The History of Giving Birthday Presents to Kids

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Most parents in western countries celebrate their children’s birthdays by giving birthday gifts, however, birthdays weren’t always celebrated in this way. In this blog post, we take a look at the tradition of giving gifts to celebrate birthdays, how it started, and how it differs in other nations.

birthday gifts

Who Started the Tradition of Giving Gifts?

The act of giving gifts goes as far back as the time of cavemen, perhaps even right to the origin of our species. Of course, gifts at this time weren’t the kind of goods we’d like to receive nowadays! Cave people typically gave items from nature, such as animal teeth, perhaps with a hole in to be worn as a necklace.

Over the years, the types of gifts given has changed. Coins and herds of livestock were given as gifts in later years. Nowadays, gifts can be just about anything. For adults, it’s common to receive a household gift such as a candle, flowers or a favorite food item. Teenagers can be difficult to buy for.  Gifts can range from anything from gadgets and tech to make up or clothes. Great present for boys and girls on their birthday can be anything that suits them. Most commonly given gifts for children are toys and games, although clothes, chocolate and candies and things for their room.

Other Historical Birthday Traditions

In ancient Greek times, gifts were given to those celebrating their birthday as a way to get rid of evil spirits. They also used noisemakers to help scare away the bad spirits.  Perhaps this is where the use of party poppers to celebrate birthdays came from. In Roman times, gifts were only given to men on their birthday. Women started celebrating their birthday sometime around the 12th century.

Adding candles to a birthday cake is something else we can thank the ancient Greeks for – they started this tradition as a way to honor their gods and goddesses, however, birthday cake as we know it today was developed by Germans towards the end of the 18th century. This was the same time when ‘Kinderfeste’ first started taking place – the 18th century equivalent of a child’s birthday party.

Which Countries don’t Celebrate Birthdays?

Not all cultures celebrate their birthdays the same way. Some people, because of religious beliefs do not celebrate birthdays. Some cultures do celebrate, but with different traditions. In Russia for example, you might be given a personalized pie instead of a cake. Some cultures don’t recognize official birthdays, with many people worldwide not knowing which date or even which year they were born in.

The Future of Birthday Celebrations

Birthday customs and traditions are always changing and adapting, with many popular American customs spreading to other countries. For example, many British parents now choose to do a ‘cake smash’ with their child for their first birthday, a trend which was virtually unheard of just a couple of years ago. One thing’s for sure – birthday celebrations are set to get bigger and better as time goes on.

Schools of Behaviorism

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Methodological Behaviorism

S-O-R Stimulus organism variable response

Occurs in response to stimuli in the physical environment as mediated through presumed internal processes according to an S-O-R model of psychology.  Methodological behaviorists believe that human behavior results from the action of presumed organic variables that determines how a person responds to external stimuli.

According to Methodological Behaviorism, talking is an overt response to stimuli mediated through organismic variables. Early Methodological Behaviorists ignored both private events and internal processes.  Modern Methodological Behaviorists may use their data to make inferences about hypothetical mental processes, although they do not incorporate those into their data analysis.

Radical Behaviorism

According to Radical Behaviorism, thinking is the private act of talking to oneself.  Radical Behaviorism accounts for “private events” by attributing them to environmental considerations. Environmental factors (ie, social settings and social skills) are thought to be the potential causal factors related to anxiety levels.  According to Radical Behaviorism, thinking is the private act of privately talking to oneself.

Consequent stimulus changes are part of the equation of Radical Behaviorism and one of the key differentiators from Behaviorism.  This is the idea that behavior occurs due to antecedent and consequent events that occur in the physical environment.

Skinner was a radical behaviorist.

S-R-S Model of Psychology

Metallism – encourages clients to examine ones thoughts through introspection to determine the reason for their behaviors and state of mind.

John Watson S-R Early behaviorists

 

 

 

3 Ways to Measure Time

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  1. Latency:  The time from the presentation of a stimulus to the start of the behavior
  2. Duration:  The time from the start of a behavior to the completion of the behavior. Also called temporal extent.
  3. Inter Response Time: Time from the end of a response to the beginning of the next response
interval recording ABA

Interval Recording in ABA

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Time Sampling: Refers to a variety of methods to record behavior at specific moments.  One divides the observation period into intervals and then record either the presence or absence of a behavior within or at the end of the interval.

Partial Interval Recording: Record whether the behavior happened at any time during the interval.  Tends to underestimate high-frequency behavior and overestimate duration.

When the goal is to increase behavior – use whole-interval recording because it underestimates the duration of the behavior

When the goal is to decrease behavior – use partial-interval recording because it overestimates the duration of the behavior

Whole Interval Recording:  At the end of each interval, it is recorded if the behavior happened during the whole interval.  The longer the interval, the more whole interval will underestimate the occurrence of the behavior.

