I’ve mentioned before that there is a place for a limited use of rewards in a GBD home.  I thought I’d share one way we’re doing this now.

I am opposed on so many levels to Yu Gi Oh cards.  I don’t think they are evil or anything, but they are a consumer driven game that is designed to keep you consuming and I don’t want to instill this in my children. At the same time, they play a certain amount of time each day with the neighborhood children and this is what the public school boys are playing.  So this is what my children want.  I could take a hardnosed stance and say no way, but I do want to encourage them to be socially relevant and have relationships with the neighborhood children.

We don’t have a lot of money to give them a full allowance at this point and, as I thought about it and was trying to work out a way to do it, I realized that they’d just spend their money on these cards which are not cheap.  So I found a way to make it work.  I buy the packages of cards and my children have the potential of earning two of them a day (except on Sabbath).  The two opportunities they have are:  1) positiive participation in homeschooling for the day with a good attitude and 2) cleaning their room.

There is no special thing they are working towards (after so many you get X). It’s a pure tit for tat.  You do the work you get the card. It’s like a paycheck.  There are no exceptions, no extra credit, and no getting the card without doing the work. And there is no punishment or additional loss for not doing the work.  It’s helping us establish the habit of good efforts in both areas on a daily basis.

At some point we’ll stop doing this. If I don’t have the money for it they’ll not get them for the days until we have them again–we’ve already btdt, but when we have them, it offers something fun and extra for them.  A little extra motivation.

And with ds1’s special needs I do sometimes have to be more black and white and immediate for him than other children.  The inherent rewards and benefits are not always motivators because he doesn’t *get* it if it’s not in front of him.  “Fun” is a greater motivator because the payoff is now. So having something that he wants fashioned to something that he may be ambivalent about can sidestep the ODD issues and garner cooperation even if it’s a little extra effort.

Another thing we’ve brought back after dropping it for awhile is recognition that results in a drawing. If we catch a child doing something especially cooperative–behaving really well when we know they’ve been exposed to an allergen, cooperating with each other even during a difficult time, being very helpful with the bubbies, etc., they get a little ticket that acknowledges what they were doing and the end of it rips off and gets their name on it for a drawing.  I got them from the Teaching Stuff store.  Once a week we are doing a drawing for something like a date with mom or dad, the privelage of choosing the next video rental, or something else.  Everyone gets a chance to win before they get to be drawn again and only one drawn a week so it’s just a special thing that can happen, but it’s not enough to be the motivator for behavior.  It’s like a blessing for children already doing what they are expected to do.