Ep #53: Why Your Reward Chart Sucks (And How to Fix It)

Have you tried using a rewards chart or reward system to create a new habit in your kids and it didn’t go well? Stay tuned to find out what went wrong and how you can fix it.

Welcome to Parenthood Prep, the only show that helps sleep-deprived parents and overwhelmed parents-to-be successfully navigate those all-important early years with their baby, toddler, and child. If you are ready to provide the best care for your newborn, manage those toddler tantrums, and grow with your child, you’re in the right place. Now here’s your host, baby and parenting expert, Devon Clement. 

Hello and welcome back to Parenthood Prep. It is an incredibly foggy day here in New York, and I am getting ready to leave for the airport, to spend about four weeks traveling in Asia, which I’m so excited about. I can’t wait to tell you guys all about it when I get back. If you are listening to this, I’m already there, and I hope you enjoy it. 

So today I want to talk about something that comes up a lot, especially with sleep training, but it really can come up in like any aspect of life with little kids, which is using a reward system to help everyone create new habits, break bad habits, get into new routines, etc. 

As I mentioned before, I spent this week sleep training a three and five year old, and when I’m with older kids, especially, the reward system, is such an important part of the learning process. And I think there’s some backlash against using rewards like, oh, it’s like dog training or, you know, it’s too transactional, or whatever, but, or you’re bribing them. That’s my favorite. I don’t actually think that’s the case at all. 

I think in a lot of ways we need to treat our kids a little bit more like employees. And I know that sounds crazy. Would you go to your job if you weren’t getting paid? I mean, maybe, maybe you would, but most of us wouldn’t, no matter how much we love our jobs. So when kids are learning something new or having to do something that is less appealing to them than what they were doing before. For example, if you’re trying to get them to fall asleep in their bed without you laying with them, they don’t really want to do that. 

So we have to give them something that’s going to be motivating for them and incentivizing to them. And yes, obviously, in the grand scheme of things, we want rewards to be intrinsic. We want them to just do it because they’re kind, or they’re good people, or they want to be, you know, a good citizen of the world, but something like giving up cuddling with a parent in bed before falling asleep is going to be really hard to do. 

Another great example of when I love to use a motivator or reward system is like if they have a babysitter, and maybe they don’t want the babysitter to come, and they would rather you stay home, and they want to give you a hard time about leaving, and you feel super guilty, like you most likely are having the babysitter come so that you can do something that’s, you know, fun for you, or something that’s, you know, more adult, or even just so you can get stuff done without your kids, like hanging on the shopping cart at the grocery store, which is so annoying, right? 

Like, I remember my mom yelling at us constantly, like, do not hang on the grocery cart. And it just doesn’t sink in when you’re a kid, especially since I think they need more physical grounding than we realize. And then the first time I went shopping with, like, a friend’s kids, or kids I was babysitting for I just heard my mother’s voice coming out of my mouth, stop hanging on the shopping cart. 

Anyway. As I was saying, when you have a babysitter, you know you’re probably going out to dinner. You’re probably doing something fun, or at the very least doing something that’s like, nice to do without kids, and that’s good for you, and that’s a motivator for you. So we want them to do something that’s fun too, like, if you don’t normally order takeout or order pizza, like that, could be a thing they do on the night with the babysitter. If there’s, like, a toy you don’t love for them to play with because it’s too messy or too loud, like Play Doh, we’re gonna give them that to motivate them, and then they get, you know, the Play Doh play out of their system. And hopefully the babysitter cleans it up. 

So you don’t want to just be like, Well, no, you have to suck it up and deal with this, like different person that you’re not used to being with when you would rather be with me, because I said so, and you should be intrinsically motivated to do that. That’s just not how it works with kids. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to make it enjoyable for them. We’re going to make it motivating, and then next time, you know, they’ll be even more excited to have the babysitter come, and they’ll look forward to it. And over time, it’ll just become this really enjoyable routine. I mean, screen time watching a movie, that’s like, always a fun thing to do something like that. 

