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I listened to audiobook Punished By Rewards by Alfie Kohn. It's really interesting and backed by research. It's worth a read/listen.
The core i got out of it is that extrinsic motivation (rewards/carrot or punishments/stick) doesnt have long term and overall positive results versus intrinsic motivation.
He has examples for children development (his focus area) as well as corporate for adults.
Eg. Kids were given rewards for playing math computer games. The game play increased at first but eventually decreased to less than before the reward was introduced.
Or sales performance quotas for overall company sales. With and without incentives.
I recommend checking out the book
Thanks for the recommendation. Downloading now.
Maybe try lottery tickets
How old? I have 2 boys under 10. So our rule for reward is that it can’t be: candy, toys, or tv time. We just started a year ago and it’s been amazing but before…it was solely good behavior for one of those 3. Transition suuuucked but it’s been amazing. Usually they want our individual attention apart from their sibling whether is playing chess or basketball or hide/seek.
SC1's comment literally brought back a memory of a song I've had in my head as an inner voice since childhood Sunday school. I can't find it on the internet but the lyrics are about doing things because you love each other, not because you want a reward. That's the lesson to teach. Deeds are acts of love for relatives and strangers.
Withhold your love from them and give it as a reward.
Ha, seriously though, I have 4 kids between 9 and 5 and I have no idea. I worry about the same thing. They’re little psychopaths unless there is a reward attached.
That’s normal behavior. If you do something you expect something in return, do you attend church regularly maybe put them into a Sunday school then you start getting them into the reward of doing the good deed instead of receiving something in return.
Age is important context here. When they were little, I talked about how everyone has jobs in the family and our kids jobs were x, y, z. We also tried to set the expectation of helping if they see someone else struggling with a task and then we would reinforce that going the other way (they are struggling so we offer help). Mostly lots of conversation about how we all need to pitch in. When they got older, fussing about not being fished over for doing basic crap was met with a different response: this is what we expect you to do and what you should do to be a good person. You don’t get rewarded for doing the minimum. But that was more of a preteen/teen thing.
Sometimes the reward can be as simple as a sincere thank you to a goofy new way of doing a high five.
I'm probably going to get a lot of hate for this...but based on very limited experience with two kids and a cat, I have found that when they are young and you can't really explain things to them verbally, that pavlovian conditioning works really well. Basically, good and bad actions are rewarded or punished as immediately as possible, respectively. All mammalian brains are wired like this, and as long as the reward or punishment comes quickly enough, a natural connection is made.
This helped my kids to learn to always ask for things with please, and respond thank you/you're welcome etc. Also helped me teach my cat how to do tricks - which also brings up another interesting point. Different people(and animals) have varying levels of receptiveness to positive and negative reinforcement. Cats, I've noticed, don't have a great concept of negative reinforcement. Anyway there's no silver bullet here, but this is how I've approached it.