Please

When Ben was 3, we had a massive snow storm that kept us home for about a week. Rob helped our neighbor with something (cleaning off her car?), and she invited us over for dinner. During dinner, Ben asked for more ravioli, and I said, “Can you ask nicely, Ben?”. He obediently posed the question for a second time including the word “please,” and I said to the neighbor, “We’re still waiting for it to become spontaneous.” She said, “So are we,” nodding to her son, then 5.

For a long time, I couldn’t figure out why “please” seemed to take so much longer than “thank you,” in terms of becoming automatic/spontaneous, especially given that things that end in “please” typically end in your getting something you want. That should be reinforcing, right? Whereas by the time you say, “thank you,” you already have what you wanted. Or, weirder still, in the case of a compliment (“what beautiful curly hair you have!”), you didn’t much want the comment in the first place, and still, both of my kids learned to say thank you consistently in response to compliments before they said “please” consistently.

So I posed the question to my husband, who looked at me for a minute and then said, “Do you really think you insist on ‘please’ every time?”

Oh. Maybe not. Although at the time, I thought I did. Then I started to observe myself more.

You know how when your kid first starts speaking, you get *so excited* that they can communicate what they want at all? So all they have to do is say, “Book!” or more likely, “PIE!,” and you jump for joy, praise them (likely irrelevant, in the pie situation), and then reinforce the demand by providing whatever it is they want?

Or, when you’re doing something (talking on the phone while making dinner and supervising your other child stirring the soup), and your kid says, “I want milk,” so you quickly incorporate that into whatever you’re doing, and get the milk? And then a moment later realize, “Oh, I didn’t make her say ‘please.’”

Yeah. That. In psychology we talk about intermittent reinforcement using the example of a slot machine. You win so little of the time, but then when you do, it becomes super-hard to walk away from that machine. Intermittent reinforcement (getting rewarded some of the time) is harder to extinguish than consistent reinforcement (getting rewarded every time).

So what are we intermittently-reinforcing, here? Requests without “please,” or requests with “please”? Maybe the first and then the second… because, ultimately, they do learn to ask for things politely. Mostly.