20 AugBeing the “Baby In The Box”: BF Skinner’s daughter dispels the myths

In the latest episode of School For The Dogs Podcast, Annie interviews British artist Deborah Buzan. What follows is a full transcript of the interview. Further notes on the episode may be found here. 

Today I am speaking to a very famous baby. Of course she is not a baby any more. She is a woman in her seventies. The story of her babyhood has become something of an urban legend. The misunderstandings about her youth I think actually dovetail with a lot of misunderstandings about dog training. Deborah Buzan is an artist who lives in England and we spoke via Skype, and, unfortunately, we didn’t have a great connection. So, this recording isn’t wonderful but I did my best to clean it up. But even if it is not the most easy listening I hope you’ll make it through this episode because we had a really interesting conversation. She is the daughter of B.F. Skinner and if you’ve listened to this podcast before, you’ve probably heard me talk about Skinner. He is one of my heroes and a hero to many good dog trainers out there. Skinner, who sadly passed away in the early 1990s, is considered to be one of the founders of the science of behavior.He codified a lot of what we know about the science and philosophy of behaviorism. If you’re not familiar with Skinner, I suggest going out and getting all of his books, or at least one of them. About Behaviorism a good one to start with, or Beyond Freedom and Dignity. He also wrote a novel called Walden Two which is kind of about how you could create a utopia creating positive reinforcement.

Anyway, I thought the best way to introduce Deborah would be with this clip of her father discussing some of the misunderstandings about how she was raised.

“I’d like to correct some rumors that go around. I am sure that some of you have heard them. A distinguished psychiatrist whose name you all know, I won’t mention it, told a distinguished person whose name you also would know, that the child that we raised in the so called box, the air crib, became psychotic. I wrote to him that we’ve heard this before and I’ve often heard this, would you mind telling me where you heard this rumor? Our daughter is very intelligent and talented, married, her husband teaches international studies at the Univ. Of Warwick, they live in London. My daughter is an artist, she does large color etching and sells all she can produce and so on. I don’t see any ill effects of the air crib on her. Well, he sent me a very apologetic letter, I must say that. But he didn’t tell me where he heard it.

Then one summer a British critic came over and said to a friend of ours, a professor of literature at Harvard, “Isn’t it too bad about the daughter of the Skinners, who was raised in the box, killing herself. And our friends said ‘Well when did she do that? I was swimming with her yesterday.

But recently I’ve been getting letters— I’ve had two or three in the last month — ‘Is it true your daughter is suing you?’ I wish to say that — that is the daughter that isn’t here, so I can’t put her on display — but she is not suing me. We have a very good relationship.

Deborah Buzan: I was born Deborah Skinner. I am a print maker, and I also do writing. My father was B.F. Skinner. And he was a behavioral psychologist at Harvard. He was studying rats and pigeons, which are an awful lot simpler than human beings, in order to learn about human behavior, because humans definitely have the same sorts of reactions to their environments. He used the term called “Operant Conditioning”

Annie Grossman : And I understand that he called it Operant Conditioning, if I understand correctly, because the animal is operating on his environment in order to produce some kind of change. Would you say that that’s a definition?

DB: That’s right and my father was very very badly misunderstood about that. Because a lot of people assumed that he wanted to control an awful lot about daily life. He used the word “control” an awful lot, which I don’t think was very wise, because it is kind of a dirty word, but what he was talking about was creating your surroundings so that you are a lot happier. He wanted the science of behavior to help that… He didn’t want to become a despot who’d be deciding what people would do.

AG: Right but to me it always seems like we are already a lot more controlled than we like to think about. I mean, think about something as simple as taxes, right? I pay taxes because I understand that if I don’t, the consequence isn’t going to be good. And if I don’t do it for long enough, I’ll be put into a small box with a guard somewhere. Isn’t that control?

DB: We are already controlled. We are controlled by traffic lights! You know? We are controlled by laws that require that children to go to school and dogs to be on leashes. We are controlled by lots of laws, by the police, and he was saying, well, we should set things up so that we aren’t being controlled by rules that we don’t like. And this doesn’t mean we should remove traffic lights. It means things should be set up more positively. But I think the main thing is that, yes, we are controlled by rules and laws, but we aren’t controlled in the right way. An awful lot of it is very aversive, so that we are punished.

