Differential rewards?

[alexsdad]

Dad posting here...

So, 2 children, daughter 13, son 11. Both great kids. At the end of the school year we have been in the habit of doing something special with them if they have done well at school - making sure, at the start of the year, they knew that this was something we would do. Up till now, both have been doing equally well. We've done things like trips to the Zoo, day out in London, Alton Towers etc. Stuff we could not normally afford to do. All been great, and everyone has enjoyed it.

Now this year, whilst our son has done OK, our daughter has gone into stellar overdrive. Top in the class in just about everything. Dead keen. Great year. If she were the only child, we would be looking to do something appropriately 'rewarding', especially encouraging her as she enters, what I would anticipate, may be a difficult time in terms of keeping up academic achievement in a school where there can be significant negative peer pressure.

However, if we do something for the whole family which is 'stellar' then average performing son also benefits equally.

So, my question is, what do you think we should do? Should we try to reward differentially or not? If we take both kids on something great, then son may think 'why should i bother? I get good stuff anyhow' - or do we do 2 'treats'. One great one with daughter, one OK with son? I feel that would be too devisive, but I am concerned that he may be happy to get a 'free ride' based on our daughters efforts. No sign of her being annoyed about this btw - at least, not yet!

Comments/thoughts much appreciated (to my first ,and rather long post on here!)

I am just going to recommend a book called "unconditional parenting" by Alfie Kohn. Read it and perhaps think about the issue of linking reward to achievement.

But i really wouldn't do separate treats, your ds probably feels overshadowed enough without this. Instead reward them both for working hard. Your ds is probably more likely to be encouraged by this than to free ride. If you give him a lower quality reward then he was just get angry and resentful and may simply give up.

I wouldn't even consider different rewards, the "reward" is that the whole family do something fun. I would hope that your daughter is happy for the whole family to do something (fun or stellar or whatever) because she has done so well and (more importantly IMHO) worked hard and shown a good attitude to her work all year. Your son should not be excluded from something simply because he hasn't done quite so well - to be excluded from what has always been a family event would be to punish him, and I hope you are not suggesting that he should be punished for doing OK, when that's the level he's at.

Personally, I would also keep the treat at a similar level as other years - doing better than usual doesn't equate to a more valuable reward - if you are giving a reward, it should be for the overall "doing well and working hard all year" not for the specific "doing really really well instead of just ordinarily well".

I hate the Unconditional Parenting book, so it kills me to say this, but WitchWATT has a point. (wince) Reward systems as incentives can have serious drawbacks. Your son could easily end up thinking that you love him less because he's not as clever as his sister.

If you're going to continue with rewards for them doing well, might be better to make it something low key and individual -- like ££££.

Alternatively, you could reward for effort rather than attainment -- in which case, perhaps the differential isn't that much?

Thanks for all the comments - some food for thought there. I'm glad I posted :-).

peanutbutterkid - actually, I rather suspect that there is a differential in effort involved as well, given parents evening comments - but (a) it's not like he's done badly, or put in less effort than we may have wished/expected, more that my daughter performed significantly above expectations - and (b) other comments taken on board. Keep everything sweet!

Thank you!

I wouldn't reward at all. I would treat it as something for the whole family to get away from school and all the hard work, and just be together.

Rewards always make me very suspicious and it's likely they do your kids, as well.

If anything they should be situation-appropriate - ie you all take a decent holiday, but perhaps your daughter gets something new to help with ehr work, like, laptop, that kind of thing? While son needs to wait a bit longer for that. Make it relevant and explainable in terms of 'she needs this now to keep on top[ of her extra work in the top set' etc rather than 'she deserves this'

do you get what I mean? And son also gets something appropriate that he needs. It doesn't matter how 'good' each thing is, as long as it helps them and they are pleased with it. Separate the chil;d from the achievement - on a family holiday, what you want to bring is the child, not their success.

Is it your son's fault that he has less brains than his sister? Surely the true reward of doing well academically is enough.

our boys are still very young (6 and 3) but my husband and i have had a chat on something similar.

