i found this article on web: lemme copy paste it for thse who r interested!
The trouble with star charts
By rewarding your child at every turn, are you helping or hindering her development?
Author: Nikki Sheehan
There is a space on our kitchen wall where we used to have a star chart. It’s a big space – this was the mother of all star charts, more like a galaxy of behavioural correction. It promised incentives for improvement for every aspect of my five- and seven-year-old children’s lives. There were rows to encourage tooth brushing, hair brushing, bottom wiping and hand washing. There were rows to reward behaviours such as politeness, kindness and obedience. There was even a row for not being grumpy in the mornings.
The children could zoom along the star chart each day, grabbing stickers. It was very complicated, with smiley faces, frowning faces, pink stickers and blue stickers, and, of course, stars. Each sticker earned the child a point, and points meant prizes: 20 points earned a small treat (a comic or some sweets), and 500 points would qualify them for a really big, as yet undecided, reward that my children (wrongly) decided would be a trip to Disneyland.
And it seemed to work. My children’s behaviour improved. The cat came home, the neighbours started talking to us again, even my frown lines started to relax. Motivated by the multicoloured verification of their virtue, my children had a reason not to squabble, whinge or play cricket with eggs. They stopped fighting over the spoons at breakfast, put their shoes on the shoe rack, and stopped turning the floor into a pond at bathtime. They seemed happy; I was a contented mummy. It was all, as my daughter would say, easy-peasy, lemon-squeezy.
But perhaps it was too easy. A few weeks into the regime, I began to have doubts. I noticed that normal living was becoming subordinate to the acquisition of points.
My children weren’t arguing as much, but nor were they discussing their disagreements and solving their problems; they were simply giving up in order to get a sticker. Where once I would have seen occasional spontaneous acts of kindness, I now saw RADA-standard dramatics calculated to win a star. Their behaviour, once unpredictable but natural, had become controlled and calculated. My children had not matured into more self-disciplined, caring, helpful members of the family: they had learned to work the system. They had a new job – they were sticker pickers. Gradually, every move they made was followed by a request for a sticker.
What had I done wrong? Numerous parenting manuals recommend star charts to cure everything from rudeness to bedwetting. I consulted Sal Severe, whose book How To Behave So Your Children Will Too! has become a modern classic. “Star charts and reward systems are excellent external motivators,” he told me. “Children like to see that they are making progress. However, tangibles should always be accompanied by words of encouragement that are directed at internal rewards. It is fine for children to work hard for stickers, but better when they work hard for self-esteem.”
Sensible stuff, but I’m not convinced that my children have the perception to see a trip to Disneyland as mere icing on the cake of self-improvement. However, Sal Severe has a point. Caught up in the excitement of my shiny new system, I had probably neglected to praise and stress the intrinsic value of good deeds. And if I had forgotten that the real reason for not hitting each other with blunt objects is to avoid concussion, what hope did they have?
Perhaps the fault was not totally mine. The way they greedily grabbed their stickers made me wonder if a star chart was not a reward system at all, but a bribe system. But what’s the difference? According to Toddler Taming expert Dr Christopher Green (who recommends the use of star charts), “A reward consolidates good behaviour, coming almost as a bonus after the event. A bribe is arranged beforehand and if there is no performance there is no payout.”
So, according to this definition, my stars were black holes.
However, although the sages of parenting don’t agree on the definition of bribery and rewards, the general consensus is that rewards are useful external motivators to get children into the habit of behaving in the way we want, while bribery makes children obnoxious and more likely to be disagreeable in the future.
Maybe worrying about the difference between rewards and bribes is splitting hairs. Especially if neither actually work. No one ever claimed that raising children is an exact science, but I was surprised to find that most parents’ favourite child-control method seems contrary to scientific study. The enthusiasm for using rewards can be traced back to the theory of operant conditioning expounded by influential psychologist BF Skinner from the 1950s onwards. Through experiments with rodents and pigeons, Skinner deduced that when a reward follows a behaviour, that behaviour is likely to be repeated.
But since the 1960s, research with humans seems to show that, rather than encouraging target behaviour, rewards can have the opposite effect. For example, preschoolers who expected a reward for drawing drew as many pictures as those who didn’t expect anything, but the quality was lower.
Sixth-grade girls who were promised cinema tickets for teaching younger girls a new game got frustrated more easily, took longer to communicate ideas, and ended up with pupils who didn’t understand the game as well as those whose sixth-grade tutors hadn’t been promised an incentive. And in a longitudinal study of 100 Californian children, those whose parents gave rewards for good grades were more likely to become disinterested in learning and do less well in school by age nine.
