Motivation

 Motivating without Bribes

    How to keep incentives healthy as we try to motivate our kids 

We all feed off of rewards and I don't think that's always a bad thing but when it interferes with our ability to discern right from wrong, and to make choices simply because it's the right thing for us - that can be a dangerous dependency between doing it simply because you get something out of it and not just when you should. This is not just a kid problem. As I was studying the reading and pondering on my own life, this is a continuous problem with adults as well. Adults don't want to help because they are too busy, unless they get something out of it. Employers often incentivize externally with "Employee of the Month", and bonuses based on performances. Adult seek out bribes and sometimes they are healthy but sometimes they are not. Spiritually, we also look at incentives. We want to have eternal life with our families. We want to be able to have access to important things like priesthood blessings, or temples, or personal revelation. By making good choices according to the doctrine at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, we can have access to those things if we make certain choices. Most of those are long-term outcomes that we are seeking but not all. And so we use incentives to motivate ourselves. 

    The questions to ask as you are deciding, "Should I offer this reward to my child?", or "Is this a bribe that will hurt my child later?" is, whether or not it will likely help the child in the long run, and will this set our family up for success. Still there will be times of desperation, when a bribe or offer to a child may get out of hand and reassessing how to deal with that will likely be important.

     Often the bribe is about the immediate need right now, and not a long term goal. The parent isn't thinking about the long run, they are wanting a certain behavior to stop or start right away. They offer a prize to increase the chance or speed up the progress on that goal. Sometimes it works and so it feeds this desire to try it again. 

In an article titled, "What's the problem with bribes?", Dr. Steve Dennis talked about why it is a slippery slope because some incentives can work but when parents get desperate and use illogical incentives or rewards that don't have an end or a clear authentic purpose, children may not be learning or growing from the experience at all and it will create a cycle of dependency. (Dennis, BYUi). The child won't understand the importance of getting good grades for instance or they may not recognize why following the rules helps everyone. The behaviors will continue and often the parent has to offer bigger and bigger incentives to see the same results. 

Dr. Dennis continued with sharing five different tips that can help keep incentives healthy. He talked about always redirecting to the authentic, never eclipsing the authentic, paying attention to timing, giving age and maturity levels a consideration, and recognizing that the best rewards are not physical or material things. Often our positive reinforcement can be enough. 

I have given this a lot of thought. My son has received applied behavioral analysis therapy and they work a lot with incentives. At times, I think there was been a dependency on rewards in our family. I started working on positive reinforcement, even when I was seeing a negative behavior, and it was remarkable how much that helped our family turn things around. We are often people pleasers, for better or worse and sometimes the incentive is just making your family members happy. That also can have consequences. We want kids to innately make decisions based on what they believe is right, not what they believe their parent told them is right but that also comes with age, and maturity. We can only parent one stage at a time. Incentives can be a helpful tool when intentionally used to help the child gain independence and an appreciation for that said skill or milestone. 

References 

Dennis, Steven, What's the problem with Bribes?, BYUi, Parenting Skills FAML 120 file:///Users/kathrynjenkins/Downloads/faml120_document_whatsTheProblemWithBribes%20(1).pdf