This Life
Train a Parent, Spare a Child
By BRUCE FEILER
Published: January 11, 2013
SOMEONE asked me recently what my New Year’s resolution was as a parent.
Without thinking, I said, “more creative bribing.”
I find the issue of bribing children — or to be more precise, the giving
of blunt, uncreative rewards for desired behavior (“If you just stop
kicking that seat in front of you on the plane, I’ll give you 10 minutes
of iPad time”; “Clean your room this weekend, I’ll give you 10 bucks”;
“If you use good manners at Grandma’s house, I’ll let you have an extra
brownie”) — to be one of the more nagging challenges of being a parent.
On one hand, I’ve read a small library of articles that have laid out
with undeniable persuasiveness evidence that giving children tangible
rewards — from money to sweets to an extra hour before bedtime — not
only doesn’t work in the long term, it actually has a negative effect on
them. As early as the 1960s, Edward Deci, then a psychology graduate
student at Carnegie Mellon,
showed that when external rewards are given, subjects “lose intrinsic
interest for the activity.” More recently, Daniel Pink, in his
best-selling book “Drive,” reviewed four decades of research and
concluded that offering short-term incentives to elicit behavior is
unreliable, ineffective and causes “considerable long-term damage.” (The
main downside: People perform the task merely to get the reward; when
the reward is removed, they stop doing it.)
So I got it: bribing is bad. And yet I, my wife and nearly every other
parent I know resorts to this tactic with appalling regularity. As one
father said to me recently when we were discussing our approaches to
parenthood: “My philosophy is simple: threats and bribes.”
So what’s a beleaguered parent to do? I reached out to some of the
harshest critics of bribing for tips on making my resolution come true.
THE TALKING CURE Dr. Deci, now a professor of psychology at the
University of Rochester, said the biggest problem with tangible rewards
is that they actually work, at least in the short run. “If you want
somebody to do something, and if you have enough money, you can get them
do it,” he said. “Practically anyone, practically anything.”
But with children, he pointed out, since you are trying to get them to
do the behavior “more or less ongoingly for the rest of their lives,”
the technique will backfire unless you’re prepared to offer the same
reward every time. “You don’t want them coming to you when they’re
grown,” he said.
Dr. Deci recommends a three-step alternative. First, be clear about why
what you’re asking them do is important. Second, be interested in their
point of view. “If it’s something they hate doing, acknowledge that,
tell them you understand it’s not fun, yet the reason they need to do it
is as follows,” he said. Finally, communicate in a way that’s not
controlling. “Don’t use words like ‘should,’ ‘must’ and ‘have to,’ ” he
said. “All of those things that convey to them you’re a big person
trying to push around a little person.”
MAKE IT A GAME Alan Kazdin, the director of the Yale Parenting Center,
said the problem with incentives is they focus too much attention on the
desired result instead of the behavior that leads up to the result.
“You can’t throw rewards at behaviors that don’t exist and get them,” he
said. “If someone says I will match your retirement fund if you perform
a flamenco dance right now, my reaction is, ‘Great, but it turns out I
can’t do that.’ You have to develop the behavior very, very gradually.”
For example, if you want your children to eat more vegetables, he said,
instead offering them $10 to do so (a technique I once stooped to, I
confess), he suggested turning the process into a game. First, take the
pressure off by telling them they don’t have to eat vegetables now but
just keep them on their plate. “You tell them they’re probably going to
want to eat vegetables when they’re older, because there’s a nice little
challenge in there,” he said.