What makes the perfect reward chart?
I need your advice. I’m helping the online pocket money website Roosterbank create a reward chart. They want to come up with something that will be both useful for parents and fun for kids, and FREE for everyone, regardless of whether or not they use the Roosterbank site. (They’re nice like that). I have to confess though that I don’t have a great track record when it comes to reward charts. I’ve tried reward charts a few times with Belle, but just haven’t been able to get it right. Our last attempt a few months ago included around eight simple tasks to do every day, really easy things like ‘clean teeth’ and ‘go to bed without having a breakdown’, yet it was abandoned, (like the toothbrush), after only 10 days. The difficulty was deciding how exactly the thing should work. Should she have to get every single item ticked every day to claim her pocket money at the end of the week, or was there scope for error? We tried the first approach initially, but it did not go well. One bedtime tantrum on the first night, and that was it for the week – where was her incentive then to eat all her lunch on the other six days? In the second week we discovered just how short-termist (and cunning) Belle can be. “OK,” we’d say, “time to clean your teeth!” “I don’t want to,” she would say. “But if you don’t clean them, you can’t get the tick on your chart.” “That’s alright,” she’d say, “I don’t want the money. I’m seeing Gran at the weekend and she’ll buy me my Jacqueline Wilson magazine.” What can you say to that? The reward chart had been about handing over responsibility and control, and she’d grasped it firmly. With both…
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