Motivating Children with Short-Term Rewards is a Big Parenting Mistake
Motivating children with short-term rewards is unquestionably the easiest way to get a child to do something immediately. However, motivating children this way has two big problems that make the immediate results not worth it.
Psychology professor Dr. Edward Deci, the world’s leading researcher on goals and motivation, explains these two problems in his classic book Why We Do What We Do. Deci states:
The first is that once you have begun to use rewards to control people, you cannot easily go back. As the experiments have shown…when people behave to get rewards–those behaviors will last only so long as the rewards are forthcoming.
This is a big problem for parents when motivating a child to do something the child needs to do over and over for the long-term. For example, motivating children with money for good grades or for keeping their room clean. A parent may be able to motivate a child like this while they live with them, but what happens once that child moves out on their own?
Instead of helping the child learn to value working hard for good grades and maintaining a clean environment, the child only learns to value rewards. So, once the reward to motivate a child to do the right thing is gone, the motivation for immediate gratification takes over as the reward the child will seek.
Deci then states:
The second problem…is that once people are oriented toward rewards, they will all too likely take the shortest or quickest path to get them.
Parents Motivating Children with Rewards Are Using a Shortcut Mindset
Having a shortcut mindset is a debilitating mindset.
Coach John Wooden has a great quote on shortcuts that illustrates this point.
Wooden states:
If you’re working on finding a shortcut, the easy way, you’re not working hard enough on the fundamentals. You may get away with it for a spell, but there is no substitute for the basics. And the first basic is good, old-fashioned hard work.
When a parent makes the decision to rely on rewards for motivation, they are inherently teaching their children to have a shortcut mindset. As a result, parents then instill the pursuit of shortcuts as part of their core values. Furthermore, the message they’re sending to their child is that outcomes matter more than process.
This mindset has implications beyond just motivation. In sports, this could lead to the use of dangerous performance enhancers as a shortcut. In life, it could lead to using lying as a shortcut, cheating as a shortcut, or even stealing as a shortcut.
With this in mind, motivating children with rewards is too risky even with the short-term benefit of immediate results. History shows that getting ahead in the short-run is never worth the consequences lurking around the corner in the long-run.