DS1 has problems (ADHD, aspergers etc) and is rewarded for sitting still, listening etc at school. My hubby wondered what we would do when ds2 starts school, and if he will get the same reward. I said no because there will be things individual to each of them that they will struggle with and excel at and so they should have their own "reward" system in place.

For example ds1 is a fantastic reader but ds2 (not that we know yet!!) may struggle and so will have a reward once he has tried hard and has learnt all phonics.

Your poor DS that all I say.
"he may be happy to get a 'free ride' based on our daughters efforts"
Aren't you a wonderful loving father.
Start saving for the therapy fees he's going to need it soon enough.

Please read Alfie Kohn Unconditional Parenting.

Be careful, that's all I can say. My brother is 51 and he is still smarting from the fact that his younger siblings were cleverer and better at school than he was. He has now gone back to do some studying and is having enormous stress problems because he feels inferior; he keeps thinking that he can't do it, and then remembering that his little sister wrote a book.

Not because our parents gave us huge big treats, but because he knew, and we knew, that they prized exactly the kind of things that we were good at. Yes, we spent more time on school work- but then, wouldn't you prefer to spend time on things that you understand and enjoy? If you have perfect pitch you're going to enjoy singing more than if you struggle to stay in key.

Me and my younger brother were lucky because the kind of things that came naturally to us were the kind of things you get high marks to. Big brother was better at other things, and naturally wanted to spend time on those, but they didn't come with rewards (though I suspect they have been just as useful in RL). He worked hard enough, but I got so much pleasure out of my reading that I would have done it if it had been banned by law.

I wouldn't worry about your ds "getting a free ride"; I would worry about him ending up in hospital 30 years later with stress, because he keeps thinking he is never going to live up to expectation. Setting him up to compare himself with a sibling could be setting him up for a lifetime of insecurity and missed opportunities.

"high marks for" even

I think it would be better all round if your tradition of a special treat was labelled as "celebrating the end of the school year and start of summer" rather than linking it to effort/achievement.

Please don't try to compare your DD and DS. Maybe he'll do better than her next year and then you'll face the same dilemma in reverse? Just be proud that you have two DCs who both seem to be doing well at school rather than causing you to worry

Mine have actual grades against effort grades. We reward effort rather than achievement. Seems fairer IMO.

Much fairer, though even then I am not totally sure.

Learning foreign languages was my hobby, and that was rewarded at school (though not excessively so by my parents). It seemed like I was making a lot of effort, but in fact I was making no more effort than say a horsey girl spending all her time in the stables or a sporty girl playing hockey. Or my brother was playing on his computer, or my other brother playing the violin, or my big brother reading books about seafaring. It was just a case of playing my favourite game.

In the event, apart from the violin, those things have been each one of us has made a career out of, so from the parental pov each ought to be equally valuable.

Children are naturally going to get rewarded for achievement. Either through being in the first team for everything, prizes at speech day, strings of A*s at exam time.

But if you reward effort, you keep them both motivated and engaged, and doing the very best that they can. Which is all that we can hope for as parents, isn't it?

Message withdrawn

Bloss sums up what I wanted to say.

What Quattro says about awarding for effort makes sense and seems fair, and would certainly be a necessary way of doing it in families with more than one child, as you are highly unlikely to have two children with exactly the same ability.

I still wouldn't use family time as a reward, nor would I want to reward children with big expensive treats for something they are already getting rewarded for at school. A smile is a good reward. A quiet word to let them see that you've noticed they've put in a lot of effort.

Family time is about different things, and the last thing you want to do when building up the memories that are to glue your family together for the years ahead is to let them be centered on sibling competitiveness.

Competitiveness is not a bad thing per se (pre-empting Quattro here ), it can do wonderful things to people, but everybody also needs a space in their life that is not touched by it. That's what family days out ought to be be about: a bunch of people who are simply together because they love each other and want to have a good time together.