In every parenting journey, fostering positive behavior in children stands as a cornerstone for growth and development. Creative reward systems emerge as powerful instruments, igniting motivation and shaping behaviors.
This blog delves into the approaches that incentivize good conduct at home, aiming to provide insights and inspiration for crafting engaging and effective strategies that nurture a harmonious family environment.
What Maintains our Appropriate Behavior?
There are all sorts of ways to reward (positively reinforce) good behavior. Although we’d all prefer that our children show responsible behavior just for the love of being responsible, it’s often necessary to use external forms of reinforcement. This is especially true when your child faces a new and/or difficult challenge.
These external reinforcers are also necessary when you and your child don’t place the same value on the skills you want them to learn.
Typically, after children become fluent with new tasks or skills, they will begin to enjoy the skill more and may need far less external reinforcement or maybe even none.
“Praise and Raise”
Remember, we all have multiple needs, and even though you may love your job it’s highly unlikely that you’ll continue to do it if your employer stops paying you. The words “praise” and “raise” only differ by one letter but their impact on behavior can be very different. We all want to be acknowledged for doing good work, but that acknowledgement alone won’t meet our financial needs. Similarly, even if you’re paid very well but you’re treated extremely poorly at your job, you’re also probably thinking about leaving that job. Children are no different. While they may love praise, it often isn’t enough to sustain effective behavior change. Providing them with access to their preferred items and activities in addition to praise is often needed to incentivize good behavior and maintain progress with new patterns and habits.
Three Sources of Motivation
For all of us, we need some motivation to drive us into action. There are three basic ways that we’re motivated.
- We can be motivated by the natural reinforcers produced by the activity that we’re doing (playing guitar alone).
- We can be motivated by recognition/praise (playing guitar for an audience).
- We can be motivated by other non-social reinforcers (playing guitar for money).
For many things that we all do, our behavior is maintained by some combination of all of these sources of reinforcement (reward). This brings us to creative reward systems for encouraging good behavior… Just like the rest of us, your child will do things because they love doing them, because they love getting your praise/attention, or for other non-social reinforcers.
Cash is a popular reinforcer for children, especially older ones, but most of us are on a budget and no one wants to have to pay their child for every single thing they’re supposed to do.
When praise isn’t enough and a raise is out of the question, it’s time to get creative. The Carrotology app gamifies good behavior through its in-app reward system (Crowns), allowing your child to visually appreciate when they’ve done something good.
Earning Privileges
Something that only costs you a little bit of flexibility is using privileges to reward good behavior. A great way to learn responsible behavior
is to be shown that responsible behavior can earn privileges. That is, your child can earn their way to being allowed to do something that they’re normally not allowed to do.
Maybe your child wants to earn an extra half hour of TV before bedtime. Maybe they’d like to be the one to pick the family dinner for one night. Maybe they’d like to skip a chore or enjoy the privilege of having a friend sleep over. Maybe they even want to wear that shirt to dinner that you’re not completely comfortable with.
Any of these privileges can be stocked in the Carrotology shops of Crown’s Landing where your child can purchase all sorts of reinforcers with the Crowns they earn for completing responsibilities.
Earn Your Time!
What? My child needs to earn my time? No, of course not, but what if there’s something they want to do with you, and you’d rather not spend the time, or it would require you to make some time? What if what they want takes an hour of your time?
In cases like these it may be worthwhile to have your child earn the activity that takes up your time. This requires a commitment from both of you. Your child must commit to earning the Crowns needed to purchase the activity and you must commit to supplying the hour of your time for the activity they requested.
There’s a lot of truth to the old saying “time is money,” but time can sometimes be easier to come by than money. In these cases, leveraging time spent with your child can be a powerful way to motivate them without straining or draining your bank account.
Using Choices
Sometimes you can provide choices to your child that are little trouble for you but very meaningful to your child. Everyone has to go to school, but maybe your child wants to choose who walks them to the bus stop. Maybe your child would like the choice of rearranging their bedroom or choosing who drives them for a medical visit. Maybe they even want to choose where they sit at the dinner table or where they do their homework.
It takes a little bit of thought, a little bit of flexibility and a little bit of creativity, but you can find all sorts of ways to inject choice into what is usually a choiceless situation. Again, when providing choices for a child to earn it’s a good idea to think about those choices that are the easiest for you to provide, yet the most meaningful to your child.
“Monetizing” Activities and Items that are Normally “Free”
When attempting to be creative with reinforcers on a budget, you may wish to restrict some of the items or activities that your child can currently access freely.
For example, if your child accesses their video games any time they have free time, you may want to restrict gaming by requiring that your child purchase each half hour of gaming. You can even use a hybrid procedure in which the first item is free, but there’s a cost for the second item.
How Carrotology Helps You Manage Rewards
Carrotology makes it very easy to transform everyday items and activities, choices and privileges into powerful rewards that your child will want to earn. You don’t have to break the bank to create responsible behavior. Let the Carrotology app help you easily provide a visual reward-system to reinforce good behavior at home!
