The Poisoned Carrot?

The school term has ended and the grades are in. So I'm guessing some children will be waking up to whatever they want come Christmas morning, while others will be pouting and using their vacation time to go through the test papers to determine where they went wrong.

At face value, promising a reward for good grades appears to be a win-win situation your child keeps up academically and gets rewarded for it. But is it, in fact, a good or a bad thing? Is it actually setting the stage for our children to develop poor attitudes towards academics, or do these rewards really motivate children to put that extra effort into their work?

Numerous studies have been done regarding the pros and cons of rewarding or not rewarding, and based on my research so far and knowing my child as well as I do, I've found myself leaning towards the "not rewarding" side. Why? Because I've tried both and seen the effects either way, and what I've found is that the expectation of a reward places an extra burden on my son to perform, which no doubt adds to his stress level, and by extension, mine.

There was a time, not so long ago, when I would say to him, "If you get an A+ this term you will get that ___ you've been asking for." He'd get super stressed during the preparation time, still miss the A+ by half of a mark and come home in tears. But that's just my child, maybe another parent would have luck with the rewarding method.

A few months ago I read an article in the Washington Post in which Jim Taylor, a psychologist who specialises in sports and parenting, referred to promising children rewards for good grades “outcome love”. "Outcome love impedes children’s happiness as well as their success in life because despite what parents may say to children about unconditional love, they hear parents most acutely through their actions. If parents send frequent messages of love, happiness, and excitement when their children are successful and frequent messages of withdrawal of love or anger, frustration, and disappointment when their children fail to live up to their parents’ expectations, the kids will make that connection,” Taylor said.

He said messages sent through outcome love shape your children's short-term happiness, as well as have a long-term "deleterious effect on mental health", that endures into adolescence and beyond.

“Sadly, these messages fuel mental health problems including perfectionism, fear of failure, low self-esteem, depression, and anxiety, not to mention the reactions of resentment, anger, and rejection from the children toward the parents. Even more painfully, this attitude of outcome love becomes internalised and children grow up to be adults who berate themselves for failure and only give self-love when they succeed,” Taylor outlined.

As a parent I am only human, so it is natural for me to feel proud when my son does well at school, tennis or music, and disappointed when he does not do as well as I think he has to potential to do. And nothing is wrong with that. But to be honest, I often see it as a reflection of my parenting skills. I'm working on that, though, because I am well aware that in claiming his good and bad grades or his medals as my own means I'm cheating him of his high and low experiences and sending him the wrong message about my "unconditional" love.

"Fortunately, there is a simple way to avoid outcome love. When parents focus on the process of learning over the relatively arbitrary end product of points, grades and scores, we communicate in terms louder than words that we love our children unequivocally and without reservation," Taylor said.

On Thursday when he came home from school, he was disappointed in his grade because he knew he could have done better, but he was not in tears because there was no promise of a reward. This time, unlike just a couple of terms ago, there was no visible sign of disappointment on my face. We looked through the report book, identified the subject areas on which he needs to pay more attention, discussed how we are going to do that in the new year, and I sent him on his way to play with his little friend next door.

"If we want our children to truly believe us when we say our love is constant and unconditional, that we value learning more than a number printed in red at the top of a test, we are going to have to put our money and our unconditional love where our mouths are," Taylor advised.