A couple of months ago, an article by journalist Melinda Wenner Moyer – whose work I normally greatly respect – started making the rounds on Facebook. Then (knowing my approach to parenting) a couple of readers emailed it to me and asked me what I thought of it. The article was called Go Ahead: Heap Rewards On Your Kid, with the subtitle: Parents are told stickers and trinkets for good behavior will ruin their children—but the research is wildly misunderstood.   Moyer’s main point is that while a large number of sources state that rewards are detrimental to children’s development (largely to their intrinsic motivation), “the literature on the potential dangers of rewards has been misinterpreted while the findings on its benefits have been largely overlooked.” I had already done an episode on the negative impact of rewards on children’s development. I was prepared to wholeheartedly disagree with Moyer’s article. But I came out of it sort of half-convinced that she might be right. So I came up with a two-pronged approach to the research for this episode. Firstly, I would dig into all the research that she read (and some more besides) to fully understand the evidence she consults, with one guiding premise: Is it possible that Moyer is right? Is it possible that rewards have some benefit for children and for families? And secondly, I wanted to ask Alfie Kohn – the author of Punished by Rewards – to address these issues in-person. Spoiler alert: heaping rewards on your kid is great for gaining compliance. If compliance is what you want in your child.  

Get a free guide called How to Stop Using Rewards To Gain Your Child’s Compliance (And what to do instead)

To tie in to this week’s episode, I have a FREE guide called How to Stop Using Rewards To Gain Your Child’s Compliance (And what to do instead) available as a preview of the membership group content. Each month you’ll get a guide just like this, walking you through a different aspect of parenting and helping you to make the changes needed to make sure your day-to-day-parenting is in line with your goals for the kind of child you want to raise. Because it turns out that the desire to raise an independent, thoughtful adult with strong critical reasoning skills isn’t so well aligned with rewarding a child for complying with your wishes.   Mr. Alfie Kohn's Book Punished by rewards: Twenty-fifth anniversary edition: The trouble with gold stars, incentive plans, As, praise, and other bribes - Affiliate link  

Parenting Membership 

If parenting feels really hard, and it seems like you’ve read all the books and you’ve asked for advice in free communities and you’re tired of having to weed through all the stuff that isn’t aligned with your values to get to the few good nuggets, then the Parenting Membership will help you out. Click the banner to learn more. Join the waitlist to get notified when doors reopen in May 2025.     Read Full Transcript Transcript Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We have a bit of a different episode lined up for today, but before we get going I wanted to tell you about something you might be interested in if shifting toward the kind of parenting style we’ll discuss in this episode is something that you’re interested in trying, but you’re not exactly sure how to do it. I’m developing a membership community for parents who want to move toward using scientific research and principles of respectful parenting to ground their parenting, but who aren’t exactly sure how to do it. When I surveyed my listeners recently I realized that while a lot of you really like to hear the deep dives on the scientific literature that I cover in the show, you struggle with implementing the principles we discuss. Your children are still having tantrums; they are hitting each other; you have a hard time finding a balance between being present with your child and having your child engage in independent play so you can get things done. Your children are using screens more than you’d like, you aren’t sure how to foster the type of social, emotional, and intellectual skills your child will need as an adult, and your child does one or several things that trigger a quick anger that you don’t really know how to control. You’re tired, you feel like you’re parenting for survival rather than according to any kind of strategy, and you wish it could be easier but you’re not really sure how to make it happen.   In the membership community we will tackle one topic each month, using exercises to think through what we want to achieve in our parenting and how we’ll do that. You will have a group call with me to discuss any questions you have as you did the exercises that you need to have answered before you can begin implementing the changes. Then you’ll get a couple of weeks to work on it, before we have another group call where we review the problems you’ve had and fine-tune your approach. Throughout the month you’ll have my support, but also the support of a community of parents who are striving toward similar goals, and who share challenges and wins; doubts, and confirmations that they KNOW this is the way forward for them and how they are making progress on that journey.   By the end of the month you’ll already be implementing strategies that will help you to move beyond rewards, punishments, nagging, and yelling, to a place where you and your spouse are on the same page about your approach to parenting, and your parenting methods invite your child to work with you, rather than you needing to bribe them to do the things you want them to do.   For a quick win, we’ll start the first month by looking at tantrums: why children have them, the best way to handle it when your child is in the middle of one, and ways you can invite your child to help you help them prevent their tantrums in the future. Once we’ve reduced a little bit of stress in your life, we’ll take a step back and look at our broader goals for parenting: what kinds of qualities do we want our children to have when they grow up? Is the way that we are parenting on a daily basis helping them to develop and practice these qualities? And how do we get our spouse, who might not agree with all this scientific research and respectful parenting stuff, on board? After we’ve covered these topics, we’ll select a new topic each month based on the group’s interest, following the same process of learning about the strategies and then implementing them each time.   