In the end, it’s important to use rewards strategically, and be careful not to shower children with gifts for doing things that they might otherwise learn are intrinsically valuable. For example, it might not be such a horrible thing to provide some type of monetary reward for bigger chores, since let’s be honest, how many of us are intrinsically motivated to clean the garage? But for smaller chores that you expect your children to do every day, like making the bed or cleaning up their dirty dishes, providing a reward could backfire. The same could be true for the types of chores that take a little bit of extra effort. Teaching my son to have intrinsic motivation to pee in the toilet isn’t something we were necessarily concerned about, since eventually, everyone learns to do it. In education, researchers have found that intrinsic motivation is related to what they have called learning goals, or motivation to learn for the sake of learning, whereas extrinsic motivation is associated with performance goals, or learning in the pursuit of evaluation, or a good grade in essence, a reward (Heyman &. When I was potty training my son, we showered him with jelly beans and praise when he had a successful trip to the bathroom. Again, that doesn’t mean rewards are always bad.
So if you want to promote intrinsic motivation-if you want to teach your kids that learning in school or helping others are enjoyable in and of themselves-using rewards might be the wrong strategy.
Together this research suggests that providing children with a reward for a behavior is almost like telling them that the behavior itself is not much fun.