When it comes to your children choosing the path that you want them to walk, it comes down to two things. Number one, understanding what the brain goes through when making decisions so you can devise a smart plan of attack...and secondly, knowing that if you successfully create a habit that they feel good about, then you can have the reward of knowing they will want to choose that choice from now on without you having to ask. Well that's the dream anyway.
There's a reason your child wants to play video games and eat junk food. It's just how our minds work. Our brains have the power to convince us to act. It's connections and ability to release chemicals into our systems can make some decisions feel less desirable, more effort or sometimes even impossible. A lot of it originates from our early caveman days when the limbic system helped us preserve energy and fight enemies but without these threats, it can cause a lot of inconvenience in our daily lives. Our brains can discourage us from eating better, exercising, or meeting many of our well-intended goals that require grit or discipline.
This system CAN be overridden by being more mindful, repeating habits we want to build and by sheer will but it's not easy. Children especially have even less coping mechanisms to fight these primal urges to do the immediately gratifying and easier thing. The nice thing is that once you understand a little bit about what exactly is driving intent, you can devise plans to hack your brain long enough to build a positive habit.
Stanford health psychologist Kelly McGonigal, PhD says:
"You can think of the brain as having two different modes. One mode focuses on immediate, short term survival, immediate gratification and avoiding pain and discomfort. The other mode takes the long-view including remembering your biggest goals and values, thinking about future consequences and going after long-term rewards. I call these modes the “impulsive self” and the “expansive self.” It’s the impulsive self that tends to get us in to trouble, either by doing things we later regret or by preventing us from taking action that is difficult but important.
Which mode you’re in is based on the relative activation of different systems of the brain. The impulsive self is based more in the mid-brain, which includes the stress, cravings and habit systems of the brain. The expansive self is located more in the frontal cortex and includes the areas that control attention, motivate positive action, think about the future and regulate what’s going on in the mid-brain. We switch back and forth between these two modes and which systems of the brain are most responsive to the challenges we meet. The relative dominance of these two systems shapes our choices. To give one example, Caltech researchers have shown (.pdf) that you can predict the foods dieters will choose by how reactive the prefrontal cortex is in the face of temptation."
Let's take a quick look of some safe assumptions that we can probably agree upon:
Most choices that we urge our children to make fall into the bullets that are designated as tough tasks. How do we make the more difficult choices desirable enough to enter into "easy habitual phase"? The magic word is incentives! We have to first get them to try it once, then twice, and a few more times and make it fun, easy and pleasurable. In order to get a child to try it your way initially, we might want to lessen the friction by making the differences of pleasure or pain less between choice a and b. The way we do this is to bundle feel-good incentives around the more difficult option to make the choice easier to make until a habit can be formed.
The trick is to make a person choose the better but less pleasurable option enough times until it becomes habitual. Make that option feel good enough that they will continue this habit motivated by their own desire to continue.
There are numerous incentives that you could use. The only thing limiting you is your imagination. We've listed a few of them here. Let's take a real life situation in order to show you an example:
The situation: You want your child to do their homework, but they find it to be boring and tedious. They don't want to do it.
The goal: You want your child to want to do homework, and to care about their future.
The incentives:
Pretty soon, they'll be in the habit of putting effort into their work because it just feels good. Repeat this structure for each goal you encounter as you get your children to view the better choices as easy. By the time the task feels simple, hopefully they will believe and trust that you want what's best for them and return that with respect and actions that show that they also want to make themselves better. We hope this sheds some light on what is happening so that you can be more effective in your journeys into turning young children into adults. As always, Happy Parenting!
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As a parent, I want my child to value school and be self-motivated when it comes to trying his best. I try to connect school with the opportunity to earn the things that he wants but what happens in the summer when he no longer has this source of income? How can we use it as an opportunity to strengthen the message that school is important to his life and is something he should care about? In general, giving him the opportunity to work for the things that he wants lets him experiences earned rewards, something that he sees adults do as well. During the school year, he earns an allowance for each day he attends school, and bonus bounties for the work that we go over on Saturdays. He knows that assignments that are done well will earn him more bonuses than sloppy ones. Things got especially interesting when he suddenly got into collecting wrestlers and was hell bent on buying every single one. Let’s just say every homework was coming back pretty neat. Summer is a great opportunity to make school seem like something he is now missing out on. When we start out allowance, I point to the empty piles and say, “Man, see how much money you’re missing out on now that you don’t have school or sports?” I can see the look of stress on his face when I say this. Then I usually follow with, “Well that’s okay. We’ll look for plenty of bonuses whether it be you cleaning the house, or helping dad. We’ll figure it out. And…OH, I forgot to tell you. Your teacher gave us all of your notebooks from the school year. We never checked those! So when you need some extra cash, we can review how you did last year and get you some bonuses. How does that sound?” He got really excited. The point of doing this is to create an understanding that even work that wasn’t reviewed can be used towards the things that he wants. When he starts school next year, hopefully he will consider this when he is sitting in class. Knowing that we really pay attention and look at everything also lets him know that we care, which makes it much easier for him to care. I hope that this gives you some ideas of your own. As always, happy parenting!
