Behaviour modification, surprising discovery!

Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather (or more accurately, my jaw dropped open cartoon style) this afternoon when I was studying a chapter on learning (for my psychology degree) and behaviourism in particular.
I'll give you some background: you know these behaviour modification techniques and ideas that we use to discipline children? Essentially punishments and rewards, Supernanny style. They are used in schools and parents are expected to use them as well, punishment/time outs (naughty steps, being sent to a bedroom) for bad behaviour and rewards (stickers, treats) for good behaviour. So much so that it's now common practice, starting with babies (routines, controlled crying, and so on) as if our children are unruly creatures, not to be trusted, with no sense of good and bad who need to be controlled as much as possible.
Now, I did some reading to find out where this behaviour modification came from, is it scientifically valid? Why do we do it? Does it work? And it all leads back to a man called Skinner, he was an American psychologist, a behaviourist to be more exact (he believed in studying behaviour not inner states as these could not be measured) who ran a number of experiments on animals (rats and pigeons mainly) in the 40s and 50s. He realized that these animals responded to things like punishments and rewards (positive reinforcements) and their behaviour changed: they were more likely to do something if there was a reward and less likely if there was a punishment (rat presses a lever and gets food, he will press the lever next time he's hungry).
Psychologists subsequently used this research (calling it behaviour modification) for cases of children with behaviour and developmental problems (not the average child, the ones with "difficult" behaviour). Now, for some reason these techniques became more and more mainstream until they were used for the majority of children, and from schools this trickled into the home, with parents moving away from a strict authoritarian style to behaviour modification.
Just reading this worried me, we are using techniques on children designed to change the behaviour of rats and pigeons...
And this brings me to my discovery today. I vaguely remember studying this last year and reading that, to the surprise of the scientists involved, punishments didn't really work: if a rat got an electric shock by pressing a lever, he would be less likely to press it in future, but a lot of rats still pressed it. So today I'm reading the chapter again and at the end it says that Skinner himself stated that punishments should not be used (only in very extreme cases), behaviour can only be changed through positive reinforcements. Punishments cause stress, anxiety and anger in the subjects and there is no guarantee that the subject will stop the "bad" behaviour. This is psychology degree coursebook, not a fancy hippie text.
So why are we still doing it?????? Why are we still putting kids on naughty steps or telling them off? Why are we controlling little babies by forcing them to eat and sleep at certain times and, most importantly, why are we using controlling techniques like controlled crying to change the behaviour of babies (if you cry no one will come, if you sleep everyone will be happy with you and give you lots of hugs and positive reinforcements).
I will be doing more reading on this...

Example of "Skinner box" for studying behaviour in rats