December 2009

So, a couple of weeks ago I decided that it was time that Sammy learn to dress herself.  She’s shown that she is capable.  She puts on pants when it (unintended pun alert!) suits her, she can put on her coat using (cute video alert!) the “flippy-dippy” method, and her fine motor coordination is above average.  She is also working on buttons and snaps at school, and she sees the older kids putting on shoes and such, so I thought her interest level would be high.

I was wrong.

When I told her I was going to teach her how to dress herself, she seemed excited, until she was asked to perform any part of the task.  She simply refused to try any of the simple tasks I showed her.  I isolated the skills.  For example, all I asked her to do first with her pants was to learn to put them on the floor with the tag at the bottom and the big hole facing her.  NO, MOMMY!  I CAN’T DO IT.  YOU DO IT MOMMY!  HELP ME!  So I tried putting the pants on the floor for her, thinking this part might be more difficult than I realized.  I put the pants on the floor and showed her how to make “tunnels” by lifting up the top part.  She loves tunnels, and was thrilled to see tunnels in her pants.  She was even eager to stick her foot in the tunnel.  But the minute she felt resistance from the material, NO, MOMMY!  I CAN’T DO IT.  YOU DO IT, MOMMY!  HELP ME!  Now, I knew she could do this because she’s done it before, but for days she could not or would not stick her legs in those pants.

I tried other things:  games, songs, reverse-psychology, etc.  Nothing made a bit of difference in her attitude.  As long as I was helping, she would try a little bit, but not enough so that she was really learning anything.  We were making no progress.

I could have decided to wait and try again later.  But this resistance she has to putting forth effort really bothers me.  She seems to be the type of child who won’t try anything unless she can do it well immediately.  She didn’t walk until she was 17 months old, but then she got up and walked like a 2-year-old.  There are countless other examples of this kind of thing.  And I don’t see a lot of persistence in her in general.  She is also cautious.  These things are not horrible character traits – I’m pretty sure she gets them from me and I’m pretty spectacular so I’m not worried about her in any overall way.  But I do think that she can use some extra pushing on learning how to put forth effort, and she needs reinforcement to know that it’s ok to do things wrong.  (See the comments on my Reward Systems post from last week for further discussion of this.)

So I decided to persist, and having just dispensed with the Cooperation Chart, I decided to turn it into a Reward Chart.  I give her a smiley face on the whiteboard for each dressing task she accomplishes:  putting on pants, taking off shirt, etc.  When she gets 8 smilies, she can choose a piece of candy, a trip to the ice cream store, or dinner at a restaurant.

This is the type of arbitrary reward system that Rational Jenn first addressed and I responded to.  And it worked, which is no surprise.  (Jenn and I agree that these things work in the short-term, but Jenn’s objections are about the lessons you teach by offering disconnected rewards.)  Sammy started putting forth effort and learning the new skills.  As soon as she “masters” any particular skill, I wipe it off the board and tell her that she doesn’t need the treat anymore, since she can do it now.  (My explanation is much more elaborate, but that’s the essence.)  She has had no problem with me eliminating the treats, but of course, there are still things on the board.  We’ll see what happens when we’re done and there are no more rewards.  But when we eliminated the Cooperation Chart, she didn’t squawk, so I’m hopeful.

Another thing I notice is that she does seem to take joy in the actual dressing, once she gets it.  She tells strangers at the store that she puts on her own pants now.  She practiced taking off and putting on her shirt on her own yesterday, just to try it.  I’m considering eliminating the rewards even before she masters everything, because I think she might have finally gotten the idea that, if she keeps trying, the accomplishments will come.  But I don’t want to ruin this lesson by stopping too soon.  The lesson of effort is more important to me than the dressing.

Now, I wish I had thought of this in the beginning, but there was a better way to go about this.  I wanted some extra kind of motivation to kick-start her effort, but it didn’t have to be so completely disconnected from the actual rewards of independent dressing.  A few days ago, I realized that a perfect “reward” would have been to allow Sammy to pick her own clothing once she could put it on herself.   The problem with that is that I already let her pick her clothing somewhat.  I’ll either let her choose from 2 outfits, or pick the pants, or whatever she’s in the mood for that day.  Many days she just asks me to pick for her.  She also chooses her shoes and socks, so this wouldn’t be a new privilege.  So, it wouldn’t have been a clear thing – that she was earning this privilege by stepping up her responsibility.  Still, it probably would have been better than the totally arbitrary reward. 

So I’m sticking with the Reward Chart for now because it would be confusing to change, but I don’t feel like there is all that much difference in the two approaches.  Ideally, you wouldn’t use either, but simply show the child how to dress and count on his natural desire for independence to guide him towards putting forth the effort.  This is the way even Sammy learns most things.  And sometimes she’s early and sometimes she is late with certain skills, and I’m fine with that.  I do think that most of these things should be done at the child’s pace and when the child is ready and naturally interested.  But I don’t believe in 100% child-led learning.  This getting dressed issue was something of an experiment for me and for her, and I think we both learned a lot.  I won’t jump as quickly to a reward next time, but try only to use them in the cases I explained in my earlier post.  And, I think, I hope, that Sammy learned something about effort.