In the beginning of the school year, we were receiving concerned notes about Ryan not paying attention and seeing below average scores. We worked hard and saw amazing results. What we have been doing: We focus our comments on speed, accuracy and neatness. How we have been doing it: Dad does an awesome job of making sure that homework is the first thing that happens after school. Then at allowance time (every Saturday morning), we go through all homework assignments. Any examples of neat accurate assignments increase the frequency of bonus dollar rewards. We use a rubber stamper to create this physical moment of pride while he gets to stamp his assignment and hear what I liked about it. He loves explaining to me what it was about and how he solved the problems. He loves it when I notice his efforts and I've seen it really motivate him to try harder.
Most reward systems or piggy banks rely on real money to incentivize actions. Since money has a set monetary value within the ecosystem in which you exchange it for goods, you don't have any control over what it's worth. Even at a quarter, it can add up quickly. This means that somewhere down the line, you are limited as to what you can award and how frequent that might be.
Now that school has started, getting the children to wake themselves up is on my list of top priorities because the sooner they can master this, the more relaxing my mornings will be...and let's face it, we need all the help we can get in September. Now that we have an established currency where they know that certain currencies can be exchanged for tangible rewards, I can use bonus bounty as an incentive.
I think it's important to take a long view of the things that we do every day and how they can help or exacerbate a problem down the road. When it comes to digital devices, my goal isn't to teach them to avoid using them but rather to enjoy them with balance. I want the act of putting the device down and out of reach something they are comfortable doing. The way that I can help this is by giving them more things to consider when in that immediate mindset. I want them to think about the situation that they are in and appreciate that there are times when experiencing something else is also valuable, such as face to face time with someone you care about, or physical activity. As long as these points are met I would be satisfied and feel successful.
Human beings and especially children are strongly stimulated emotionally by visuals. This is why the media has such a powerful impact on the way that we think and the things that we do. Your children are constantly surrounded by ads, movies, television and video games. Most of this is geared towards simple pleasures and consumerism. When your children are at one of their most active cognitive development stages, the period before age six, it's even more imperative that we take a proactive stance to balance out this with positive influences.
There are a lot of studies out there that seem to suggest that a large part of your adult personality is set by age six as the nature of brain growth changes afterwards. Looking at how the millennial generation has been defined, it seems like that theory could be credible.
Praise, in my opinion, is the most powerful motivator that you have in your arsenal. I place positive language way above the incentives of earning KidCash or anything else. Calling attention to all of the wonderful things they do will not only make them feel good about shifting their behavior but encourage them knowing that their parents love and believe in them. KidCash was built as an easy way for you to systematically highlight the small accomplishments they make daily. Combine verbal praise with the ability to earn rewards. The rewards themselves translate to the child's ability to control what they can do and have in their lives and so it serves as another form of lending trust to the child and encouraging independence. Whenever I notice something positive that the children have done, I write it down. I will repeat it at the end of the day as well as when we give out allowance. I will mention these things randomly as well. How do I know it's important to my child? I hear him repeating these messages back to me with why he's making a productive decision. Not only is it motivating him, but it's building up our relationship as he sees me as a person who watches and cares. We encourage positivity as a way to use our product for many reasons other than making your job easy. We hope to give you the best shot of getting their attention, getting through to them and building a close relationship built on communication, trust and love. We hope this helps gives you more ideas in your daily journeys taking care of these little ones. As always, happy parenting!
When it comes to eating, I want my child will be able to mitigate his own healthy balance. Sure, junk food is bad but treats are surely fine if one understands not to overdo it, to balance excess with exercise and to make sure that you eat the nutritious food as well. I want my children to understand the connections that can help mitigate a healthy lifestyle. Knowing that this was my goal, I devised a long term plan using cereal and candy dollars that started two years ago. Today, we reached a huge success milestone! My children used to pick out the cocoa puffs or the sugar frosted mini-wheats. So would I, they're delicious. As children, they have no other motivation to do any differently than the pleasure that sugar gives to their brain. My plan was to educate them over time, and slowly wait for them to make the decisions on their own. I wanted their motivation to be awareness and caring about their own health. I wanted them to trust my advice because they trusted me and knew that I loved them and wanted what is best for them. The Cereal Plan At first I would make the choice between cocoa puffs and cheerios drizzled in chocolate. I would explain that the cheerios have more nutrition in them and less sugar than the cocoa puffs, even with the chocolate syrup. Any time my child would choose the cheerios, at the review he would earn a bonus candy dollar. Whenever he would spend the candy dollars, I would repeat the message that candy should be budgeted, but it's fine to have dessert or a treat after a nutritious meal. Once he started to regularly choose the cheerios, I switched up the cereal to a highly nutritious granola and raisin brand cereal and made that the one that would earn him the bonus dollars. I referred to it as the "good" cereal or "better choice". He's been choosing this cereal for a month now and choosing to keep the raisins in. This morning, he told me he didn't want the chocolate syrup. As long as I've been patiently pushing this program, that's the words that I wanted to hear. I wanted him to want to make the decision for himself, not because I had asked him to. I haven't even been rewarding bonus dollars anymore for the better cereal. He's been telling me that he wants to eat better, he wants to feel good. I think that the main point of KidCash is to get their attention and motivate them to practice your lessons. Once you have their attention, you can repeat your positive messages until they understand and want to make decisions that better themselves. We hope this helps you in your endeavors. Happy Parenting!
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