When I was a young girl, my mother didn’t use stickers, charts or time outs to get me to behave. There was no Dr. Phil, offering sage parenting advice and the Internet, with its information overload, didn’t exist. I behaved because I knew the consequences and believe me— they weren’t pretty.
When I became a mother I figured I was old and wise enough to be able to talk my little one out of any bad behavior. Not. My son is stubborn with a capital S. And being very intelligent makes it even worse since he insists on rationalizing every thing he does that I don’t approve of.
So the question is, should I bribe him to get him to behave? I must admit, I’ve done it in the past. I’ve also tried an assortment of behavior charts and other modification plans but none of them really worked in decreasing the target behavior. I decided to try one more time and turned to the Internet for help. In the past, I created charts myself, but this time I decided to find some snazzy pre-created chart. I figured finding one would be a snap.
Wrong. I typed in “behavior charts” and found literally 5,030,000 references! It was enough to make me crawl back in bed and go to sleep. After all it was cloudy outside and the house was quiet except for the drone of the dryer. But no, I decided to trudge on so that I could get started immediately.
After visiting a gazillion websites most containing charts I could easily create in Excel, I finally decided to give up on the whole idea after reading an article that basically shows how rewards (or bribery) in the long run may not work effectively. The following points helped me to make the decision not to move forward.
(1) Over time, performance and the quality of the work declines because the child is thinking only of the reward and not the value of what they are doing.
(2) Loss of interest in the reward equals loss of motivation to complete the task.
(3) The work may ultimately become an unpleasant task that is done simply to get the promised reward.
(4) Eventually you will have to remove the incentives and when the incentives are gone, so is the motivation for doing the task.
Ultimately, if you decide to use a behavior chart or some type of reward system it’s really a personal choice. That’s one of the great things about being a parent; we get to decide what’s best for our kids. As parents we need to be aware of the pros as well as the cons involved in using such a system. We must educate ourselves and not use them simply because some expert says we should. As I said earlier, my mom didn’t use them and I think I turned out okay.