Indeed, a divorce may cause adjustment problems for people working out a new lifestyle, but the chances arc David pesters his mother because she accidentally rewards him, even though she wants him to stop. Her looks, touches, scolds, and even smacks arc still attention to David. To help him through the divorce adjustment, his mother needs to give him lots of reassurance and attention – but carefully to avoid doing so at times when David is acting in undesirable ways Although it may seem obvious that attention can be a social reward, too much of the obvious forms of attention (shouting, touching, grabbing) are not recommended, but the more subtle forms, such as a glance, smile, frown, eye contact, or physical gesture. In many families there is troublesome child behavior that is maintained by exactly these types of subtle attention rewards.

Many parents and teachers alike operate under the mistaken belief that publicly noticing ‘bad behavior’ will somehow stop it (indeed, much of our society operates on this erroneous principle). ‘Johnnie, Mother is watching.’ `Don’t go in there!’ ‘Leave your brother alone!’ Put that down this instant!’ Imagine a teacher looking out at her class: ‘Who is talking over there? Is that you, Peggy? Stop it right now! I expect to have absolute quiet in here.’ Often children giggle when a teacher reacts like that. Or the teacher may say: ‘Linda, get back in your seat. What are you doing on that side of the classroom?’ Is the teacher’s public notice going to stop the behavior, or is it actually an attention reward for the child? Aren’t the talkers and walkers in that classroom being actively rewarded by attention’? Many studies have demonstrated that such attention produces more and more of the very behavior that teachers want to end in their classrooms.

It is important to note, of course, that teachers and parents do not have control over all of the rewards which the child may receive in the situation. Disruptive classroom behavior, for instance, is powerfully rewarded by the attention of other children. In such cases, it may be necessary to use other procedures to eliminate the behavior.

There were a number of amusing examples in which college students purposely used attention in the classroom markedly to change their professor’s behavior without his or her knowledge of what was going on. One professor we knew tended to give very dull lectures, reading in a monotonous voice from his notes. Yet on rare occasions he would digress from the notes and describe interesting personal experiences related to the topic. Three students sitting in the front of the classroom agreed privately to look bored and inattentive during the lectures from notes, but to look very attentive and smile immediately when the professor talked about personal experiences. Within two weeks the professor, who did not know about the ‘experiment’, was not referring to his notes at all. Such is the power of attention and other social rewards!

`Monkey see, monkey do’ was a popular saying among parents when we were children. The slogan didn’t have much to do with monkeys but rather reflected a common observation of parents that children learn a great deal by just watching the behavior of others.