Clicker training a baby. I’ve already discovered that these four words elicit a strikingly wide set of responses. “How could you even say that?”, “Huh?”, “Do you really think a baby’s smart enough to do that?”, “Interesting idea,” and “You can not do that to my grandson!” are a few examples. Leaving out the emotional responses for the moment, we seem to be left with either explaining what clicker training is or arguing whether our son might be approaching our dog in intellect. I haven’t actually spoken to anyone who had any real constructive ideas unfortunately.
For context, we have a four-month-old son and a four-year-old Irish Terrier. Back a few years ago, we had talked about the idea of clicker training an infant based on some passages in Don’t Shoot the Dog, but hadn’t done any work to find research or anecdotes about doing this.
We haven’t tried anything yet, because of our weakness in selecting primary reinforcers. We probably could identify some primary reinforcers that would work now such as giving him support to get into a standing position, but we’re pretty lazy and so we figure we will wait until he can eat those little puff baby food and use those as the primary reinforcer.
I really have not seen anything about this idea, so I can’t even guess what will come of it. I think it could be a cool idea, because as the kid ages and gets money, we could transition to a clicker with a counter and have the number on the clickers translate into some amount of money, making it not just a solution for short-term things, affecting the behavior of a toddler, but to more long-term parenting.
Anyone know any blogs or webpages or anything that address this idea? Anyone tried it yourself? If so, what behaviors did you try to effect? Were you trying to substitute mutually-exclusive behaviors for those you don’t like? Did you use the clicker in a style more similar to the sports arena and shape the development of motor skills?
I was planning on starting just by charging the clicker and seeing how that process goes – how long it takes, how well he really gets it, etc. Then, I don’t really have a plan for how to use it other than a general feeling that it will hopefully allow us to avoid some of the positive punishment method of “no, no, no …”
I welcome not only the information I mentioned above, but any thoughts including criticism.
