AIBU to off DD financial reward for GCSE grades?

[BlackBean2023]

DD is going into y11 and last year I made a deal with her- every 9 gets £200, every 8 £100 and every 7 £50 (she's at a selective school- straight 7-9s not unusual). I've doubled the amount as a motivator for Spanish and chemistry where she's not trying and currently predicted a 5.

She told my SIL yesterday who said it's out of order but would tell me why she thought so. AIBU? I can afford it and DD is motivated by money. The grades are reasonable and obtainable for her.

SIL doesn't have teenagers so it's not a cousin comparison thing..

I wouldn't. I don't care if you do.

My kids don't all have the same capabilities. They range from academically gifted and expected to score in the top 1% to bright but with a learning disability that affects their test performance. I don't feel the grades necessarily reflect the amount of effort they put in, so it doesn't seem balanced or fair. I prefer to reward my kids for doing the best they can whether that be a 5 or 9.

The issue is that hard work doesn't always mean people get good exam results. And some people get good results without much work.

We did it for both of ours, sliding scale going into negative for a bad one. They are so used to instant gratification these days, so trying to persuade them that better results will result in more choices later, or short term pain for long term gain was wasted on them. Cash is king!

Whatever you promise your child is up to you, and yes it is a great motivator,. However whatever you promise if your child meets that then don't let them down, but stump up the promised reward.
Our GCSE reward for passing all was a watch. My parents promised me I could choose which watch I wanted because unlike my older siblings I was taking all mine a year early - a Timex with a red strap, they KNEW that was the one I wanted. It was £2 or so more expensive than the cheapest which came with a brown strap.....I'd even have paid the extra myself

I got all my GCSEs (grades today would be A or A*) a year early.
I got the cheap one with a brown strap. I can still feel the disappointment today (almost 50 years on), it's not as though I wear a watch now & the Timex broke and was binned many many years ago.

the problem is that hard work doesn't always yield results in life, particularly not financial ones

Not everybody will have the same experiences or opinions, but my thoughts are (from 1989, hence the amounts being less than mooted in PP):

a. 'Why would I give you pocket money? I don't care what the house looks like, I'm not paying for you to vacuum the stairs or clean the bathroom when I wouldn't do it myself.'

Vs

'I really appreciate you vacuuming, mopping the floors, cleaning the bathroom and kitchen and doing the washing up. Here's five pounds for doing all of that - if you cut the hedge each Sunday morning, I'll make it up to seven and a tenner if you run the strimmer around the back garden once you've cleaned the cuttings up. It wasn't getting done before, but it makes a big difference to the house.'

b. 'What's the point of taking all those exams? It's not like you're going to be a doctor. If you're lucky and find somebody who'll have you, you'll be married by 20. You can't work when you've got children - so make sure it's a rich man or you'll need to get yourself down the council and tell them you need a house'.

Vs

'I know everybody round you has got at least two kids by the time they're twenty, I was married at 17 after all, but you're smart and you don't have to do that if you don't want to. You could go to university and become a doctor, a teacher or a lawyer - or something else, maybe live overseas, own your own home and not be dependent upon anybody else. It'll give you the freedom to make choices throughout your life'.

Which leads us onto

c. 'Do what you want. I don't care what grades you get, you don't need exams to get a job in a shop or hairdresser's. Everybody else does it and it's good enough for them, why would you think you're anything special? I did fine working in a shop until I got married'.

Vs

'You could do really, really well if you put some actual effort in for 18 months. I value you and your potential and I want to give you an extra motivation - like if you were working, you'd get a payrise, a bonus or go up a point of the salary scale. How about twenty pounds for every B and thirty for As?' (or Cs and Bs as suitable for the kid's abilities).

One tells the kid that the effort and achievement is valued, one tells them that there's no point in bothering. I had the it's not worth the effort version throughout my childhood.

Also, I know kids who worked damned hard who had a bad day, were unlucky with the questions on the paper, misread what was asked of them....or actually had poor teaching so less to draw upon.

BUT I would also say to a degree its horses for courses - this might be something your daughter needs?

Mine would have been like - keep your money! but then in my house, from being tiny a star chart was about the most inflammatory thing you could have done.....

I would also add that the amount of money you are offering seems fair to me. The higher the amount the more dc will want it. Your instincts are right on this, op. Don't be swayed by the naysayers.

I got nothing for getting straight As back in my day. I was entirely self motivated. Maybe you will get them to get good results from this sort of set up for these exams, but I question the longer term benefits. You can see at work the young adults who have frankly been quite spoilt. I think this sort of reward system breeds a very unpleasant attitude in life.

Ffs the kids frontal lobe hasn’t bloody developed yet! Long term consequences haven’t set in, they are more likely to be motivated by having summer holiday money than their future 😂 what you’re doing is fine people are psychoanalysing your kid under the same rules as they would an adult and it just doesn’t work that way.

also for the person who said it felt like a double punishment when they didn’t do as well. I get that but when I had a similar thing I was happy with what I had earned rather than what I hadn’t if that makes sense? (Sorry about grammar have had very little sleep in a week 😂)

Except OP isn’t her DD’s boss. She’s her mum.