AG: Right. Aversive and coercive. When a behavior is being operantly conditioned, it can be punished, aka discouraged, or reinforced, aka encouraged, but a lot of the time behaviors are encouraged via negative reinforcement, where something is taken away in order to encourage a behavior rather than behaviors being reinforced with rewards.

I think what he was saying was that if, like, the government is going to control us, they should be making the things they want us to do really reinforcing. So they should be, like, rewarding us for driving the speed limit rather than waiting for us just to go over it and then punishing it.

DB: There should be a lot more control that is in terms of reward. He is thinking for the good of people!

AG: Just this morning, my husband said to me —I was telling him about some old school dog training methods that of course still persist, but things that I think are pretty ridiculous, and he said ‘ do you think people like forcing their dogs to do things because it relates to the way that it feels good to control something that you feel like is less than you? And I said, yeah, I think it relates to the way in which we are controlled so much and we learn to do things because of aversives and so therefore it’s natural…

DB: I certainly can believe that the idea that dominating a dog can give you a certain pleasure. And training is terrific because you know, you can get an animal to do what you want even if it doesn’t understand whatever language you speak. There’s a satisfaction you can get for that. I certainly feel that. My cats sit up and roll over and play the piano…

AG: Right, well, but you’re training with positive reinforcement, and in that way, when you’re shaping an animal… that can feel magical.

DB: Yes isn’t it. It’s wonderful.

AG: I’m curious if your father was a good dog trainer! Did you have any pets in your home?

DB: We had a dog. A beagle. Hunter was allowed to go out and roam. My mother would open the door and let him out, and then again she would have to go open the door, and she was getting fed up, like she was a servant to a princess or something, standing at the door waiting for the dog to want to come in. So my father took a piece of cardboard and drew a big spot on it and under it he wrote “Hunter, you can’t come in.” And he put this next to the front door — there was a picture window there so Hunter could see it. And no matter how hard Hunter tried to get in the front door, she wouldn’t let him in.

AG: So when the card was in the window saying “Hunter you cannot come in,” even if he tried very hard, he couldn’t come in?

DB: When the card was in the window —I don’t think he barked, I think he whined — she wouldn’t let him in. When he was being good, I think, she’d take the card away, and then the minute he asked to come in, she’d let him in. So it didn’t take him very long to learn — he was an intelligent dog I like to think! So I had all these friends who thought he could read!

AG: That’s a great story.

DB: He learned very quickly that there was no point in asking, so he’d go run around or whatever and then come back, and then sit very patiently until he removed the spot, and then immediately she’d let him in. And then occasionally, as he was getting older probably, he would go to ask to be let out, and she would go to the cupboard to where the piece of cardboard was kept, and he’d look at her with this piece of cardboard in her hand and you could see him thinking “Uh, maybe I don’t want to go out” because he knew it’d be a long time before he’d be let back in again!

AG: Well, actually this is a good segue to talk about something else he did which was apparently to help your mother, which is to build what he called the Baby Tender. Is that right?

DB: It was also called the “Heir Conditioner.”

AG: Which is pretty funny.

DB: It wasn’t really used, I think. It was just a joke. But it was mainly called the Baby Box, or the Air Crib. But Baby Box is bad because of course “box” goes back to what my father was doing with rats and pigeons, which was…putting them in a box. Of course, there were all sorts of terrible rumors about me, and it was terribly bad because of course it reflected badly on him…

AG: But hold on. Just to back up, he said he was putting them in a box. But for people who aren’t familiar with his work, that might sound nefarious. Really, he was putting them in a box, from what I understand, to very narrowly control their environments and encourage certain behaviors that he could then train using reinforcement, really.

DB: He was putting them in a box to study their behavior, when he was doing experiments on animal behavior. That was called a Skinner box. But I wasn’t actually an experimental subject at all. The whole reason why he decided it’d be a good idea to have an enclosed box with glass in front and behind was that it was a much nicer environment for the baby. The reason my father decided there was a better way then a crib, with bars, and it’s small and you have to wrap a baby up, is that when my sister was born, my mother was very happy to give birth to a baby, she was happy for that, but she didn’t really like all the business of having to change diapers and having all the sheets and clothes that she had to wash all the time. I suppose you could say she wasn’t that domesticated when it came to raising a baby.

