Reddit mentions of Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes

Can you give an example of what you mean by misbehave, and what ages you are thinking of?

I think maybe sometimes I would use obviously ludicrous threats, like that I would tie them to the roof of the car, or put them on the roof of the house for the night. It was humorous, they knew it was empty, but it did communicate my annoyance or dissatisfaction with their behaviour.

We would rarely use real threats. Occasionally we would remove a child from a situation, for a while we would send them out of the room and ask them to come back in with a different attitude, or with an apology. If one of them hurt another we might leave the room along with the hurt child. But on the whole they are pretty well behaved.

There are a few books I've enjoyed reading:

Alfie Kohn's books: Punished by Rewards, and Unconditional Parenting.

Raising Happy Children

Playful Parenting

D.W. Winnicott's book: The Child, The Family, and the Outside World

I have his book Punished By Rewards. Excellent stuff.

Reward system? Ugh. This is 2014 for crying out loud. Bribing doesn't change underlying behavior. http://www.amazon.com/Punished-Rewards-Trouble-Incentive-Praise/dp/0618001816

Punished By Rewards. It's a good read; I promise.

Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes

I was fortunate enough to stumble across this book when my impossible to discipline child was only 2 - sticker charts and other incentives were already backfiring big time. Although written for school aged children, not toddlers, the principles completely changed my approach to parenting both of my kids.

https://www.amazon.com/Punished-Rewards-Trouble-Incentive-Praise/dp/0618001816

Buy it. Read it. If it doesn’t work for you no harm done, but it sounds to me like this is what you need.

Your focus on detention is arbitrary. It's like saying it's unfair that hostages don't have access to pizza. Maybe, but the whole state of being-a-hostage is unfair. Instead of obsessing about their lack of pepperoni and mushrooms, why not, instead, focus on the actual problem?

• We force children to go to school.
  
• We force children to study specific subjects at school.
  
• We force children to do homework after school.
  
• We stigmatize them if they fail at school.
  
• We use school grades as one metric of mental health.
  
• In most schools, we force children to be subject to archaic. pedagogical methods--once that have been proven to be ineffective.
  
• And, yes, we force children who have (in my view) naturally bucked against this system, to stay in school longer than kids who accept it.
  
• In most schools, children learn very little, especially given the amount of time the spend there.
  
• In many cases (e.g. when forced to read Shakespeare), they often develop a lifelong hatred of the subject.
  
• Many children spend years in school being bullied, mocked, and ostracized.
  
• Throughout this time, they're repeatedly told all this is "good for them," and, in the end, like serial abusers, they inflict in on their own kids, telling them it's good for them.
  
  All of this stuff has been studied for decades. We know that most schools are run horribly, according to unsound educational principals. But that never changes.
  
  When psychologists or neuroscientists discover something about learning or education, it takes years or decades to affect classroom practices, if it ever does.
  
  Schools aren't generally affected by Science. Instead, they are buffeted by politics and held fast by tradition.
  
  See
  
  
• Wounded By School
  
  
• Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes
  
  
• The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing
  
  
• video: The 3 Most Basic Needs of Children & Why Schools Fail
  
  
• Summerhill School: A New View of Childhood
  
  
• [A Mathematician's Lament (PDF)] (https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf); longer book version: A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form
  
  
• Ken Robinson's TED talk: Do Schools kill creativity?
  
  
• How Children Fail
  
  
• Unschooling
  
  
• Why do we get frustrated when learning something? (written by me)
  
  I am skeptical that I will CYV, even though I believe that this is the best argument against it--not your view that detention is wrong, but that it's not even worth talking about. Sure, detention is a bad thing--but not the worst thing--about a horrible, corrupt, abusive system.
  
  I'm skeptical, because the system is so deeply entrenched in our culture. And the most people can do is argue about small tweaks: whether we should use this textbook or that, the length of Summer break, the size of classrooms, etc.
  
  The debate about Creationism vs Evolution in schools is a good example. If the Evolution folks (or the Creationist folks) win, they will pat themselves on the back and walk away happy, never glancing back and noticing that the same shoddy educational methods are being used now as before--with just one correction.
  
  Yes, Dominoes is bad pizza. It won't suddenly become good pizza if you put it in a less-ugly box. I agree that the box is ugly, but why focus on it? It's not the core problem.

Marzano isn't a terrible place to start

I'm partial to the work of Alfie Kohn

Some kids don't respond to the carrot and stick approach. Some, like my younger son, are equally pissed off by carrots and sticks.

Two books changed the way I parented both of my children. The first one I think is the better of the two but the second is much more geared toward parenting.
Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes
http://www.amazon.com/Punished-Rewards-Trouble-Incentive-Praise/dp/0618001816/ref=pd_sim_b_5
Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason
http://www.amazon.com/Unconditional-Parenting-Moving-Rewards-Punishments/dp/0743487486

Just for people who maybe didn't take it and want to know. Also the Young Sensei thing might be from Todd Shimoda's The Fourth Treasure

e: Dolphin training is on page three here

e2: And dehumanizing woofs are from this book

>You are all crummy boyfriends. This is sweet and adorable.

I think the only reason this might not be true is that you should be able to ask for those things and have them freely given, and be able to give the gift freely as well, rather than having everything be quid pro quo.

As soon as you attach a specific reward to those actions instead of just asking as my SO, then I am essentially forced to weigh the tasks against the reward, rather than doing it out of caring for you.

Also, you are setting yourself up to only ever get the response you want when accompanied by a specific reward.

Read Punished by Rewards for more on this kind of thought...

