You might be thinking, “I can’t possibly keep up a reward system for my child for the rest of their life!” And you are right, that isn’t realistic. So how do we avoid this?
Pairing & Fading!
What is Pairing?
Pairing is when you align yourself with the things that your child likes the most. They can only receive these rewards through you. With time, you become a reinforcement.
We also need to take this a step further! What we mean is that we need to not only pair yourself with the things that your child likes the most, but we need to go a step further and pair your giving the reward with verbal praise.
Example: You set the expectation that your child needs to come home from school and place their backpack in its designated place and pull out their planner for you to look at without whining. If they are able to do this, they can earn a positive reward. When you give them that reward, it’s vital that you also verbally praise them for meeting expectations. Doing this allows you to later start fading out the physical reward.
Fading
The goal is not to be giving your children rewards for the same behaviors for the rest of their lives. Ideally, we would like for them to be able to receive rewards for things for a period of time, pair those rewards with verbal praise, and fade the rewards out or at least move away from a less dense reward system. Fading is the process of decreasing the amount of assistance needed for a task to be completed.
Backpack Example Continued: You set the expectation that your child needs to come home from school and place their backpack in its designated place and pull out their planner for you to look at without whining. If they are able to do this, they can earn a positive reward. When you give them that reward, it’s vital that you also verbally praise them for meeting expectations. Doing this allows you to later start fading out the physical reward. In this case, let’s say you are using a marble jar system. Originally, you were giving them a marble every time they correctly executed this behavior and you were verbally praising them. After you see them being able to do this behavior with at least 80% accuracy for at least 3 weeks, you can start fading out the marble. You would continue verbally praising every time, but you would start to give them a marble every other time they did this. Then you might fade to every 2-3 times, and then you might intermittently.
Self-Monitoring
In life it can be helpful to teach people to self-monitor and reward themselves for positive behavior. Adults have the ability to do this for themselves, while many children need support in developing this skill. A term that comes to mind when thinking about this, that stems from behavioral literature, is the Premack Principle.
The Premack Principle can be described as higher probability behaviors can be reinforcing to lower probability behaviors. A way in which adults naturally do this is by setting themselves up for success to complete a harder, or more time-consuming task, and then having an easier or preferred task come after.
For example, when a person will reward him or herself by watching a favorite show or eating a special treat after he or she finishes their work that day or completes an challenging task.
Children are often not taught how to monitor this themselves. It can be a positive life skill to teach older children and teens how to utilize this principle for themselves.