So my father thought well there’s got to be a better way. So he decided to design a different kind of sleeping, and occasionally playing, environment for the second child that came along, which was me. So he built this large box. It had a glass front that you could lower and glass on the other side, and it was situated next to a window so that I could look out, there were no bars. And it was warm. It was kept warmer than the normal outside ambient temperature of a room. But it wasn’t closed off to germs and things. And also I wasn’t in it all the time. I would be out like any baby. I would sleep in it and I would play in it occasionally. There would be toys in there, sometimes hanging from the roof. It was a very wonderful place to be a baby! I didn’t have to wear any clothing. I’d have diapers on. I didn’t have to wear any other clothing. When I woke up, my mother would take me out and put some clothes on me. It was very comfortable. I could move all my limbs very well. I wasn’t constricted. So it was the perfect sort of invention for a behavioral psychologist to create! And I was always happy to be put back in it again. He said if ever I had objected, if ever I had started crying when he or my mother were putting me to bed, he said that he would never have put me back. It was obviously a very nice place to be.

My sister, who had two daughters, used the box for both of them. And at this point it was a lot more advanced. It had a sort of rubberized perforated bottom to it so she could do things like give her babies a wash in there. And keep the temperature up which was lovely. One way they could tell if I was very warm I’d be a little pink and if I was cold I’d have my arms next to my body. It’s an obvious way to tell if anyone is cold. So they could change the temperature, and it was within one or two degrees of me being comfortable and uncomfortable. And so I was a very happy and healthy baby. I didn’t have all the childhood illnesses. I was very healthy. My father claimed that I never got colds in my whole entire life. I had to tell him that that wasn’t the case. He was sure that it was such a wonderful tool for keeping a healthy a baby — well not a tool, that’s the wrong word. But a way of looking after your babies was to have them in a very nice environment when they’re very young. And you know when you’re fresh out of the womb, you’re very susceptible. It’s lovely the way you’re safe as well. My sister would bring home her friends — she was six at the time — to see the new baby, and they would lean over and breathe against the glass, because the glass would be up. It was winter – I slept in it for two and a half years — but the first winter I think my sister had some friends who were ill and they wanted to see the baby and luckily they could see me very well without breathing on me.

AG: I think that some of what is misunderstood about it… One thing is that you were in and out of it all day long. You weren’t left in it attended for long periods of time. Do you think that’s something that people misunderstood?

DB: Absolutely. For one thing, my father had been putting rats and pigeons into cages, also known as boxes, to learn about behavior. He wanted to learn about the behavior of simple organisms. So here he was, with a daughter who he then put into a box. So people just sort of assumed he was studying MY behavior perhaps. Neither thing is true. Because my mother complained when my sister was born that there was too much to do look after a baby, and that was the reason behind it. But, of course, the benefits came to the fore and he realized how good it was for me. It wasn’t just my mother who was getting off, it was also a very nice environment for me.

AG: It seems to me that one reason, or another reason, why it may have been misunderstood was because there was a lot of fluidity in the way that your father seemed to approach behavior as it relates to many species of animals not just rat behavior and dog behavior. He saw a continuum. He saw that operant conditioning isn’t species specific. He saw that we are all controlled by our environments, we are all controlled by punishment and reinforcement and whether you have two feet or four feet or fur or not, doesn’t change the fact that we all operate based on certain contingencies. But, I think that what you’re saying is that the goal of the Air Crib, or Baby Tender– it wasn’t that he was trying to get you to do or not do any specific things, he was just trying to design an environment that could make life safe and easier for everybody.

DB: It was a byproduct that he hadn’t even thought about I think. I think he just thought that if he could build something that would keep me warm, I wouldn’t have to have blankets on me and I’d be better able to move around, and I was probably a lot stronger. Because with a baby, movement is just vital. And it was very good that I could just move all over the place. With my feet I could pull down a ring that would start music playing. And that sort of thing. It was a designed environment.

People don’t necessarily think when they have a baby that they want to create something different. It’s expensive to have something like an Air Crib built for you. Nobody manufactured them. You could get a pattern and then have someone build it, but when you first have a baby you often don’t have the money to do anything other than just buy a normal crib. And a normal crib works, it functions, it just doesn’t happen to be that brilliant.

But the main thing I think about the confusion the Air Crib and the Skinner box, which was studying animal behavior, was that I wasn’t a study subject. I think that this is important to make clear. And people just assumed he was going to study my behavior and start doing things like putting little treats into the box, which is completely ridiculous. And people thought I went insane. And that was because there was another psychologist at Harvard who did have a daughter who was institutionalized. So there was confusion about that. And the fact that it was also called the Baby Box was also a part of it as well.

