A Harvard economist named Roland Fryer Jr. Researched the effects of bribing kids. He ran a randomized experiment in hundreds of classrooms in multiple cities. He used mostly private money to pay 18,000 kids a total of $6.3 million and brought in a team of researchers to help him analyze the effects. The results represent the largest study of financial incentives in the largest study of financial incentives in the classroom. The experiment was taken in Chicago, Dallas, Washington, and New York. Some kids were paid for good test scores, others for not fighting. In 3 out of 4 of the cities Roland had no effect, but in the last city Kids who got paid performed significantly better on their standardized read tests at the end of the year. It was as if those kids had spent three extra months in school compared to the other kids that did not get paid.
It is a dirty trick to bribe your child, but can also help them learn. When a teacher is at school and offers the kid who does the best a piece of candy it is pretty much the same thing. The bribe is just giving the child incentive to do their best.
Giving your child an allowance for helping around the house is not the same as bribing them, but if you are just giving them money in an attempt to get them to behave, then you are doing it wrong. Help them to grow in maturity and responsibility so they can be good members of society.
If you teach your child now that when they don't want to do something they get a bribe then they will have that mindset when they approach problems and obstacles that they don't have to do. The fact that we are resorting to bribery is a sad reflection on our culture.
Parents should provide positive re-enforcement as a reward for completing tasks or reaching a goal. Parents should never, however, bribe children in order to convince children to do something they do not want to do. Providing positive re-enforcement for negative behavior prevents children from learning about the consequences of negative behavior and sends a mixed message.
It is messing with their brain. A child does not need to have a fake wonderland because they won't get the reality side. Even though they do their chore, they will always expect rewards. Punishment will do the bribing job without greediness following it. Soon, they will own you. When they grow up, they will not live effectively because they won't know how to do something without a prize. In reality there is more punishment than reward, so the kids can't get used to the opposite.
The parents are teaching their kids to only work when there's a reward. Think if you kept giving your child video games and consoles every time they didn't want to go to school, get out of bed, clean their room, etc. It doesn't always work, and it eventually wears you out.
No, I can't agree that bribing children is a good parenting idea. I can only see bribing as a slippery slope to a place a parent does not want to go. I don't think bribing really teaches a child very much. It might provide some incentive, but that incentive won't always exist outside the home. Just teach them to work hard and live life.
Bribery is a quick fix to problems that parents look for, but it does not help the child gain long term success. Children who work hard so we will reward them will only ever do enough to get the rewards and when the reward is no longer offered they will cease to try hard. Instead, we need to teach our children to be internally motivated.
Kids need to learn that they have certain responsibilities in being a member of a family and of society and you are not paid or rewarded for doing this, but it is an expectation.