The Motivation Express

In the business world, motivation has been a hot topic of late, and companies are spending a lot of time and money on figuring out how to motivate their employees to work better and smarter, and how to motivate their clients or customers to spend more and support the business more.

All this motivation talk has filtered down to families, with parents now concerned with how to motivate their children to do well in school, to do chores around the house, to practice an instrument or sport, etc. Many times, moms and dads think that motivation has to do with rewards--the proverbial dangling carrot--and so offer a lot of quid pro quo scenarios, as in:

If you clean your room, we'll go get ice cream.

If you get an A on your science test, I'll give you $20.

Image courtesy of Tom Curtis/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

But what that type of motivating will quickly stall because of the Saturation Principle, which basically says each child reaches a certain point with a reward system in which the reward is no longer enough to motivate the child to a particular behavior. In other words, $20 for an A on a science test might work for the first one or two tests, but then the child will need a bigger incentive to do the same thing $20 previously "bought." Or a clean room would soon need a triple fudge sundae as reward when a plain vanilla cone used to be enough.

What the rewards-based motivation parent fails to realize is that a child needs to learn to do something for that something's own sake, not for the carrot dangled in front of him. The old maxim A job well done is its own reward has a lot of truth in it, one that should be taught to children and should be lived out in our lives as adults.

The fact is, there are many jobs and tasks that we have to do because they need doing--housecleaning, cooking, shopping for groceries, etc.--most of those are pretty non-glamorous and rather boring for many of us. If we teach our children that any work must be rewarded as a way to motivate them to complete the task, then how will they learn to find the inner will to do things as adults when there is no longer an enticing carrot being offered for cleaning their room?

As I tell my kids, do the job, task, homework sheet, test, etc., to the best of your ability with a cheerful heart. Sure, sometimes there will be a special treat after a particular thing has been accomplished. We did celebrate with ice cream when the end-of-the-year testing was completed at school, for example. But most of the time, we expect our children to do well without an outside reward, and sometimes, they surprise us with how well they do the task at hand (sometimes, we're not surprised when the job has to be redone because of haste!).

Use rewards as motivation sparingly, and you'll be helping your children to find their own inner motivation.

Until next time,
Sarah