My father wrote an article for Ladies’ Home Journal — does that still exist? — which was called Baby In A Box, which is why it started to be called the Baby Box. And in that article he called it an apparatus, which in my mind is a very big mistakes, because that of course immediately connects it to the Skinner Box.

AG: I actually have a clip of your sister talking about that very article.

JV: My father was very proud of it and he sent an article off to the Ladies Home Journal, and they were the ones who named it Baby In A Box, which doesn’t sound too good. I thought I’d show you what they further said:

“Debbie Skinner has lived in a sound-proof, dirt-proof box since birth.” It doesn’t sound very good, and it caused a lot of furor!

AG: It’s like he was doing this thing to help mothers but it got painted as if it was some kind of evil device.

DB: And people have asked me “Oh you were raised in a Skinner Box weren’t you,” as if I was put in this box when I came out of hospital and a little while later they opened it up to find out whether they had had a girl or a boy sort of thing. The misunderstanding has been extraordinary, actually. I don’t care about what it says about me. I’m not anyone who needs to worry about my reputation or my contribution to mankind. It’s my father whose reputation is important.

AG: At what point were you aware that there was such controversy over this thing that seemed so normal and natural to you and your family?

DB: Probably when I was in my late teens. It was about that time that my father started getting talked about in his early works and became well known. Up until that point, he was a scientist, a professor. I remember once I was at Harvard summer school, and I was talking to somebody, some student, and we just got to chatting, and he said “What does your father do” and I said “He’s a professor at Harvard”. And he said “What is he a professor of, and I said, “Psychology.” And he said “Is he a Skinnerian?” And I thought that was pretty good! All I said was “He is Skinner!”

AG: That must be pretty amazing, to hear your father used as an adjective like that.

DB: But there have been so many times where I have come across people who thought I was either dead or crazy or whatever. Colleagues of my parents who would come back from lecture trips abroad and would say that met people who would say “It’s a pity about Skinner’s daughter, isn’t it?” And, you know, this just happened all the time. People thought something terrible had happened to me, and that it was all his fault because he was experimenting on his daughter. Whereas it doesn’t bear any resemblance to what people have imagined.

AG: Do you think the ill effects in the end outweigh the benefits to you and your mother?

DB: No. It’s an interesting thought, that you said. Had he done something to promote the Air Crib and it would’ve therefore been better known in its own right, that might have helped separate two boxes as it were. That might’ve made a difference. I think it wasn’t well enough known. And I think it wasn’t well enough known because no one was going to manufacture it, and we’re talking about the fifties here, actually the forties. I was born in ’44. In the forties and fifties, post war, and post… well the Cold War hadn’t happened but there was this fear of Russians bombing at any moment in America. There was real fear of machine warfare. And machines had a bad name. People didn’t like the automation. Then, I think it was still a threat that women were having lots of gizmos in their kitchens and all this business and people were actually revolting against technology. They didn’t like the new-fangled technology that was coming in. And I think the Air Crib would never have really taken off, because I think people would’ve thought “Why bother, I keep my child warm, my child can walk, my child’s arms and legs are perfectly strong. I think the actual benefits of the Air Crib… it’s very hard to know about that actually. I do think I’m healthy. I was certainly a healthy baby. I didn’t cry for a long time after I was born. In fact my parents were a little worried because I was little too happy! They took me to the doctor to ask them to do something to find out why I wasn’t crying, and so he pricked me with a needle. He was actually probably giving me a vaccine or something, and then I cried!

AG: (Laughing) It was an experiment!

DB: (Laughing) Very much! Thank you Annie. Yes.

AG: Have you ever been contacted by people who are interested in creating an Air Crib or have you ever been privy to people interested in their resurgence?

DB: Every once in a while. But my sister really deals with that, because their first port of call would be the BF Skinner Foundation. My sister, Julie Vargas, runs the BF Skinner foundation in Cambridge, which deals with new work on behaviorism. She is very keen, as am I, of course, to keep his books in print. So she does reissue those. She and her husband work very hard to keep his legacy alive. And if anybody wanted to build an Air Crib, they might very well be pointed towards the Foundation, which you can certainly find online. I don’t know, but I think every once in a while people do make them, and of course after a few years there are probably a lot of them being put on eBay for all I know! These sorts of things, you don’t want to put them in an attic or loft or anything. There isn’t much room for them. They do take up a lot of space, you know.