As we go forward, you’ll feel more confident as a parent. You’ll know that the interactions with your child that you have on a daily basis ARE grounded in what scientific research tells us is needed for children to develop unconditionally loving relationships with us. You won’t be nagging or reminding or even shouting as much, because your children will understand your boundaries and will actively seek to cooperate with you on the work of the household, because they see themselves as invested in the family.   If you want to learn more about this group, head on over to yourparentingmojo.com/membership for more information. I plan to launch at the beginning of November with a special price for pilot members, and this price will never be offered again. The last day to sign up at the special price is Thursday October 25^th at midnight Pacific Standard Time.   Even if you’re not sure you’re ready for a group just yet, at the top of yourparentingmojo.com/membership you’ll find a free infographic that you can download that will summarize some of the key steps that we’ll learn in this episode about how to move beyond rewards, which you can refer to whenever you feel a bit lost and tempted to use praise or rewards to get your child to do something. Get the free infographic, and more information about the group if you’d like it, at yourparentingmojo.com/membership.   So now onto today’s topic: rewards. In Episode 9, Do you Punish Your Child With Rewards, I used Alfie Kohn’s book Punished By Rewards to make the case that rewards like praise and M&Ms and going out for ice cream are really only quantitatively, rather than qualitatively different from punishment. In other words, punishments and rewards are really activities on a continuum rather than being completely different, and if we’ve decided as parents that punishing our child isn’t something we want to do, that perhaps we should think twice about rewards as well.   Punished by Rewards is actually 25 years old now so in my episode I looked for more recent research that might have come to a different conclusion and I didn’t really find a lot, so I said this in the episode. It does seem as though more recent research had shown that rewards are detrimental to creativity so we might not want to reward activities where we hope our child will develop and use creativity, although Punished By Rewards actually does cite some sources arguing that creativity might not be completely detrimentally impacted by rewards.   But last year a journalist named Melinda Wenner Moyer wrote an article for Slate called Go Ahead, Reap Rewards on Your Kid, in which she argues that “blanket condemnations [of rewards, and she specifically cites Kohn’s book Punished by Rewards in this category] are unwarranted. Rewards can be useful in some situations and inappropriate in others, much like every other parenting tool. The literature on the potential dangers of rewards has been misinterpreted while the findings on its benefits have been largely overlooked.” As a side note before we go deeper into this topic, I have to say that the idea of rewards being “useful” does make it rather sound like something we are doing to a child, rather than something we do with them.   I actually missed the article at the time, but within the space of a couple of weeks this summer a listener emailed me a link to it and asked me what I thought of it, and I also saw it circulating on Facebook. I had been looking for an excuse to reach out to Alfie Kohn for some time as our world views on raising children are rather well aligned, and this seemed like too good of an excuse to pass up.   Before we get too far into this episode I do want to acknowledge the contributions of listener Jamie from Los Angeles to this episode. I’ve mentioned her before; she’s the one who sends me an email after each of my episodes telling me all the things I got wrong, but in the kindest most constructive, knowledgeable, and thoughtful way. She’s a massive Alfie Kohn fan herself so I reached out to her for her thoughts on my thoughts and she responded with an essay that might actually be longer than the one I wrote containing a ton of useful insights, many of which are incorporated here. So, huge thanks and respect to Jamie.   In a few minutes we are going to hear from the man himself, and the question I want to answer in our conversation is “Is it possible that Moyer is right, and that rewarding children has some potential benefits and fewer drawbacks than Kohn and others have stated?”. When I reached out to him, Mr. Kohn quickly responded and kindly agreed to talk, although he is quite strapped for time so I want to do most of the set-up for this episode outside of our interview. He will have read this introduction by the time we talk, so it’ll be almost as if we covered it together, only much more efficient.   So let’s discuss the major points that Moyer makes in her article. The first of these is that the vast majority of research on rewards, and specifically that conducted by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, who have done a LOT of research in this arena, has been conducted in situations where children want to do the activity the researchers are asking them to do. So the researcher might ask college students to do puzzles for 13 minutes on day 1, then on day 2 half of the children get offered a dollar for every puzzle they can complete in 13 minutes, but on day 3 they go back to nobody getting paid to do the puzzles. On each day, the researcher says at the end of the 13 minutes “OK, I’m going to leave the room for 8 minutes and you can do whatever you want,” and the options included more puzzles or reading magazines or presumably sitting and twiddling your thumbs. The students who were rewarded on the second day spent less time doing puzzles in their “free time” on day 3 than they had done on day 1, and less time than the students who were never rewarded did on day 3. Professor Deci, who did this research, concluded that rewarding people saps their intrinsic motivation for doing the puzzles.   