So, if the research holds true, offering my children rewards to tidy their bedroom should lead to Lego in the dressing-up box and a lifetime of smelly socks hidden under the bed.
Alfie Kohn, author of Punished By Rewards, is convinced that the ‘do this and you’ll get that’ method of raising children is a big mistake. “Star charts and other rewards can sometimes be effective at getting a temporary change in behaviour, but never anything more than this, and often at a very high cost,” he told me.
“Children learn that the reason to do x, or not to do y, is to get the goody – and that, as scores of studies have shown, actually makes them less likely to develop a commitment to doing the right thing when the rewards are no longer available. In fact, two studies have shown that children who get rewards or praise from their parents are less generous and helpful than their peers.”
OK, so perhaps my star chart was a bit over-ambitious, but can’t we occasionally help our children to behave themselves by offering rewards? After all, everyone else does. “A child who complies in the hope of getting a reward or avoiding a punishment is not, as we sometimes say, ‘behaving himself’. It would be more accurate to say the reward or punishment is behaving him,” says Kohn.
“Given that rewards are demonstrably counterproductive, one wouldn’t want to use them just because other people are doing so. Rather, one would want to find more respectful and effective ways to help children become decent people, and simultaneously to encourage our friends and neighbours to rethink their tendency to treat children as though they were pets to be trained.”
Harsh stuff. But at least we modern parents have swapped the stick for the carrot. Sadly, this gets us no Brownie points with Kohn. “Rewards are less destructive than punishments,” he concedes. “But rewards and punishments are not opposites: they are two sides of the same coin. We do not need to choose between being punitive or permissive; it’s also possible to set limits and exert firm control while being warm, caring, and responsive.”
Kohn’s view is that rather than doing things to children, such as bribing or threatening, we should work with them. So when a child has done something wrong, we can see it as an opportunity to educate or solve a problem together. “Working together offers a vote of confidence to the child,” he explains. “This belief sets in motion what we might call an ‘auspicious’ circle. The more we trust, the more likely a child is to live up to that trust.”
This sounds great in theory, but how else, for example, can we get a reluctant four-year-old to sit down and practise reading, especially if he’s used to being drip-fed rewards at school? Kohn’s answer is that children only appear to lack motivation for behaving in a certain way because we’re asking them to do something inappropriate. “The use of rewards allows adults to avoid questioning the curriculum (and the style of instruction); instead, they can just focus on fixing the children.”
According to Kohn, schools are in danger of destroying our children’s innate love of learning. “As soon as we give certificates and other artificial inducements for learning, the desire to learn for its own sake begins to evaporate,” he says. “If we give these certificates publicly, and only to a few kids, then we’ve taken a bad thing and made it even worse by, in effect, punishing and humiliating the children who didn’t jump through our hoops.”
It’s not only schools that are hooked on paying for compliance. Sports coaches reward good play with sweets, children’s meals in restaurants come with a free toy, and only a very brave parent would dare to wrap a pass-the-parcel without a prize in each layer. Even acting altruistically now has inducements: some charity fund-raisers offer children prizes dependent on the amount of money they pull in. When I was a kid, all we got at the end of a sponsored walk was a cup of weak squash and blisters. Oh, and a warm feeling of pride at having helped someone else.
Gillian Edwards, parent trainer and Assistant Director of The New Learning Centre, urges us to put a bit more thought into how we reward our children. “Rewards are a useful incentive, especially if accompanied by descriptive praise. But the rewards need to be educational. Don’t encourage them to get more stuff. Most of the time they get far too much stuff without having to earn it. Above all, what children want to do is spend time with adults, so give them five minutes’ extra story time, or sit down with them and paint a picture.”
But what about star charts? “In terms of behaviour management they can be very effective, especially for going the extra mile, but they need to be well managed by the parents,” warns Edwards. “There’s only any point if the parent is enthusiastic and makes sure it’s covered in stickers.” So, I ask her, is my dream of children who are helpful members of the family – without the aid of bribes or rewards – unrealistic? Edwards advises me to keep trying. “They should be taking part in chores in the house anyway,” she says. “Children need to know that they have responsibilities.”
Now that we have taken down the star chart, I once again have children who sometimes fight, are often messy, and are occasionally very helpful and kind. I’m trying not to use rewards – but last week, when my daughter won the class prize at school, she was so pleased and proud that, despite knowing the theory, I was pleased and proud too.
So now we have an empty space on the wall. But I think I might just put up a big photo of our family. I hope it will remind me that, as a parent, I need to reflect their successes back to them and that, as one researcher who had studied rewards, concluded: “A person’s kindness, it seems, cannot be bought.”
