In summary, because effective punishment requires constant surveillance and consistent responses, it's almost impossible to be a "good punisher". It's best and easiest to use consistent reinforcement for good behavior and extinction for bad behavior. Praise the child for good behavior in the supermarket. Extiguish the child's temper tantrum by consitently refusing the request and ignoring the tantrum.

Punishment is to cause suffering, pain, or loss that serves as retribution. Punishment is a form of chastisement,
correction, discipline or penalty. When we hear the word punishment, most people think of disciplinary proceedures
used by parents, teachers, and other authority figures. But punishment is much more than parents giving a child a
time-out for misbehaving or teachers giving demerits. Any process that adds or takes away something and causes the
behavior to decrease is punishment. Example: If parents ignores all the A's on their childs report card and ask
repeated questions about the B's and C's, they may unintentionally punish and weaken the likelihood of future A's.

As you can see, punishment is a tricky business. If one were to study psychology, they would learn that punishment
can have a negative or positive effect on a child. You can then use that knowledge to become a better parent. Examples of punishment uses are given when parents must stop their children from running into the street and their teenages from drinking and driving. Teachers must stop disruptive students in the classroom and bullies on the playground. Dangerous criminals must be stopped and possibly removed from society.

There is an obvious need for punishment. But it can be problematic. To be effective, punishment should be immediate and consistent. However, in the real world, this is extremely hard to do. To make matters worse, when punishment is not immediate, during the delay, the undesirable behavior is likely to be reinforced, which unitentionally places it on a partial schedule of reinforcement. Sadly, this makes the undesirable behavior even more resistant to extinction. Perhaps most important, even if punishment immediately follows the misbehavior, the recipient may learn what not to do but not learn what he or she should do. Imagine trying to teach a child the word dog by only saying "no!" each time the child said "dog" when it was inappropriate. The child (and you) would soon become very frustrated. It's much more efficient to teach the child by giving him or her clear examples of correct behavior, such as showing a child pictures of dogs and saying dog after each photo.

Punishment has other serious side effects such as increased aggression, passive aggressiveness, avoidance behavior,
modeling, temporary suppression, and learned helpnessless. The best method seems to be a combination of the major
principals. Reinforce appropriate behavior and extinguish inappropriate behavior and save punishment for the most
extreme cases (such as a 2 year old running into the street.)