Most parents would agree that it's generally better to reward children
for doing what you want than to punish them for avoiding generally
unpleasant tasks such as finishing their homework or cleaning the
cat's litter box. Yet psychologists who study motivation say it's
not that simple. Sometimes parents and teachers make a problem worse
when teenagers perceive rewards as bribes.
There's a big difference between doing something for enjoyment
(intrinsic motivation) and doing the same thing for a reward (extrinsic
motivation). A teenager who wants to play the guitar so that she
can have fun with her friends in a band will joyfully practice for
hours. The improvement she hears in her technique and the scope
of the songs she can play are more than enough reward to motivate
her to spend many afternoons practicing chords and riffs. A classmate
who has little interest in music will look for ways to avoid even
a few minutes of practice, even if her parents have promised her
a prize for learning a new song.
Does this mean that you teenager should only do the things she
finds enjoyable, or that you have to look for ways to make most
of her activities fun? Absolutely not! That's an impossible and
inappropriate task. Rather, you should take the type of motivation
into account when you're trying to understand or change your child's
behavior.
Children who are motivated extrinsically approach a task differently
than those who find that same task interesting or fun. A teenager
who's enjoying herself will view difficulties and mistakes only
as temporary setbacks to be overcome. A child whose motivation for
a behavior is extrinsic will tend to give up when she encounters
problems or is told that she's doing something wrong.
Other effects are more subtle. Numerous studies have shown that
if a reward can be earned only by doing an undesirable task, that
task tends to become even less attractive. Let's say you've told
your fourteen-year-old daughter that she'll be allowed to watch
television only if she finishes her mathematics homework. The girl
will tend to enjoy doing the math problems less than if she hadn't
been offered the reward or if she had simply been told that she
could do her homework and watch some television.
That approach also encourages the child to shift her focus from
the task (doing the homework) to the reward (watching the television).
Once that's the case, she'll try to get the reward with the least
amount of effort, probably by rushing through the math problems.
A child who's told that she should clean her room because that's
one of her duties as a family member will tend to do a better job
of it than one who feels she's doing it mostly to get her allowance.
Teachers fall into this trap as well. Telling a student who doesn't
like science that she'll get a bonus for doing her homework will
not increase her enjoyment of the subject. In fact, the emphasis
on the reward may lead her to dislike science even more.
The size of the reward intended to motivate a child also appears
to have an effect, but not the way many parents believe. Large rewards
tend to draw the child's attention away from the task. Studies have
shown that children who are offered a large reward—an item
worth fifty to one hundred dollars, for example—tend to enjoy
a task less than children who are offered a small reward, such as
a slice of pizza.
Offering a large reward also tells children that, ultimately,
their parents are taking responsibility for seeing that a task is
done. Not only is the inherent value of the work ignored—be
it a school project or family chores—but the children become
more dependent upon their parents for the next reward.
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