AG: Right. What interests to me about the Air Crib as it relates to dog training, which is of course my primary interest— and I should say that I learned about your father through dog training. I went to the Karen Pryor Academy and really discovered this whole world of dog training that I didn’t know existed and at some point I was like, oh, hold on, this is all about more than just dog training. There’s a lot more here. I had heard the name Skinner but I don’t think I had a clear idea of who he was or what he did. I went to the flagship Barnes and Noble in New York City, and I think there was one copy of one biography of him and I picked that up and I read it cover to cover and I was just blown away. Just like the kind of dog training we do at School For The Dogs, the kind of training I learned at Karen Pryor Academy, I think makes so much sense, in that same way, I felt reading his work, that this makes so much sense as a way to view the world. It’s funny because since I came to it after I was already training dogs I’m not sure what I would’ve thought about it prior to that. But I think dog training has made me a lot less speciesist, because I see that animal intelligence is not one thing. Um, but, all this is a roundabout way of saying that when I started to learn about the Air Crib as I was learning about his work, I thought that was really interesting as a management tool.

In dog training, I think so many things come down to managing the environment, figuring out what the reinforcers you’re going to use are, and then delivering those reinforcers with really good timing. The example I give my clients about the management part of that is that you’re getting to sort of create the stage on which — you’re sort of getting to create a world in which your dog will have the opportunity to do lots of things you like so that you can reward those things with really good timing, but part of creating that stage is not providing access for them to do all the things you don’t want them to do. Because once your dog figures out how much fun it is to chew the coffee table, that behavior is going to be reinforced, and then you’re going to have to use punishment to get rid of that behavior. Or, you could manipulate the environment so that they don’t have the opportunity to do whatever the thing you don’t want them to do is.

And when I talk about tools to kind of create that stage, or that kind of dollhouse-version of the world, the crate is certainly a big one. So I talk about the crate as a management tool, and I saw how your father’s use of the Air Crib was kind like the crate in that it was creating a very safe, nice spot, where your dog can be happy. It shouldn’t be a place where your dog is forced to be. And when your dog is in the crate he isn’t also peeing on the rug or chewing on your shoes. I would say you’re training your dog to do appropriate things, but those things are very broad. You’re not really training your dog necessarily to do anything specific in the crate. Anyway, does it offend you to think about the Air Crib in terms of a crate ?

DB: Are they happy to go into the crate?

AG: I would try to use a crate so that a dog would want to go in it.

DB: They get rewarded for going into the crate? They do? So that fine. That means the crate for them is good.

AG: I want the crate to be a place where they’re happy, safe and enjoying themselves.

DB: That’s very good then. You’re not doing anything against the dog or the owner. And you said something about Karen Pryor. I actually worked for her in Hawaii. I worked for a summer at Sea Life Park in Hawaii. She and her husband ran a marine life center. And one of the great things about it was the way they trained the porpoises and the seals and other things. And it was a terrific place. And of course a lot of people have seen dolphins leaping out of the air and things, and of course that’s almost all done by using a conditioned reinforcing noise…

AG: How did you end up working at Sea Life Park? Was that through your father’s colleagues?

DB: Karen, because she was using his principles, went to see him at Harvard. And it was sometime in the spring I guess and she just happened to mention that the trainers are women. Because the men are the ones who pull them out of the tank and give them injections, and the women are the trainers because the dolphins like the trainers. And they need to like the trainers. And my father happened to say that his daughter was looking for a job for the summer. At which point she offered me a job. So I didn’t do much training, but I got to work with the porpoises who were brought in and needed to get used to the human contact because they were going to be put into a lagoon where they did a show with Hawaiian maidens.

But anyway I got to know Karen and it was wonderful, and she was using all his ideas about shaping. Because sometimes the idea — the fact — that our environment is controlling us, is a little strong. What the environment is doing is shaping us. It’s making a difference. But it isn’t so much controlling us because we have some control? on it. But in terms of animals, of course you shape animals. You don’t start out getting a dog to sit by telling him to sit. You have to get him to stand in front of you, you then have to have him lower his bottom a little or whatever. Or if you’re teaching him to shake hands, you’re not going to do it with one command, you have to shape the behavior bit by bit. It’s actually called successive approximations, which means the desired behavior isn’t immediate; it comes in steps. And I’m sure that anyone who has trained a dog to do tricks knows that it is done bit by bit.