So anyway, when it comes to sleep training, which we’ll use as the example, but it really could be any behaviors. Using a reward system is a great way to do that. And a lot of people, I think, try it and do not succeed at it, and that is because of a variety of reasons, mainly that they’re doing it wrong. So I’m going to tell you how to do it right so that it’s very motivating for your kids. 

First of all, we want whatever the behavior or the habit is that we are trying to change. To be very specific, I worked with a family a few years ago. I was sleep training the baby, but they had two older kids, and they had this piece of paper taped to the wall that had like little stickers all over it, just kind of haphazardly all over the piece of paper.

And the dad was telling me, with the kids there that, like, this is their rewards chart. Whenever they’re good, they get a sticker, and when it’s all filled up, they’re gonna get ice cream. And I was like, Okay, first of all, what does that mean? Like, being good, like, that’s so vague. It’s so nonspecific, I’m guessing that the parents don’t even know specifically what it means. So how are the kids supposed to know? 

Also, there was no real, like, counting of the stickers. It was just sort of like, they were stuck all over the page. And there was a lot of them. There was like, already maybe, like, 100 stickers on the page. So I’m like, when exactly are they gonna get this reward for like, quote, unquote, being good? And then on top of that, over the course of the three nights I was with them, the kids had ice cream twice. So how is it a reward to get ice cream if they’re getting ice cream all the time anyway? 

So we want the thing that we’re looking for them to do to be very specific. So a lot of times with sleep training, it’s staying in your bed all night. It’s falling asleep on your own in the bed. It’s staying in your room until your clock tells you that it’s time to get up. And for kids, you know, that are young and can’t tell time, sometimes that’s a color changing light, like the hatch light, or one of the clocks you can program to change when it’s time for them to get up. You know, some different things might be brushing your teeth without complaint, or getting ready for school without being dramatic. I don’t know, like, what behaviors are gumming up the works, what’s giving you a hard time? 

And it should be really specific. So I gave the example just now of, like, getting ready for school without being dramatic. But we want to know what that means. Like, what does that mean? Maybe you set a timer and they have their, you know, clothes on and shoes on before the timer goes off. It should be something very, very specific. 

And then what you’re going to start with is you’re going to reward them right away. You’re not going to say to them, okay, if you fall asleep on your own every night for a month, you’ll get something at the end. The behavior that you’re looking for should be very specific, and the reward should also be very specific. So decide with them what it’s going to be. 

So for me, like when I’m doing sleep training, I will give them something in the morning after their first night of sleeping by themselves. And it could be throw the rules out the window, let them have candy for breakfast. It could be a special breakfast that they don’t normally get, you know, pancakes, waffles. It could be M&M’s in the morning, like, you know, not a ton, but like, kids are so thrilled to get a little sweet treat when they’re not supposed to have it, like, they go nuts. 

So, you know, you would just tell them, you know, here’s what we’re gonna do. And if you do this in the morning, you will get this reward. And, you know, it feels like, well, they’re not really doing anything at all, and they’re getting this huge reward, but we’re sort of setting up the example, creating this trust of, if you do this thing, you’re going to get rewarded for it, and if all they’re getting is a sticker on a chart, and they have to wait a week for the actual reward. I mean, that might work for like a six or seven year old, but it’s not going to work for a three year old, like they need something tangible in the moment. You know, if you don’t want to give them sweets, it can be screen time. It can be an activity, playing with a toy, again, Play Doh, maybe if it’s like too messy for you normally, or making slime, or just doing something that they don’t generally get to do that is very motivating to them. 

And honestly, this might be something that you don’t love, like you don’t want them to have candy for breakfast, but guess what? You do want them to sleep in their beds overnight alone. So you have to trade off on that a little bit. It’s a negotiation. 

