compliance. And choice isn't important, it's the appearance of choice that's

important. By asking the child to do something it gives the appearance of choice

increasing the likelihood of the child complying. If the child does what is asked then to
help instill the behavior, the parent should immediately praise the childs behavior and

be very specific about what was good.

Another method to stop bad behavior is using positive opposites. By only trying

to remove the bad behavior, a child is most likely to produce more bad behavior in its

place. To prevent this, a parent needs to know what behavior they want in place of the

bad behavior and work to instill this behavior in the child.

We don't change their children. We change the parents, so they can change

their children.
Parents are very frustrated because they think they don't have any tools that are

effective, so theyre going to use power. And power makes things worse.

The article was moderately difficult to follow and keep track of. I deem this

to be because it is mainly the conversation between Khazan and Kazdin without

much commentary. I decided to use it anyway because it gave more examples of

how to discipline a child along with a few hows and whys. Based on Khazans

work on the topic of parenting and child abuse, she most definitely would

advocate for the use of mild disciplinary methods rather than more physical

forms of discipline such as spanking.