Moyer pulls out two important points about this study, the first of which is that while it was statistically significant at p=0.1, it was not statistically significant at p=0.05, which is a way of saying that there is likely some relationship but not at the stringent p=0.05 level which is customarily regarded as best practice in psychological research. And I should also note that this fact is buried in the Results section and does not come across in the abstract, where the results are discussed as if they were significant at p=0.05. But the second point is one that I don’t believe I addressed fully enough in my episode, and having now re-read Punished by Rewards I don’t think Mr. Kohn does either, and that is the fact that Professor Deci asked students to work on these puzzles specifically because he thought the students would find them interesting. And they did find them interesting; we know this because he specifically asked them to rate how interested they were in doing the puzzles on a scale of 0 to 9, with 9 being “very interesting,” and session averages ranged from 7.25 to 8, which is to say that the students liked doing the puzzles a lot. It does seem as though it could be difficult to select a task that would have the right balance of children who find the task positive, neutral, and distasteful so you could really know that the change in interest was caused by the independent variable you’re trying to manipulate, rather than boredom that comes from doing the same thing over and over or even repetition that gets you into a groove of doing something so you get better at it and enjoy it more.   But if we bring this back to parenting, as Moyer does, we might ask ourselves when, as parents, we ever reward our child for doing something they already find interesting and want to do? And the answer is, of course, “never.” And it turns out that the vast majority of research on the effect of rewards on motivation to do a task are done with tasks that people – usually college students – find interesting and want to do. So that part is problematic.   The Scottish philosopher Alastair MacIntyre has addressed this issue in his most widely-read book, After Virtue. MacIntyre imagines that he knows a highly intelligent 7-year-old child, whom he wishes to teach chess, but the child has no desire to learn how to play chess. MacIntyre says he could pay the child with 50 cents worth of candy every week that the child comes to play chess with him, and that he will play in a way that makes it difficult but not impossible for the child to win, and if the child wins, they will get another 50 cents worth of candy. The child then plays, and plays to win – but the child is also motivated to cheat, and will cheat if it is possible. MacIntyre might hope that in playing, the child gains some skills that make the game of chess more interesting than it is when you really don’t know anything about chess, and that the child comes to want to play chess and to win for the satisfaction of knowing they have played well, in which case if they cheat, they will have cheated themselves rather than MacIntyre.   But Swarthmore University Professor Barry Schwartz, whom Mr. Kohn quotes quite a bit in Punished by Rewards, argues in a not-yet-published paper that he shared with me that instead of different types of motivation having an additive effect, where the candy might supplement whatever tiny bit of intrinsic motivation the child has to learn chess, the extrinsic motivators might actually crowd out the intrinsic ones, and “the very bribes used to help create a sense of telos [which is a Greek word roughly meaning “ends” or “goals”] of chess may prevent it from appearing. Given this possibility, it may be more promising to make the early steps toward proficiency in a complex practice as engaging as they can be, so that instrumental incentives are not required to keep the child engaged.” In other words, when you’re trying to engage your child in a complex activity that isn’t always a lot of fun until you know more about it – like reading, or playing the piano, Schwartz argues that we should try to make the practice itself more fun, rather than trying to bribe the child to do boring things.   But what if the activity we’re discussing isn’t reading or playing the piano, but throwing your dirty clothes in the hamper? Moyer argues with the often-stated view that if you start rewarding a child for doing something, you won’t be able to stop. She says that she rewarded her son for putting clothes in the hamper for a few weeks using a point system (where one point was worth one cent as well as a minute of screen time ) until it became a habit, and then she was able to stop rewarding him for doing that and move on to the next habit she wanted to instill and did not see any back-sliding in the clothes-on-the-floor department. She cites studies showing that rewards have been successfully used with non-compliant children, children with ADHD, and those with conduct disorder to shift their behavior, and that these behavior changes are persistent and ultimately replace negative behaviors. But perhaps we should wonder whether a measurable improvement in results in the clothes-on-the-floor department is really a goal that we want to pursue? Yes it makes our lives a bit easier because our child is cooperating with us without having to be asked every time, but is this really what’s best for the child?   The authors of books on parenting non-compliant children seem to be of the opinion that if a parent-child relationship is really not functioning at all well, the only thing that can and indeed should be done is to use rewards, with occasional additions of mild punishments if these are warranted to change the child’s behavior. Professor Alan Kazdin, Director of the Yale Parenting Center and Child Conduct Clinic and author of the book The Kazdin Method for Parenting the Defiant Child states in his book that “repeated practice helps lock particular behaviors into your child’s repertoire of behaviors, a process that involves changes in the brain.” He argues that “You’re not ‘beating back’ your child by positively reinforcing good behavior. The child of a typical harried parent receives many more psychological nicks and gashes from inept parenting than he ever will from calm, systematic, effective...