$20 and a Webkin

This was the promise that ultimately got the kid to jump.

The scene:  summer swim lessons at the big public pool nearby.

The actors:

• One six or seven year old boy nervously peering at the water from the top of the 3 meter board
• His mother, watching from below.

The audience: other parents, kids and swim instructors.

Just to set the tone here- I do my very best not to judge other parents for their child-rearing decisions and actions.  If parenthood has taught me nothing else- it’s that I have a hard enough time knowing what is right for my kid and my family, and that I have no IDEA what is right for another kid, mom or family…

Having said that, I often find myself observing other parents and kids and then reflecting on my own (sometimes very different) decisions.  And then I get curious.  So this post today is really coming from a place of curiosity and I’d love to hear your reactions or perspectives in the comments.

So here’s the story… a few weeks ago, I was hanging out at the pool while my son was doing swim lessons.  It’s a big pool and there were a bunch of classes running simultaneously.  One teacher had her class of what looked to be 5-7 year olds on the diving boards.  Some were doing dives off the low board, others were jumping off the high-dive.  I watched as one little guy climbed up, up, up the ladder to the high dive, get a peek over the edge and climb back down.   A few minutes later, he was up at the top again, nervously inching towards the end of the board.

His mom was down below with her cell phone camera out ready to capture his big moment.  Except that it was not at all clear whether today was the day for this particular moment.  So she starts in with the usual mommy patter, “Come on Billy, you can do it!”

Billy, meanwhile is holding on to the handrail that extends about half of the lengh of the diving board, looking over the edge again, deciding if he’s going to go out onto the board past the rail, or back down again.

Mom’s still yelling, “You can do it Billy! Come on, it’ll be fun!”

So far there’s nothing too unusual about this scene- we’ve all seen it before.  One of our big jobs in life is to encourage our children.  (Encourage: to inspire with hope, courage or confidence.  Isn’t that what we’re all about as moms?)

But then, she throws in another form of encouragement.  The kind that gets people out of bed and off to work in the morning.  Now it’s “Come on Billy, you can do it.  I’ll give you five dollars if you jump.”

Well, I have to admit that got my attention.  For all kinds of reasons.

Way back in the day, when I was a professor and not a parent, I ran across a little book by a guy named Alfe Kohn called  Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes.  I used it with my undergrads to help them name the games they had become very good at playing to succeed inthe academic world.  It’s a great book and I recommend it.  Since you probably don’t have it handy, the one sentence takeaway is that studies over many years in many different arenas show that when external rewards are offered for certain behaviors, intrinsic motivation to do those behaviors suffers, even when it was something the person liked and would have done without the reward.

For that reason, among others, I’ve always been really careful about when and how I offer rewards to my son.  So I was honestly fascinated to see how this scenario would play out.

What happened was that the mom talk was joined by an auctioneer’s patter.  Now it was, “Come on Billy, five bucks.  I’ll give you five bucks if you jump.  You can do it.”   When Billy still was looking uncertain, she upped the ante.  Now it was ten bucks.  As he inched his way down the length of the board, she’s calling up to him the whole time.  ”Ten dollars, come on, Billy.  You can do it.”  He’s standing at the edge, peering over at the water 10 feet below him.  ”Alright, Billy, twenty dollars.  I’ll give you twenty dollars if you jump.”

At this point all kinds of thoughts are racing through my mind as I exchange glances with the mom next to me.  We’re both kind of watching in disbelief as this scenario unfolds.  I have so many questions about this situation, not least of which is, “The kid is only seven, do you really have to double the bet each time?  Why not up the ante a dollar at a time and save yourself some money?”

So Billy is standing at the edge of the board, mom is keeping up the chatter and makes what turns out to be the final offer, “OK buddy, tewnty dollars and a webkin.  I’ll give you twenty dollars and a webkin if you jump off that board.”  And bless his heart, Billy goes for it.

