Behavioral Incentives Are Not Bribery

Let’s say you have an 8-year-old son who seems to be perfectly content to play video games all day, every day. Physical activity levels, outside of school, have dwindled and lately there’s has been increased difficulties getting to sleep. As a parent, you know that this situation isn’t healthy. You’ve made your feelings known, offered to do non-screen activities together, tried to set limits, but nothing seems to be working.

What to do next? Not that long ago, a common recommendation you might hear from a pediatrician or mental health professional might be to provide some kind of concrete incentive. Maybe your son could earn some screentime by playing outside, or maybe they could get some kind of reward for doing healthier activities like reading or being physically active.

But more and more these days, external incentives have been the target of criticism and scorn. Don’t bribe your kids, is an often used expression from the internet intelligentsia, making a parent sound like some shadowy criminal in a dark alleyway.

To be clear, a bribe is something that provides an external motivation to do something bad. You are a public official and someone gives you money to secure a lucrative government contract instead of a fair bidding process. That’s a bribe. An incentive is something you offer to get somebody to do something that they probably should do anyway.

Incentives have been part of behavioral therapy for decades, and a component of evidence-based programs for children with various levels of oppositional behavior. The actual incentives that often get suggested can range from a simple “I’m proud of you” to sticker charts to cold hard cash.

To be fair, the critics of incentives aren’t completely making up their complaints, as there is some interesting research to support some caution with the use of incentives. These studies often show that when you start providing external rewards for something, the level of intrinsic motivation can fall. For example, if a little girl likes to read, then providing an external reward for reading could diminish that natural desire, and then reading becomes more about the reward and less about reading itself.

This work is important to consider, and generally it is a good idea to think first about techniques that might build intrinsic motivation before designing some kind of external incentive. However, one important difference between the subjects of these clever studies and your own kid is that the child subjects in these studies already have some intrinsic motivation for the desired behavior which can be eroded with outside rewards. By contrast, the whole reason you as the parent are where you are right now is that the child lacks any natural inclination to read, or go outside, or try some vegetables.

The other reason we should be a little skeptical of the “no bribe” pundits is that the stance isn’t a particularly developmentally informed perspective. Sometimes intrinsic motivation is there right from the start but very often external motivators are needed first and then, later, the inherent satisfaction for something can take hold.

This principle holds for the 3-year old needing a little extra inspiration to realize that pooping in the potty works better than having a smelly pull-up, and it holds for the 12-year old who can’t see a culinary world beyond French fries and chicken nuggets. Indeed, intrinsic and external motivations are not mutually exclusive and the two can peacefully coexist well into adulthood. Paychecks, a pat on the back, a free movie pass for donating blood – these are all incentives that help us grown-ups stay on track without sabotaging any natural motivation to do the right thing.

The bottom line here – don’t let some self-proclaimed expert who doesn’t interact with actual children on a regular basis shame you into avoiding the use of well-placed incentives to occasionally nudge kids where they need to go.

Namecalling incentives as bribes and expecting all children to just naturally want to read, exercise, eat Brussel sprouts, whatever, sounds pure and righteous but ignores development and, more broadly, how behavior actually works. Incentives need to be combined with modeling, instruction, and techniques that can cultivate a child’s intrinsic drives, but they deserve continued space in the parenting toolbox.