P.S.  Since I wrote the draft of this post, there has been further discussion in the comments on the earlier one.  I haven’t changed my mind, but I do have some additional thoughts on the whole matter, so you might want to go back and re-read that if you’re interested in the subject.

Rational Jenn has written yet another great post on parenting:  Discipline without Rewards.  My thoughts are similar to hers, but differ enough that I wanted to write a response here.

You should really read the whole thing yourself, but here are a few paragraphs that (I hope) essentialize Jenn’s position:

Alfie Kohn, in his book Punished By Rewards , defines rewarding as a parent saying to a child “Do X and then you’ll get Y.” If you can put the interaction into If-Then terms, then it might be a reward. That is what we do not do around here with our kids–promise them something in order to get them to behave in a certain way…

My primary objection to using rewards is that the process involves a kind of mental bait-and-switch tactic. It takes (some or all of) the child’s attention away from what needs to be done and why and places (some or all of) his attention onto the reward.  In encouraging the child to switch his focus away from the rational reasons he ought to engage in a certain behavior, he is losing a valuable opportunity to learn some deeper ethical lessons…

If-Then Rewarding, while certainly effective in getting a child to act in a particular way, doesn’t reinforce the more abstract ideas of independence and responsibility and other great things I think my kids need to practice and understand thoroughly before heading out into the world.

I agree with all of this in essence, but I have some important disagreements.  I don’t think that “reinforcing the more abstract ideas of independence and responsibility” is always accomplished by means of having a concrete connection between cause and effect in every instance.  I guess I’d summarize my position as: “Use extrinsic motivators temporarily, for long-range skills and habits, and never as a default.”

First, I think rewards are appropriate to encourage effort at gaining new skills, especially skills that are much more easily acquired when young like swimming or riding a bike.  Kids can not and do not think long-range at birth, and they don’t know that their effort will pay off in the end.  They need to learn this.  Getting them to put forth effort for a totally arbitrary short-range reward is a great way to get them started, if they are not so inclined.  I’m not willing to let my daughter suffer the natural consequences of not learning to swim or ride a bike without trying rewards to get her started.

I think that it is a parent’s job to teach a child how important it is to put effort into long-range activities and skills, where the natural consequence will not be achieved quickly.  How can children learn this except by being “tricked” into doing it a few times?  You can push your children with negative, arbitrary punishments (“practice piano for an hour a day or you’ll be grounded”) or with positive, arbitrary rewards (“practice piano consistently for a month and we’ll take you out to the restaurant of your choice”).  I think the positive way is much better.  But if you leave it to them entirely, I don’t see how children could be expected to foresee the wonderful effects of such persistence before they have any experience.  I don’t think it takes much of this kind of rewarding, but I do think it takes some.  In the piano example, I would imagine a month might even be too long.  Once the child learns one song, they have a data-point to understand that continuing to practice will bring more and more value.  My point is that it is ok, and even necessary, for children to do things for which they have no independent, intrinsic motivation.  In other words, in some cases:

The child will only learn the rewards of virtue after practicing that virtue, in action, and seeing the positive results firsthand.

Even then, I think the more connected the reward is to the behavior, the better.  I call these logical consequences.  I got this from Susan Crawford, who makes a great distinctionbetween natural and logical consequences, saying that a natural consequence happens if the parent just stays out of the way, whereas a logic consequence is imposed by the parent, but connected to the original action in a logical way. (The natural consequence of learning to swim is simply gaining the skill.  A positive, logical consequence would be throwing a pool party for the child at the end of summer.)  Outside of the positive and negative versions of these consequences are the arbitrary, negative “punishments” and the arbitrary, positive “rewards.”  But I don’t see a clear dividing line between positive, logical consequences and many rewards.  The pool party could be viewed as a reward.  There is a continuum, although once you get to star-charts it’s arbitrary, and I’m fine with that too if there is nothing else you can think of.  I have a great example of this that I’ll save for my next post about how we’re motivating Sammy to dress herself.

Second, I think rewards are great as a stop-gap.  We used the Cooperation Chart for that reason.  We used it for 10 days and it worked and we went back to our usual natural and logical consequences.

And third, I think as long as the norm is to focus on natural and logical consequences, it’s fine to use rewards on occasion simply to make the parents’ lives easier.  If you have some isolated behavior that you want to encourage or stop, and you have a lot going on and it just needs to get done to save your sanity, a reward is fine.  It just has to be a rare exception and not the rule.  I don’t think a few instances of using rewards will harm the child. 

Despite this disagreement with Jenn, I agree with her basic point.  I am horrified with the way that parents often default into reward systems for everything - money for grades, ice cream for politeness (when the child is old enough to be polite for the right, selfish reasons), TV for chores, etc.  This kind of parenting is a recipe for secondhandedness, for sure, and this is a more fundamental issue than the exceptions I note here.  But I don’t think this damns rewards entirely.  I think they just need to be used for the right reasons.