Penny dropped for anyone yet?

^ This. The amount of people on here comparing the situation to a job. 🙄 No wonder so many teens have fucked up mental health.

I can't imagine having to tell my DD that because she sadly only achieved 6s, no money. No matter how well they've done, getting GCSE results is bloody stressful and by paying them less than they could have got, you're reenforcing that they've failed in some way. I rewarded DD by giving her money to go to Nando's with friends after her really good results. Knowing how hard she'd worked I'd have given her the same if they hadn't been as good.

I think parents who do this are completely naive about how just how much about the GCSE process is outside the student's control.

I would do this. My experience of the world as an adult is that results/outcomes are rewarded. Nobody cares about the hard work, they just want the result. It’s just about finding the right reward for that person/child. Some kids value money and some don’t.
In my experience, learning this early means a faster journey up the ladder in career terms.
I appreciate that it’s dependent on the child and the capability of that child.

I will absolutely do this in a couple of years if I think that it will encourage my DC to revise and work harder. I work with children who are GCSE age and plenty of them just do not listen to the speeches imparted on them about the importance of GCSE's at certain grades to get into college, for their future etc. And so they don't put in the effort that they could put in and cry on results day and have to resit a couple of GCSE's alongside their college course or don't get on to the course that they wanted which potentially changes the direction of their future. I wouldn't expect every 15 or 16 year old to truly, meaningfully understand how important getting good GCSE results are. It's just a case of us getting on their backs and giving them speeches like we do about countless other things. I would expect many of the children that I work with, however, to be motivated by having a few hundred quid for the summer.

Even more inequitable to go on predicted results, particularly as a child with higher predicted grades may be harder working than the one with lower predicted grades.

There is a high level of naivety with some parents on here. For many reasons hard work is not always rewarded with good exam results. I appreciate that may be true of life in general but parents are meant to be on the side of their children not potentially kicking them when they are already down from not getting the results they worked hard for.

FFS these kids are 15/16!

c. 'Do what you want. I don't care what grades you get, you don't need exams to get a job in a shop or hairdresser's. Everybody else does it and it's good enough for them, why would you think you're anything special? I did fine working in a shop until I got married'.

Vs

'You could do really, really well if you put some actual effort in for 18 months. I value you and your potential and I want to give you an extra motivation - like if you were working, you'd get a payrise, a bonus or go up a point of the salary scale. How about twenty pounds for every B and thirty for As?' (or Cs and Bs as suitable for the kid's abilities).

That is actually saying I don't value YOU at all, I value what you can achieve and if you don't achieve it I won't be rewarding you.

And really come on, that first statement is so lazy and extreme. Firstly what's wrong with being a hairdresser or working in a shop if it's what you want to do and you work hard at it? And most of us DO care what our kids get, but we want it for them not us.

Not sure I would but Imight see it differently when I get there with my kids. When I was at school / uni good grades were a motivator for themselves.

Personally I wouldn't do this because it wouldn't work for my dc but if you think it will work for yours then go for it.

And so they don't put in the effort that they could put in and cry on results day and have to resit a couple of GCSE's alongside their college course or don't get on to the course that they wanted which potentially changes the direction of their future.

And sometimes it is the absolute making of them. What's that saying, you learn more from your failures than your successes?

If you have the money and it will motivate them it's actually a very good idea.

I'm very much of opinion if you can get them through gcse with decent grades it's a perfect base for them then to forge their own path.
I flopped my A levels but it was a huge life lesson (and much easier to resit imo)

My children certainly understood long consequences at the age if 15 or 16 as did I. I don't think that unusual. They are not toddlers.

Dd1 is a gynaecologist and she needs to pass various exams to proceed to the next stage. She has to pay for the exam and any courses she wants to take to help her pass.

Haven’t RTFT (sorry) so this may have been mentioned but, if I recall correctly, studies suggest that children who receive financial rewards (that they know about in advance) for exam results tend to forget what they’ve learned far more quickly than children who don’t. Which may or may not be a problem, but it could potentially make the jump up to A levels harder in those subjects.

I'm very much of opinion if you can get them through gcse with decent grades it's a perfect base for them then to forge their own path.

I think we all see it differently. I see GCSEs (for my DD) as the start of preparation for A levels which as we all know are a huge step up from GCSEs. So they learn what subjects they like, what they don't, what revision works for them and crucially, they can fail whilst still having that parental back up. I feel it's a more gradual way of preparing them for life. Doing whatever it takes to get them high grades at GCSE and then leaving them to get on with it at A level sounds risky to me but each to their own. I'd describe my parenting as generally 'get a grip' but I find a lot of the posts on here actually quite cold, 'you didn't get the grade, so sorry no cash'.

So many posters on here seem absolutely certain that their kids will get top grades.