I’m a mom of two littles and a pup and I love being their mom. With that being said, I would say I hit Max Stimulus Point every day. The thoughts, the tasks, the touch, the self-regulation practices, the planning, the questions, the behavior, the meeting needs, the everything. I never realized what people meant when they said that being a parent is the toughest job. I’ve been a teacher, a band director, and a dog trainer, so I had an understanding of the gravity of parenting a creature. What I never knew is what it felt like to be a parent and how much not-parenting things like self care and skill building I needed. Seven years ago I never parented anything, and now we have three (two less hairy than the first).
It is really hard trying to be a mindful parent (not to mention a behavior consultant who understands how important preparing an environment and delivering consequences are for behavior).
With all three of my boys I’m always picking apart what happened and trying to think about how I can serve them best, but I recently figured out that I can’t just be analyzing their behavior, I need to start to analyze my own.
How did this happen? Well if you remember, my family took our first big road trip this spring to visit Dollywood and The Great Smoky Mountains. We prepped tons of car ride options for the boys, but our almost 4 year old human wanted to play with garbage cans in his car seat.
Garbage cans, you ask? He loves them. He has toy cans of all sizes/disposal categories that he lines up at peoples “houses,” fills to the brim, collects with the appropriate truck, and takes to the dump (an old Aldi box I designated because I couldn’t handle the piles of fake trash around the house).
Back to the bins-in-the-car-seat story: things were going great; he set them up at different places around his legs and in his cup holders and he’d use his hand as a grabber arm to dump imaginary trash onto the floor. He was content and engaged; we love it. Because this is his favorite play that he does every day, I know the sounds—the quiet click of the lid as it flips to get dumped in the hopper, the low grumble of his mouth “engine,” the quiet muttering of whose house he’s on and how much garbage they have. But then, another familiar sound happened, a bustling of clattering plastic as a can tumbles to the ground… something that’s typically followed by the sounds of disappointment and frustration (read: a tantrum). Even before he could scream, or cry, or whine, my body tensed up, I squeezed the steering wheel, I scrunched my face, I held my breath, and I’d be willing to believe that my heart rate and blood pressure were also probably elevated but that obviously wasn’t being monitored. And what happened next? Nothing. He said “Daddy, can you get my red can?”
Sure, we were lucky this time (and not so lucky others), but why did I have such a dramatic automatic response that was wholly unnecessary when we saw what happened after the clatter? The sound of a tiny plastic can falling one foot should not elicit such a big response?!
The sound of this wayward can is a conditioned stimulus that elicits the conditioned response of tension/elevated heart rate/etc. In short, I’m just one of Pavlov’s dogs (quick summary: sound = incoming food ; incoming food = salivating ; so then sound started to = salivating).
In my case, sound = tantrum ; tantrum = stress response, so eventually sound = stress response.
This is called classical (aka respondent) conditioning and it’s always at work whether we set up the training or not. There’s work that can be done to help counter condition these responses, but they’re something that we don’t even think about, it’s automatic. It’s one way that learning occurs.
I think I’m gonna try to craft some operant learning to help with this. I’d like to incorporate a breathing exercise for me (and also for Walt) that we’ll practice alone and eventually pair it with triggering situations. I will also keep practicing our scaffolded response that gets Walt what he wants like “when it falls down (antecedent), take a breath, exhale, and ask for help (behavior chain), then help happens (consequence)”.
Why did I want to tell you about this? Well, this is happening with your pets (and everyone) too! Learning is occurring all the time whether we’re crafting it in training sessions or if the environment is just doing its thang. When I remember how learning can occur, it helps me to keep a level head about the behavior that is frustrating me (not always in the moment, but that’s a practice learners can work on too).
As consultants, we see this often in fear-based responses where, to the onlooker, the animal’s response was unwarranted given the circumstances; however, when we look deeper, their learning histories can be incredibly revealing.
Brains are wonderful, messy things, aren’t they?
Now What?
- Take a moment to reflect on things that seem to happen automatically to you or the creatures in your life. Was it always like this or did it gradually occur? Is there a behavior you can do to replace it?
- Get one of us consultants on your team to be an external analyzer and help you to create a plan
Happy Training!
Corinne