Momentary Time Sampling: Recorder notes whether the behavior happens at the moment each interval ends.  Not recommended for low frequency, short duration behaviors.

PLACHECK (planned activity check) is momentary time sampling for group engagement.

3 Types of Discontinuous measurement  (aka, time sampling)  Momentary time sampling and partial and whole-interval recording are discontinuous methods.  These methods all either over or underestimate the rate of the target behavior because of the way that it is measured.  This is called an artifact.

Time sampling are suited for behaviors that do not have a discrete start and end (for example, crying).

A measurement artifact are data that appear to exist, but only because of the way that they were measured.  Discontinuous measurement procedures, especially poorly chosen aspects of it, may result in artifact.

Interresponse Time (IRT) measurement of the time between responses.

Standard Celeration Charts

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The standard celeration chart is a method of charting and analyzing changes over time.  Ogden Lindsely invented this charting technique in the 1960s.  The are 4 different types of charts which scale across the horizontal axis.  There is the daily (140 calendar days), weekly, monthly and yearly charts.  The daily chart is the one that is most often used in practice.  It is called a standard chart because it is a consistent display of frequency of change over time (celeration).  If the change is positive, it is acceleration and if it is decreasing it is deceleration.

Precision teaching is a teaching system that was developed to work in concert with the standard celeration chart.  This teaching system focuses on learning measured in terms of response rate.  For example, number of math problems done in a certain amount of time.  If the frequency of problems solved can increase, then acceleration has been achieved.  The number of correct or incorrect math problems is not considered into the measurement of celeration, only the number of problems solved.

Response-Deprivation Hypothesis

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The term “response-deprivation hypothesis” refers to a model for predicting whether or not one behavior will function as a reinforcement for another behavior. Restricting access to the one behavior would create a state of deprivation for access to that behavior which creates a situation where access to the deprived behavior acts as a potential reinforcer if the baseline data indicates that the behavior occurs at a higher rate than in the restricted state.  This concept builds upon the Premack’s concept. (Cooper, J., Heron, T., Heward, W., 2007, p.271).

As an example, let’s say Sally loves jumping on the trampoline.  It requires little effort and she enjoys it.  Sally, on the other hand, does not love doing homework.  It takes a lot of effort and she does not enjoy the work.  In this case, we can tell Sally that after she has done 2 pages of homework worksheets, she is allowed to jump on the trampoline for 3 minutes.  Given that she is only allowed to access the trampoline during these homework times, and no time other, access to jumping on the trampoline could potentially act as a reinforcer for the homework completion.

In the above example, it is very important that Sally can’t sneak trampoline jumping elsewhere and at other times.  If she sneaks it, that is called bootlegging, and will reduce the value of the jumping behavior since it is available outside of the homework opportunities to access it.

Matching-to-Sample and Stimulus Equivalence

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Matching to Sample in ABA refers to a procedure where a stimulus is presented and taught to match a secondary stimulus (such as the word “car” and a picture of a car).  When the two stimulus are correctly matched, a reinforcer is given to increase future likelihood  of the stimulus matching to occur again.

Reflexive is also called identity matching.  This is the act of the subject matching the primary stimulus to the target stimulus.  Showing a picture of a bird and the child saying “bird.”

Symmetrical refers to the two way relationship of matching.  For example, show a picture of a bird and say “bird.”  Point to the picture of the bird, and the subject says “bird.”

Transitive this occurs when the equation if A = B and if B = C, then A = C.  In other words one stimulus is matched to a second stimulus.  The second stimulus is matched to the third stimulus.  By this relationship, the subject learns that the first stimulus and third stimulus are also matching.  For example, if you say “bird” and show a child a picture of a bird, then you show a picture of a bird and match it to a real bird in a cage, the relationship of saying bird for the caged animal is acquired.

When a learner can match two stimuli that are equivalent due to a relationship with a third stimulus, this is called transitivity.

In mathematics and logic, transitive relation is described in a similar manner.

Stimulus Equivalence has been achieved when ALL reflexive, symmetrical and transitive matching has been learned.

Equivalence Class is the collection of stimuli that evoke the same behavior.  Once an equivalence class has been established, it remains functional long after training.  For example, if a child has learned to be cry in the presence of dogs, this may transfer to crying when seeing a cat as well because they are both fluffy animals in the same stimulus class.  Teaching a behavior in the presence of a stimulus that is a member of a stimulus class should generalize over to the other members in the stimulus class.  When adding a new item to a stimulus equivalence class, the new item must be conditioned to at least one stimulus in the equivalence class.

In an Arbitrary Stimulus class, the stimuli do not look alike but the share the same response.  For example, “3+3”, “half a dozen” and “number of kids in the Brady Bunch” all equal 6!