Playing hot and cold

While drinking a glass of wine, some friends and I were talking about raising children and how we were raised.

It’s not much different than raising and training animals! Many people believe that you should never say no to your child or animal – never correct them and always let them do what they want.

Correcting your animal or child does not mean causing them pain – let me get that out of the way from the start. Communication and learning certain things can be like a game of „hot and cold“. In this game someone tries to tell you where something is by saying „hotter“/warmer when you get close to the object and „colder“ when you get farther away from it. That way you can find the object fairly fast.

Communication can be the same way. You might get the same result eventually using purely positive reinforcement, but it will take ages. There are many other factors that would change the result if you never used corrections, but I’ll get in to that in other posts. Today I wanted to paint a picture for you – correcting your animal or saying „colder“ in whatever way works best for you and your animal, will help them understand what it is you want much faster.

If they do something correctly and they get affirmation from you, they know they are on the right path and that’s great. When they reach a point where they get off track, you are also able to let them know with a quick correction.

I hope this comparison gave you some good imagery and stay tuned for more!

Photo Source: feellng.tumblr.com

This post is also available in: English (Englisch)