The study found that mothers who experienced more types of abuse as children–sexual abuse, physical or emotional abuse, and physical or emotional neglect–have higher levels of self-criticism, and therefore greater doubt in their ability to be effective parents....My comments on the blog are as follows:
Prior research has found that a mother’s confidence is closely linked to her motivation to use positive child-rearing strategies.
I provide ABA services to many low-income mothers who might be described well by this article. However, (and if you're familiar with the radical behaviorist perspective, you'll know this) we don't go in for such mentalistic talk of "sense of self-efficacy". Not to say we wouldn't agree with the basic premise. But try this: mom's history of reinforcement hasn't taught her the requisite skills. The difference between those who are able to implement correct strategies in stressful situations versus those who aren't won't be doing so because they "feel more self-efficacious", but rather that they have simply attained fluency. I.e. they have practiced and learned these skills so that they can use them despite difficult setting events. For instance, if I have a headache (or worrying about the bills, my boss, the broken car, etc.), playing a piano song will be more difficult. But if I am fluent, I will be able to engage in the behavior.
An absolute failure of society right now is adequate delivery of treatment services to mothers in need such as these. In California, if your child has an autism diagnosis, health insurance companies are mandated to cover behavioral services. Based on need, these can range from 8-15 hours per week. The amount of progress children make is nothing short of astounding. Kids learn to speak, to communicate their desires, to label items and hold conversations. However, much of our work is also in parent training.
Where this becomes interesting is in multi-child households where parent-child interactions are often dysfunctional, i.e. maladaptive behaviors are reinforced and appropriate behaviors are punished. I am not paid to provide services for the rest of the family, but a great benefit of our services is that the same strategies parents learn to use with their special-needs children are those they should be using with their other children.
We've made great progress in the U.S. when it comes to those with disabilities. However, when the disorder is not genetic but the result of a learning history, our sense of moral responsibility, let alone socio-economic pragmatism (well-functioning families are more productive in every way - for generations!) withers. I see two important roadblocks to overcoming this: first, it is a common belief that lower-SES people have only themselves to blame, and thus can only help themselves; and second, we lack a coherent, comprehensive understanding of what is truly causing poverty.
The science of behaviorism is deterministic and believes all thought is behavior, and that all behavior is a product of operant mechanisms. As such, it's answer to the former roadblock is that SES is merely a function of social history and structural formations. Just as you would not blame a town for being flooded by a river and would instead try and help them recover, so too would you the individual. We do this with disabilities, why not learned behavior?
That question leads to the second, greater roadblock: the philosophical, political reaction so many have to the radical behaviorist hypothesis. The history of behaviorism's place in psychology is illustrative: it's marginalization in the fifties and sixties after Chomsky, it's quiet growth into ABA in the seventies and its refinement in the eighties, it's establishment as the pre-eminent treatment the nineties and oughts for autism and behavioral disorders. It took decades of tireless work and empirical results to barely make a dent in public and academic acceptance. However, it remains poorly understood, even as its principles remain as true and central to the human condition today as they were when Skinner published Verbal Behavior in 1957.
I would argue that the reason for this is simple: a deep human bias towards the notion that we have free will, that we are not determined, that "we" are somehow special, possessive of some mysterious, supernatural "consciousness" from which we make all of our choices. When confronted with evidence to the contrary, many experience a deep revulsion at the mere thought, a sort of existential terror. What, many will reply, is the point of anything at all then!
The roots of this (reinforced) notion can be found in various forms of cultural imbibement: religion, philosophy, politics, art. To one swayed by this mythological cacophony, to accept the radical behaviorist premise is something akin to death. And as we have seen time and time again, when empiricism and parsimony comes up against the forces of belief in legion, it often only emboldens its enemy.
And behaviorism is not a simple concept. I spend very little time with families explaining the deeper processes at work (the discriminative stimuli, the matching law, schedules of reinforcement). I give them what is necessary and show them how to use the tools of behavior change. For some, it is rather simple. For others, it goes against everything they would consider "common sense". But you can't argue with results.
In many areas of the political arena, change has come kicking and screaming, after results were plain as day. Laws were passed that people were uncomfortable with at first, but then one day would question how they could ever have been otherwise.
Unfortunately, things like racial civil rights and rights for people with disabilities don't necessarily clash with larger mythological forces anything like that of the notion of "free will". But how about the right to a learning history of behavioral cusps, that maximizes one's ability to access to reinforcement? Or the right to having a deficit in learning history be remedied? In colloquial language we call these things public education, or jobs programs. But the underlying premise if flimsy: only a basic education, only for kids, because kids don't really have free will yet (and even then, we'll basically ignore the vastly different levels of learning histories and social capital different kids have). Jobs programs if you're lucky, because maybe it wasn't really your fault you don't have the right skills. Maybe.
These two pitiful solutions are vague compromises made by a larger population that mostly believes that people are responsible for their own decisions. To the extent they are provided, it is out of an intuitive sense that there isn't something quite right about massive poverty,and therefore charity is a moral duty.
Yet the problem persists. And so mythologies are heaped upon mythologies. The remaining poor - even after public schools, welfare, jobs programs (and now free healthcare!) are seen by one side of the political spectrum as simply making bad choices. Why? Who knows! By the other side, they are largely seen as helpless victims of racist cops and lazy schoolteachers. Both take as a baseline notion the idea of free will and personal responsibility. But one side sees it as all the individual's fault, with a perfectly functioning system, the other as no fault of the individual, but rather an imperfect system which does not allow even a perfectly functioning individual to succeed.
But to the behaviorist, all can be explained by looking at individual histories. Indeed, the system is imperfect and broken, and has been for centuries, and as a result, learning histories have been repeatedly left to become mangled and neglected over generations. The environment and the individual cannot be separated. Every aspect of one's life, every stimulus that one experiences in the course of the day, every schedule of reinforcement or punishment upon which one is placed, actively shapes one's behavior.
From this perspective, blame is irrelevant, meaningless. All that matters is intervention. With this in mind, social policy can actually begin to apply the necessary mechanisms. I see on a daily basis the effectiveness of ABA in the lives of children with behavioral disorders. The treatment is a result of decades of science being accepted and applied by a social infrastructure that recognizes not only its efficacy but feels an obligation put it into action.
Humanity is behavior. Behavior shapes humanity. I believe one day we will live in a world in which each citizen has a right to a meaningful learning history. And if that learning history is disrupted by accident, just like any illness, they will have a right to treatment by a qualified, trained professional. No one will be left to "make their own choices", because the concept will no longer make sense. Certain parameters of acceptable behavior will be allowed, and considered "freedom", as they are now. And others won't. But criminals won't get "justice" anymore than successful business-people will: both will be seen, correctly, as products of their learning histories.
And women like the ones in this article won't need to exist. Their sense of "efficacy" will not be seen as residing in them, but in all of us.
