Why Rewards May Be Hurting Your Child’s Motivation

Source: "Woman with a golden cup / magnific"

“If you eat your vegetables, you can play on the tablet.”

“Brush your teeth, and you will earn a star.”

We often use rewards to motivate our children to do these things. At first, it works. The vegetables are eaten. Teeth are brushed. Things get done. But we often avoid two important questions. The first is this: What happens to motivation when the reward disappears?

When the reward disappears

Kou Murayama and his colleagues designed a study to answer exactly this question. They grouped participants into two groups and asked them to play a very simple game. Participants tried to stop a stopwatch at exactly five seconds. But an important difference set these groups apart.

The first group received money for each successful attempt. The other group played without a reward. They received money simply for participating, with no contingency attached. After the first session, participants moved to the second session. But this session was different: neither group received a reward.

Then came the crucial question: Would they still want to play? The first group, who had previously been paid, chose to play less than those who had never been rewarded.

Brain imaging also showed something striking. Initially, adding money increased neural responses associated with task success. But once the money disappeared, the same success produced much weaker activity in the reward group, particularly in the anterior striatum.

We have long known about this effect from behavioural research. Now we also have neural evidence: the reward can increase motivation initially, but when it disappears, motivation can fall with it.

The Escalating Reward Trap

Some people ask me: “Can we simply keep using rewards to motivate our children, so the behaviour does not stop?”

Not really. This is another part of the reward trap.

Psychologists call it hedonic adaptation: things that once felt exciting tend to become less exciting when they become familiar and predictable. After a while, the same reward may no longer feel special. To get the same response, parents can then feel pushed to offer something bigger. The result is an escalating cycle: the reward has to keep changing or growing to produce the motivation it created at the beginning.

This leads to our second question. When rewards get things done, is that really motivation?

Promise a child a tablet for tidying up their room, and you may see an immediate increase in effort. Yet this is not necessarily motivation. It may simply be compliance. What we really want is ownership, commitment, and engagement.

And that is very difficult to achieve with rewards, as I discuss extensively in my book, The Reward Trap: Why Rewards Backfire and the Real Science of Motivating Kids. What should parents do instead?

Replace control with curiosity

The next time your child refuses to do something, do not immediately reach for control. That is the first step. Before the bribe and before the threat, pause. Then do one thing differently. Replace control with curiosity.

Try to understand what is happening.

Instead of saying, “If you go to bed now, you can watch TV tomorrow,” try saying: “You really don’t want to go to bed tonight. What’s making it difficult?” A child who refuses to go to bed is not necessarily being difficult. Look more closely, and you may find very different reasons.

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Perhaps they are scared of the dark, anxious about the next day, or experiencing sibling rivalry, and bedtime feels like losing access to you. Or perhaps they have not had enough connection with you that evening and are trying to prolong it.

Each is a different problem requiring a different response. A reward does not solve this. A bribe may produce compliance, but it can also hide the real issue. When resistance appears, become curious, identify what is getting in the way, and offer the support the child actually needs.