AG: Right. But I think that is still so incredibly misunderstood. I see people all the time trying to get the dog to sit by saying “sit,” as if the word is going to elicit the sit from the dog, like the word is pulling it out of the dog or something.

DB: Or pushing the dog’s bottom down as if that will do it. Where basically all the dog is doing is doing is allowing you to push his bottom.

AG: I think if there was training going on with you in the Air Crib, it wasn’t that you were being trained to push a lever or do anything specific, it’s just that you were sort of generally being encouraged to do lots of things that are appropriate for a baby to be doing in the same way that when a dog is in a crate, he is being trained to do all the appropriate things he is doing in there, assuming that he is happy and not crying and scratching at the crate, which we are trying to avoid. But, more importantly, in the dog example, the dog doesn’t have a lot of opportunities to do all the things we don’t want him to do, just like, you, because you were in this enclosed environment, didn’t have the opportunity to be sticking your fingers in sockets when your mother’s back is turned. But we don’t tend to think of that as training I guess.

DB: No. I think that the Air Crib was purely a very good bed. And a playpen. I was safe in there for sure. A baby in a crib, they’ve been known to climb out of it and hurt themselves. But I was safe, and that therefore was controlling my behavior to the point that I wasn’t in danger. But if there were toys in there, I wasn’t being shaped to play with them. If I didn’t play with them, it’s because I wasn’t interested. So I don’t see the connection, and my father had very few thoughts having to do with my behavior. It was all about my health and happiness. He really wanted to make an improvement for my mothers’ sake, of course, initially, but also just because the normal environment of a baby who is just fresh from being born, is to stick it in a very small surrounding with bars and there’s an ability to be comfortable in the way we can. If we’re too hot in bed, we can remove a blanket. A baby cannot do that until they get old enough to do that and to know that they can remove a blanket if it’s too warm, or put it on if it’s too cold. But I didn’t have that problem. But it had nothing to do with providing me with toys and trying to get me to play with them. I have a feeling the only toys in there were soft toys because you might hurt yourself.

AG: He wasn’t training you to do anything specific. He was just trying to make you healthy and happy and comfortable.

DB: And it worked. I didn’t mind going into it. There was… people learned the news then at the cinema. There would be a news real before it where they’d learn about this and that and the other. And they made a film that was four or five minutes, and it started with my mother and father playing chess, and my sister next to one of them, and I was holding myself up by holding on to the table where the chess board was, and it was all happy families, and then I knocked over a piece. And my mother or father picked it up and put it back on the board. And then I did it again, obviously having a good time making my parents work, and then my mother gets up and she picks me up and the camera follows us, and she puts me into the box. The Air Crib, I should say. She puts me into the Air Crib. And of course the immediate assumption is that that’s punishment, for playing with the pieces. My father was so upset about that. And I don’t think he could’ve worked out at the time what the effect would be because they just wanted to see me being put into the box. But it gave entirely the wrong impression.

AG: That’s really interesting. It’s interesting also because I’ve run into clients who, if, you know… where people perceive putting the dog into the crate as some kind of punishment, where I think, no, you’re just putting the dog somewhere safe where they can be happy. But I think that, kind of like the Air Crib can be misunderstood as a box, crates can be misunderstood because they look like little cages. If they looked… maybe actually if they looked more like the Air Crib, they’d be better understood!

I think your father is under recognized today. I don’t think he is well-enough known. I think he really should be as well known as Pavlov if not Darwin in that he showed that behavior is a factor of evolution. I think he showed a connection between learning and evolution in a way that can’t be stressed enough. But it seems to me that the places where he is most appreciated now are with people who work with children with various kinds of disabilities, the Applied Behavior Analysts of the world, and in dog training. Or in animal training, I should say. The whole clicker training movement…