So we’ve defined the behavior that we want to see, then you want to basically make it really easy for them to achieve. So for me, falling asleep in their bed alone is all they have to do. I don’t care if they get up out of bed a million times, or I should even say, falling asleep in their room alone is what they have to do. I don’t care if they get up a million times and I have to walk them back to bed. I don’t care if they have a fit and I have to go in and comfort them, but then eventually leave them in their wide awake in their beds, and they eventually fall asleep alone. I don’t care if they get out of bed, end up sleeping on the floor. I don’t care about any of those things. 

All I care about is that they fell asleep alone in their bed without a parent there. Did they do that? Great. Then they get their M&M’s in the morning. That’s it. Then the next night it goes a little better. Then the next night it goes a little better than that. We do that for a couple of nights in a row, say, three, maybe five, depending how it’s going. Then we stop giving them a reward every morning. We’re not going to give them an M&M every morning if they fall asleep in their own bed. 

Then we’re going to drag it out and make it like a week that they have to earn the behavior, or maybe like three nights, and then they get something better. So at that point, you would decide with them, if you haven’t already, what is the big thing we’re going to get at the end of the week when we do the behavior for the whole week? So we want it to be very specific, and we want the time frame to be very clear. 

So we want to reward them right away, so that they start to understand, if I do this thing, I get this reward. Meanwhile, we are in the background creating this new routine where they’re just getting used to this behavior of falling asleep alone in their own bed, because they’re being rewarded for it, and then the next thing you know, after a week, it’s the norm for everyone that the kids fall asleep in their own bed, they get their big treat, whether it’s a special activity or a toy or whatever. A word of caution about giving them a very specific new toy, you should probably buy it in advance, like when they pick it and put it away somewhere. My sister is turning 40 years older this year, and still to this day, talks about how she was promised a certain like musical book. She calls it the Mario piano book. I don’t even know what it is. 

She was promised this musical book that she’d seen in the store if she slept in her own bed and didn’t come into my parents’ room for however long a week, or whatever. It’s probably longer than that, honestly, knowing my parents, and then when my mom went to the store to get it, it was gone, and they like, never saw it again, and 37 years later, she still talks about it, so make sure it’s something that you can actually get your hands on. That’s just a funny story. 

So we’ve got our behavior that we want to do. Maybe it’s finish your dinner. Maybe it’s stay with a babysitter, because they’ve been having a hard time being left with other people, whatever it is. We want the reward to be swift and measurable, and we want them to get it quickly. We do not want it to be vague. We don’t want it to be, be good. What does that even mean? 

You can choose something like go a whole day without hitting your brother, you know, something like that. But we want it to be really, really specific. And again, we want that response to be really specific. And then we want to phase out that reward. We want to hit them hard with it in the beginning, and then we want to phase it out, and we want to stretch those rewards over a longer period. 

I mean, there’s a lot of different options you could do, you could do a week, then you could do a month, you could do a week. And then guess what? We’re all like doing great with falling asleep by ourselves and staying in our beds all night. Then we don’t need the rewards at all anymore. Maybe things are going to start to backslide. Maybe they get sick, maybe you go on vacation, and everybody’s sleeping in the room together, and then they start, like coming back into your room in the night. 

Just bring back the chart for a couple of nights. Just remind them about it, bring it back, and then the next thing you know, you’ll be back on track so quickly. So it’s really simple, but I think it can be difficult for people to understand who have not taken care of a million kids, or had a background in education, or, you know, any of those things, and that’s how you do it. That’s how you get your kids to do what you want, using a reward system. 

And again, yeah, like, I hate the idea that it’s like bribery. We’re bribing them. I mean, you’re not. You’re paying them to do a job that you want them to do that’s maybe a little bit unpleasant and is different than what they like to be doing. I mean, if you take them to the doctor to get a shot, the doctor probably gives them a lollipop like even ourselves. How often do you do something unpleasant and give yourself a little treat or buy yourself a little treat? We like it. It makes us feel good. So kids are the same way. Don’t worry about it. 

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Thanks for listening to this week’s episode of Parenthood Prep. If you want to learn more about the services Devon offers, as well as access her free monthly newborn care webinars, head on over to www.HappyFamilyAfter.com.