New science on punishment and rewards

A growing body of research from 2023–2025 offers a transformative account of how children learn, regulate, and respond to school environments, because these studies converge on a striking and deeply consequential insight: children learn through stability, safety, and relational reward, while punitive systems generate emotional distress, behavioural escalation, and institutional inefficiency, particularly for neurodivergent and disabled students whose developmental profiles do not align with the assumptions embedded in traditional discipline models.

These studies deepen the implications of Altered Neural Responses to Punishment Learning in Conduct Disorder, and together they reshape our understanding of school discipline, disability justice, and inclusive practice.

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Punishment learning across development: evidence from a multi-country study

This large international study, Action initiation and punishment learning differ from childhood to adolescence while reward learning remains stable (2023), followed 742 children and adolescents across 11 countries and found that punishment learning changes dramatically with age, while reward learning remains stable across development, and this asymmetry disrupts widespread assumptions that all children can reliably interpret and integrate punitive consequences.

Key findings:

• Punishment learning increases slowly across adolescence
• Reward learning stays comparatively stable and robust
• Action-initiation bias (often misread as impulsivity) declines with age

Implications for school discipline:

• Punitive consequences rest on assumptions about cognitive stability that simply do not hold across development
• Adolescents do not “learn faster” from punishment — they often absorb it more slowly
• Universal discipline codes ignore neurodevelopmental variation and create predictable inequity

This study reinforces that discipline cannot follow an equal-treatment model, because equality in consequence does not create equality in comprehension.

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Reinforcement processing as an intervention predictor

Reinforcement Processing as a Predictor of Behavioral Intervention Response in ADHD (2024/2025) explores how children with ADHD respond to behavioural interventions depending on their individual reinforcement profiles, and it demonstrates that reward sensitivity and punishment sensitivity vary dramatically, which means intervention success depends on a child’s neurobiological wiring rather than on a school’s effort or consistency.

Key findings:

• Children with ADHD show diverse reinforcement profiles
• Intervention outcomes depend on how each child processes reward
• Punitive approaches correlate with poorer emotional and behavioural outcomes

Implications for school discipline:

• Behaviour charts, token systems, and compliance-based interventions do not operate uniformly
• Punitive pathways amplify emotional load without advancing learning
• Systems built around “consequences” misunderstand the developmental architecture of behaviour

This research supports the long-articulated experience of neurodivergent families: interventions must adapt to the child, not force the child to adapt to the intervention.

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Emotional and behavioural reactions to punishment

Behavioral and Emotional Responding to Punishment in Children With and Without ADHD (2024) finds that punishment increases negative emotional responses over time, particularly in children with ADHD, and that these children show slower responses following both reward and punishment trials, which complicates simplistic narratives about motivation, effort, or intent.

Key findings:

• Punishment produces cumulative emotional distress
• Children with ADHD experience intensified negative affect in punishment-based tasks
• Timing, processing, and recovery trajectories differ meaningfully

Implications for school discipline:

• Detentions, verbal reprimands, loss of recess, and exclusionary practices generate emotional overload rather than learning
• Punishment escalates distress and reduces capacity for self-regulation
• Chronic punitive environments become emotionally unsafe, especially for disabled students

This research aligns with trauma-informed perspectives and supports the claim that punitive environments create harm that disproportionately lands on neurodivergent and vulnerable children.

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Reward learning in educational contexts

The effects of rewards on trial-and-error learning in school children (2025) shows that various forms of structured, predictable feedback produce more efficient learning and improved strategy use in trial-and-error tasks, yet the rewards studied were not token economies but rather stable, context-integrated feedback loops.

Key findings:

• Reward-based feedback improves problem-solving strategies
• Predictability and clarity drive learning effectiveness
• Relational context and emotional safety shape reward sensitivity

Implications for school discipline:

• Authentic reward learning supports inclusion and self-efficacy
• Behaviourist token systems misunderstand the nature of reward processing
• Classrooms benefit from predictable routines and relational grounding, not sticker charts

Reward-based learning supports autonomy, competence, and psychological safety, all central to inclusive practice.

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What this wave of research reveals

Across these studies, a consistent picture emerges:

Punishment is an unstable learning mechanism

• Developmentally inconsistent
• Emotionally costly
• Neurobiologically unreliable
• Frequently catastrophic for disabled and neurodivergent children

Reward learning exists but must be relational, authentic, and emotionally grounded

• Not token economies
• Not externalized compliance tools
• Not conditional access to belonging

Token systems form an extension of punishment, not a form of reward

• They rely on surveillance and conditionality
• They cultivate threat responses
• They erode autonomy and trust
• They intensify dysregulation in PDA profiles, autistic children, trauma-exposed children, and children with ADHD

Inclusion demands alignment with neurodevelopmental realities

• Co-regulation
• Predictable routines
• Emotional safety
• Autonomy-respecting approaches
• Relational accountability rather than behavioural control

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Implications for schools, policy, and justice

These studies collectively argue for a discipline architecture built on:

• safety rather than threat
• support rather than oversight
• relationship rather than surveillance
• predictability rather than coercive control
• autonomy rather than conditional belonging

For policy-makers, this means:

• replacing punitive discipline codes with restorative, relational, developmentally aligned approaches
• eliminating collective punishment and token economies
• embedding neurodiversity and disability equity into all behavioural frameworks
• acknowledging that institutions—not children—must adapt when punishment fails

For families, it offers scientific validation of lived experience: children do not grow under threat.

For disability justice movements, it strengthens the case that punitive approaches are structurally discriminatory because they target the very children least capable of deriving learning from them.