DB: Absolutely. I think he isn’t well known. What he has taught us is well known. It’s true that perhaps he should get more credit. But because it’s the kind of basic fundamentals of learning, it’s something you don’t sit there and attribute to a person. You know, Pavlov did one thing. And it sparked an awful lot more. My father got onto the reaction. The stimulus comes along and then you react to the stimulus. It could be a doctor knocking your knee, that’s a basic thing… And then human behavior, beyond that, and there is an awful lot of very complicated systems to learn about the way that humans behave, for instance, gambling. Why do people put money into slot machine? It’s because sometimes they win, sometimes they lose. If they always lost, they wouldn’t do it. And you can study the reason they continue to put money in it. And all of that way is, in many ways, understandable because of my father’s work. But you wouldn’t say, ‘Ah, that’s because of BF Skinner.” You see what you mean? And things like his token economy and things, and autistic children going to a normal school after they have been at a particular school that uses my fathers techniques of giving rewards… it’s remarkable. I visited one in California, one of his, I don’t know if it was one of his students, but this man started this school, and it was moving to me to see these children, who normally would be kind of sitting and hitting themselves in the head — doing nothing, staring — for these children to be given simple tasks and actually be able to do them, and their reward is to go and play with a toy that they then may discover that someone else is playing with, so they end up having to play together, to get some joy out of it, so they’re being given rewards for, say, learning the difference between an apple and a pear, and then the reward is in itself learning to be socialized. So it’s pretty remarkable, and it all comes down to the idea of rewarding a behavior to strengthen that behavior. And that wasn’t really appreciated until my father came along. And I do think he should be better known, but it’s wonderful what he’s contributed. They use it in prisons, they use it in schools, he did “Programed Learning” which I think is now done on computers, which is learning information and you have an active answer to your question, so you’re not just reading a textbook…

AG: The feedback is more immediate.

DB: Yes, that’s a good way of putting it, Annie. You get feedback right away. And that is a thing he was very keen on.

AG: I found this clip, I believe it was from the 1970s, of your dad talking about raising you and your sister and one time where he did kind of try to do some training with you…

BFS: I never did try to use any kind of contrived reinforcement contingencies with my children. I never had a token economy or a gold star point system or anything of that sort. The only exception, was with my younger daughter Deborah, I did twice shape a bit of behavior, through the use of a reinforcer…

Once, when she was four or five years old, I was telling her a bed time story, and I was sitting on the edge of her bed, and I was rubbing her back. And I thought, “Well, this is reinforcing. I’ll see what I can do with this.” So, I waited until she lifted a foot, and then I rubbed her back, and then I’d stop. And then she’d lift her foot and then I’d rub her back, and then I’d stop. And then she gave a great kick, and she started laugh! And I said, “What are you laughing at?” And she said “When I lift my foot you rub my back!” She had advanced from the animal to the human stage by that time, and she could talk about the contingencies of reinforcement! And she did. But both my daughters would say to me “Don’t use our psychology on us!” And I never actually did. So, they turned out wrong for perhaps the wrong reasons.

AG: So, the Air Crib was really only one of the gizmos your father created in order to engineer a situation to make parenting a little easier for your mother. But I understand there was another little hack that he did to help your mom with an issue that she faced with your older sister that he thought he could make easier when parenting you… So maybe you can explain to me what the solution was and, well, what the problem was I guess to begin with.

DB: The problem is that you put your baby on the toilet, and then you don’t know if they’ve gone. So you pick them up and wipe their bottom, and two minutes later they pee in their… whatever.

AG: You mean because when they put you on the toilet, it’s hard to see if you’ve peed or pooped?

DB: Well, I guess, that was the point, that you don’t know if the baby has gone. Or I guess toddler at that point — I don’t know if you use that word? Toddler? But anyway the toddler has gone, you might not know. If you leave them on the toilet for a very long time, they get bored, and you have to hang around, and then they have a ring around their bottom or whatever. It’s not a very satisfactory system of toilet training. So what he did was he affixed a music box to a little piece of paper, which he then put under the toilet seat, and as soon as I peed, the strip would break, and music started to play.

AG: Wow!

DB: This is another example of my father having an idea and it ending up having a side benefit. Because instead of waiting around, I would pee as soon as I got on there, because I wanted to hear the music. Sometimes I think my father got everything a little bit backwards! But the result was that I was very quickly potty trained. The only problem was that the music was The Blue Danube, so anytime I hear The Blue Danube… that’s my tag line!

AG: (Laughing!) Which is Classical Conditioning, right!

DB: That’s the punchline!

AG: Thank you so much for talking. I really appreciate this. It’s been so interesting.

DB: Okay! Thank you very much! I think it’s wonderful the way that you’re teaching people about dealing with their dogs. I think it’s just terrific.

AG: Thank you. It’s a high compliment.

(Illustration by Annie Grossman)