With a three-year-old son, we’ve quickly learned a few things around our house. One is that you don’t leave glasses full of liquid within four feet of the floor. Another is that it’s much easier to get cooperation if you persuade rather than command.

Lately, we’ve also learned that you had better keep the front door locked or the little rascal is liable to let himself out. He’s got door knobs down pat.

But one of the most imporant lessons, in terms of his long-term development (and our long-term sanity) is that you can’t reward bad behavior by giving him what he wants.

That means when he stomps up to us and demands, &uot;I want some apple juice!&uot; we don’t budge. No matter

how long it takes, we wait until it comes out right: &uot;Can I have some apple juice, please?&uot;

It means that no matter how violent the tantrum or how annoying the whining, he doesn’t get what he wants until he calms down and starts behaving.

There’s a simple principle at work. Behavior that gets rewarded is repeated. This goes all the way back to the experiment where mice are trained to press a button to get a food pellet. They had no idea what the button was before, but when they realize it gets them a reward, they learn to press that button over and over.

In human behavior, too, people tend to press the buttons that get them what they want. I guess it’s only natural.

But we as a society have to be careful what kind of behavior we reward. In particular, it’s clear that throughout history and even today, violence, and more specifically, what we now call terrorism, have been rewarded.

The latest example comes out of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Sept. 11 attacks.

First off, we heard a few weeks after Sept. 11 that the Bush administration had been &uot;planning&uot; to publicly endorse the idea of a Palestinian state. Did anybody buy that? It seemed highly suspicious to me. It appeared they were pressured into a more pro-Arab stance inthe Middle East by Osama bin Laden’s deadly attack on our country. My guess is that they didn’t want it to look like that was the case: &uot;Oh, well, we were going to do this already; Sept. 11

has nothing to do with it.&uot;

As recently as this week, we heard that Bush was about ready to propose a Palestinian state; this despite months of barbaric suicide attacks on Israelis.

Terrorism is being rewarded.

It really shouldn’t come as a surprise. Even in our country’s history, &uot;terrorism&uot; was employed very effectively as a means to an end. When America wanted its independence from Britain, a group of terrorists jumped aboard a ship in Boston Harbor and threw tea into the water. And that was harmless compared to the tactics of patriot mobs in Boston and elsewhere, who would terrorize and trash the houses of Tories, or Americans who were loyal to the British crown. Our founding fathers, men like John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, saw this as justified in the name of liberty.

There are a few exceptions to the rule; men like Mohatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr. used nonviolent resistance to effect major social or political changes. But sadly, they are in the minority.

In places like Israel and Afghanistan today, nonviolent resistance is not seen as an option. It’s sad, because it’s easy to visualize how much sympathy the Palestinians would get worldwide if their militant groups started organizing protest marches and hunger strikes to make their point instead of strapping nail-studded bombs onto nervous young men and sending them onto crowded buses.

Sure, a happy ending isn’t guaranteed; before and after Ghandi died, after all, his message was not able to stop fighting between Hindus and Muslims in India, in a conflict that continues today.

But people don’t seem willing to try peaceful methods anymore, because they have learned that terrorism works.

Maybe it’s getting better, though. Bush decided to hold off on that Palestinian state after another series of brutal attacks.

Dylan Belden is the Tribune’s managing editor. His column appears Sundays.