An interesting article about rewards...

I hope my children will learn and grow emotionally because they want to, for their own reasons, and not because I or another adult makes them. My instinct has been to avoid start charts, etc... and my oldest daughter's resistance to be manipulated this way has reinforced my instinct. It's funny, she will happily accept a bribe (and often solicits them), but is very suspicious when I use positive reinforcement techniques I've learned from parenting books. I stumbled across the article "Rewards and Praise: The Poisoned Carrot" listed in Unschooling Voices #3. It thoughtfully explains and defends the choice to avoid "positive reinforcement" much more clearly than I could. Here is a snippet:

But, rewards improve children's behavior and performance, don'’t they? Or so we thought. However, when the little gold stars or jelly-beans stop coming, the behavior we were trying to reinforce tends to peter out. Children that have grown used to expecting praise, can feel crushed when it doesn'’t come. This dampens their perseverance. There is plenty of evidence that in the long term, reward systems are ineffective. Contrary to popular myth, there are many studies showing that when children expect or anticipate rewards, they perform more poorly.

One study found that students' performance was undermined when offered money for better marks. A number of American and Israeli studies show that reward systems suppress students'’ creativity, and generally impoverish the quality of their work. Rewards can kill creativity, because they discourage risk-taking. When children are hooked on getting a reward, they tend to avoid challenges, to '“play it safe'”. They prefer to do the minimum required to get that prize. Here is a good illustration of why we made the mistake of believing in rewards, based on benefits that appear on the surface. When an American fast-food company offered food prizes to children for every book they read, reading rates soared. This certainly looked encouraging - at first glance. On closer inspection, however, it was demonstrated that the children were selecting shorter books, and that their comprehension test-scores plummeted. They were reading for junk-food, rather than for the intrinsic enjoyment of reading. Meanwhile, reading outside school (the unrewarded situation) dropped off.

The rest of the article is very good too!