At this point I said to the mom next to me, “I’m not sure that’s such a great precedent to set.”  And she replied, “Well I just hope she pays up.”

Right after this happened, I put it out for comment to my Facebook crowd and got an interesting variety of responses.  I think because I initially biased the crowd by saying that the mom had ‘bribed’ her son to jump, someone commented that maybe this was just a case of a good mom having  a crappy day in public.  Even though I clearly had my own opinions about what I might have done in that scenario, my comment that “I’m not sure that’s such a good precedent” wasn’t really intended as a judgment about whether she was a good or bad mom.  I was thinking more about the consequences that might result down the line.

A couple of folks on the FB thread pointed out that ‘parenting is the fine art of manipulation’ which certainly seems true- and so there was some discussion about whether jumping off the diving board was the sort of thing that warranted a cash payment.  One poster said, “You bribe them for things that are productive, like behaving nicely at Grandma’s house, not for things that are for your entertainment.”  A dad chimed in, “Bad precedent.  First of all, why bother?  He’s 7, he’ll jump when he’s good and ready, or when all his friends are jumping and he’s not… what is being learned here is that if he holds out long enough for things he doesn’t want to do (homework, practice, chores, etc.) mom will ultimately submit to bribery.”

I had some interesting conversations over the next day or so with folks about this and talked to one mom who said that she regularly and successfully used ‘incentives’ with her son.

Honestly, I was beginning to wonder if I was missing something here.  There are plenty of areas of life where I want my son to do something he doesn’t want to do.  Would offering a reward help?

A week or so later we took a short vacation and stayed in a hotel that had a bowl of Jolly Ranchers in the lobby.  I’m probably the meanest mommy I know when it comes to candy, so it was a big deal for AJ to get to eat one or two a day.  One night we had come back from dinner and were going to practice violin before bed.  (I know… I even make him practice on vacation!).  He asked if he could have his candy after practice and I said OK.

When we came home, a couple of days later, he was working on a piece that had really challenging bowing.  He asked, “If I get all the bowing right, can I have a Jolly Rancher?”  He’d brought a few home with him, and with some trepidation, I agreed.

The first time he played it, he made a few mistakes.  I saw his face fall when he said, “I guess that means I don’t get my candy.”  I told him he could try again.  So he did.  He ended up playing it three times before he got all the bowings correct, and he got his candy.

At the time I was thinking, “Wow, maybe I really have missed the boat on this one.”  Ordinarily, it would have been hard to get him to play it a second and certainly a third time without that carrot dangling in front of him.  But on that night, he would have played it as many times as it took to earn his reward.

So for the next few days, it went like that.  We made a deal that if we had a ‘good violin practice’ he could have a small treat (like one cookie) at the end.  For a few days, things seemed to be going really well.  We were having an easier time with violin and he was more cooperative knowing that a cookie was on the line.

But then the inevetiable happened.  A ‘bad’ practice.  He was frustrated and had a complete meltdown.  I hadn’t said anything about it, but in the middle of his rant, AJ moaned, “And this means I don’t get my cookie tonight.”  Which only made him more frustrated and upset.  At that point I didn’t want to rush in and tell him he could have the cookie anyway just to calm him down, because that seemed to me to send the worst possible message, namely if you have a meltdown, I’ll do anything to stop it.  I’ve seen the consequences of that parental behavior and it’s not pretty!

When he had calmed down, we talked a bit and I told him he could have a cookie if he wanted, and that we were going to stop our experiment of cookies after violin practice.  He was bummed because he’d gotten used to having that cookie after practice, but since then it hasn’t come up again.

So here’s my deep, philosophical question:  Given that the job of parents is to shape their kid’s behavior, attitudes and motivation, the use of carrots and sticks seems inevitable.  How are we to understand the differences (if any) between a ‘bribe’ a ‘reward’ and an ‘incentive’?  How have you used these in your family?  What works for you, and what doesn’t?