Children misbehaving? Super nanny here to the rescue. As I watching the show on the Family channel last night I realized this would be a great addition to my psychology project. In this episode of Super Nanny she gets to go to Las Vegas to straighten up three children. I did not get a hold of the parents names but the three childrens names were: Jessica -14 years old, Alexi - 11, and Dillion 6. As I watched this show I realized there is all kinds of psychological happenings going on. Jessica the 14 year old is very materialistic for her age, loves shopping, and calls her parents house a dump (and believe me it was a nice house). Alexi -11 on the other hand spends endless hours on the internet and often comes across obscene messages from strangers. She also spent 1200 minutes on the cell phone last month. Then there is little Dillion -6 and his main problem is he loves to swear and start fights with his older sisters. Besides neither parent knowing about the "strangers" on the internet they are fully aware of the other bad behaviors of their children. Why does their kids behavior continue you might ask? Well, the mother will correct, but at a certain point she is afraid that any more yelling or telling the kids "no" will hurt their feelings. The father on the other hand loves to avoid the situation and tries to ignore his kids bad behavior.
Here comes the nanny and here comes the psychology! Before I talk about how she corrected the behavior lets talk about how the Super Nanny works. She uses direct observation in all of her shows. She goes to the parents home and watches the kids for a day or so. Our book in chapter 13 (and other parts) discusses the assessment of personality. The Super Nanny's direct observation is primarily used by the behavioralist approach. I learned from our book in chapter one that using direct observation can have its problems such as observer bias and observer effect. There does not appear any bias on the Super Nanny's part and if there is observer effect (the kids know they are being observed and should act differently)---wow they still misbehave right on cue.
Step one lets take of Jessica the 14 year old calling her parents house a dump. Super Nanny has Jessica go to work for Habitat for Humanity to build a house for a day---great. This is punishment and when she does good after building the Habitat house her parents give her praise which is positive reinforcement. Next is Alexi the 11 year old with too much internet and cell phone use. Not tough here, Super Nanny gets parent to remove phone and move computer out of her room to the family room to be monitored. Certainly punishment by removal here. Both punishment and reinforcement I learned about in chapter 5 work best when the two are paired together. Finally Dillion the 6 year old, he picks fights with his sisters and swears. The nanny believes he does this because he is bored and frustrated. This is displaced aggression studied in chapter 14 under stress. I like how the Super Nanny handles this one. She uses what I studied in chapter 11 under defense mechanisms the term sublimation. The nanny gets Dillion's parents to put him into a martial arts class (karate). Sublimation is turning socially unacceptable urges or behavior into socially acceptable behavior.
All of this psychology in one hour of tv or so -40 minutes if you do not count the commercials. I wonder if I could borrower the Super Nanny for my two little "gremlins"---I mean "cuties"?
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