You make an interesting point. Though I have heard of the research you allude to, and of a book that makes a similar argument (Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes), I must confess to being a bit skeptical.

If it's true that adding money to the equation makes developers lose motivation, how do you explain all the successful kickstarters out there, all the successfull donation-ware software, or all the successfull commercial software in the world?

Also, specifically on the subject of Magit, do you now expect Magit's lead developer to do less work on Magit now that he's fully funded? I know I personally expect great things now that he can focus completely on Magit without having to worry about money.

About your implication that Emacs developers are writing Emacs code for fun: I'm not sure if that's universally true. I think in most cases they're scratching an itch: they have some problem and they want to solve it, and incidentally also want to share the code with the world. They're not going to suddenly stop having problems they want to solve if they get money, and I don't think they're going to stop actually solving them or sharing the results if they get money either.

On the other hand, I do think there's some truth in what you say. I think the easiest way to turn a fun hobby in to drudgery is to be forced to do it day in and day out, whether you feel like it or not, with loss of control over direction or quality, with having to answer to all sorts of people that don't understand what you do and don't care about, and only care about using you as a tool to make themselves more money -- in short, by turning the hobby in to a stressful job. But as you can see, there are a lot more factors that go in to making a hobby in to a stressful job than merely adding money.

• The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses, Second Edition
  
  
• Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design
  
  
• Theory of Fun for Game Design
  
  
• Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
  
  
• Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise and Other Bribes
  
  Merry x-mas :)
  

A couple of books worth checking out, both by Alfie Kohn:

Punished by Rewards

Beyond Discipline

It depends on how old the students are. If they're young, simple redirection works well. If a child is too loud then I will get down to their level and speak in a softer voice and try to engage them. Whether it be in conversation or ask them what they need.

Older kids, I'm not as skilled but soft music can help. Instrumental, think Harry Potter or Star Wars music. The Marvel films are really big right now, they might respond well to hearing the familiar motifs. They're all on Spotify, maybe you could hook up a company laptop or your smart phone to some speakers. Not too loud though.

Language is really important. Kids don't respond well, or even know how to respond to negative directives. When a child hears "Don't yell" they can really only process the word yell. If someone wants a child to not run, they have to say "Walk" instead of "Don't run". "Don't run" keeps the word "run" in their head but without an alternative. A child might think "Can I skip/lay on the floor/hop/jump/etc." But if a child hears walk they are more likely to walk as they heard it in concrete terms. They may have trouble at first but it's all a part of the process.

I'm not a big fan of tangible rewards personally. If you're interested you can check out:

http://www.amazon.com/Punished-Rewards-Trouble-Incentive-Praise/dp/0618001816

I suppose the case could be made that the carrot and stick approach (extrinsic motivation) was more effective than intrinsic motivation. Of course, that has been thoroughly refuted. You could also make the case that people are too damn lazy to internalize morals, and that religion offers a short cut - if this is true, I imagine it would be more likely to do with the huge amount of effort already expended on religious teachings; and given how closely people follow biblical morals (read: not at all except for those they internalize already) I have serious doubts it's even true to that extent.

Punished by Rewards

Against paying your children to read:

• Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes | by Alfie Kohn
  
  
• Sudbury Valley School

This sounds like goal based vs. process based, except the goals are based on one day as opposed to long term.

I think about this a lot. In the book Punished by Rewards (https://www.amazon.com/Punished-Rewards-Trouble-Incentive-Praise/dp/0618001816), the author basically argues that if your motivation for doing X is to get Y, then you focus too much on Y and performance would drop doing X. I.e. if you are learning math in school, you'll focus on getting an A rather than actually focusing on the material you're learning.

If you do it time based, it's more like a process rather than focusing on the reward. Which, in a way is better, I think. Although, I think you have to be careful with this model because if you want to take out the trash and walk around in the living room for 2 hours in a circle with the trash bag, the trash still isn't taken out. Someone else could take the trash out in 1 minute if they had a good strategy of going directly outside.

Hell, maybe try making it interest curve based (http://designaday.tumblr.com/post/99397472912/interest-curve), where you read 1 chapter + the beginning of another chapter. At that point, you'll either read the whole additional chapter because you are curious or at least you'll be curious the next day to read the chapter.

rewards and punishment never worked on me either; they just made me feel trapped and resentful. I'm not sure why, but some part of my brain was really not okay with it. I had to actually want to improve myself before anything changed. and even then, too much external pressure to change could stop me from changing.

so, I didn't shower regularly until I started wanting to impress boys. actually.. a lot of things changed once I was interested in boys. :)

I'm not sure how you can get him honestly interested in self-improvement, though... it's such an individual thing...

oh, but there is a book on the subject! Punished by Rewards. maybe that will give you some ideas :)

You should read this: http://www.amazon.com/Punished-Rewards-Trouble-Incentive-Praise/dp/0618001816

Jesus Christ... praise is a form of positive reinforcement. A behaviour is reinforced “encouraged” by definition from the praise which is the reward or recognition of performing said behaviour.

https://www.amazon.ca/Punished-Rewards-Trouble-Incentive-Praise/dp/0618001816

Keep reading.

So much bad advice in this thread. PUNISHMENT AND REWARD DOES NOT WORK! This is not the 1950s! We know better now! Gold stars, reward calendars, all that crap - your child is not a dog! http://www.amazon.com/Punished-Rewards-Trouble-Incentive-Praise/dp/0618001816/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1420858818&sr=8-1&keywords=punished+by+rewards

Sorry to say, you are a "bad mom" in every classic sense of the word. You have so many parenting resources at your disposal and yet you've chosen to just yell and punish instead.