Those years, the rosy dreams our parents painted for us might be harmful…

Before the exam, many parents will make such promises to their children: "If you can rank in the top three in the final exam, I will buy you the latest mobile phone during the holidays and you can play games as long as you want; if you rank in the top ten, you must hand in your phone."

Some parents also use this kind of reward "weapon" in interest education: "I will give you 20 yuan if you play the piano for an hour."

However, the saying "a big reward always brings out the brave" may not apply here. From a psychological point of view, parents giving material rewards to their children may also bring some disadvantages. Let's analyze the key points and provide a few free reward methods (maybe you will use them one day).

Copyright images in the gallery. Reprinting and using them may lead to copyright disputes.

Part 1

What’s the problem with “getting a reward if you do well in the exam”?

Some parents are accustomed to giving their children sufficient material rewards when their children do well in exams, but this may backfire.

Doing well in an exam is a kind of psychological reward in itself. Some scholars believe that self-esteem can be divided into several dimensions, among which academic self-esteem is a very important dimension of self-esteem. In other words, getting a good grade itself helps to improve children's self-identity and self-acceptance. If you give children material rewards at this time, the effect may not be icing on the cake. Instead, it may make children overly concerned about their grades, which in turn leads to excessive test anxiety.

Anxiety will occupy some cognitive resources, making it impossible for individuals to use what they have learned. Excessive test anxiety not only fails to help children turn pressure into motivation, but also prevents them from performing at their best. If you ask 100 students who have taken the college entrance examination, 70 of them will say that they did not do well in the exam, and the main reason is test anxiety.

For children, learning is the most important thing in life, and most children are already very concerned about their test scores. Sitting in a first-grade classroom, it only takes half a day for children to understand that academic performance is likely to be linked to different "treatments". If children perceive that their parents are also very concerned about their test scores, they are more likely to have test anxiety.

Some parents may ask: I don't care about my child's grades, so what else should I care about? In fact, it can be more pure. Isn't the purpose of learning to learn knowledge? The sense of superiority of first-grade children over kindergarten children is not mainly due to their height, but the feeling that they have learned some knowledge. Parents can regard test scores as an indicator of the degree of knowledge mastery. Knowing it is a good thing, but not knowing it is not a bad thing either. It is an opportunity to "find problems and solve them". Just learn more and practice more in a targeted manner to make up for it.

Some people may say that parents are afraid that their children will lose in the future competition of "one point one playground" and "thousands of troops crossing a single-plank bridge", so they cannot help but pay attention to grades. Perhaps we can think about this issue from another perspective: those children who take learning seriously, are good at learning from mistakes, actively correct mistakes, and are not discouraged when they are not satisfied with their scores, may not perform too badly in various "exams" in the future. Compared with rewarding a good score, these qualities that can accompany you throughout your life are more worthy of reward.

Bonus tips 1:

How to reward children when they do well in exams?

Maybe it's just a sentence like "You're still good!" It's free, useful, and enough. This kind of recognition is also a reward.

A more advanced reward can be to link good grades with the child's behavior and qualities, such as "My child completes his homework carefully every day. This is a good habit, and the test results will be clear" or "The teacher always says that my daughter is very serious in class and does her homework carefully. You can see that the results are different when she is serious." (Whether the teacher said this or not is not that important~)

However, when giving verbal rewards, avoid using phrases like “You’re so smart.” The relationship between intelligence and academic performance is not as great as we think.

The "smartness" of children corresponds to "fluid intelligence" in psychology, such as abstract thinking ability, brain speed, short-term memory ability, etc. A meta-analysis involving 370,000 people showed that the correlation between fluid intelligence and academic performance is not as high as we thought. The correlation with reading is only 0.38, and the correlation with mathematical ability is only 0.41.

In other words, most of the variance in academic achievement is determined by non-fluid intelligence (who among adults doesn't have a few very smart classmates who didn't get into college?). One side effect of associating a child's good grades with intelligence is that the next time a child does poorly on an exam, it's easy for them to wonder if they're "not smart." This thought can be more frustrating for a child than the poor grades themselves.

If parents really want to give their children material rewards, remember not to give them too special or too expensive. They should be things that are not too difficult for children to obtain on a normal basis.

Bonus tips 2:

Do children also need rewards when they don’t do well in exams?

In every class, the number of children who "do well in the exam" is small after all, and most of the children will not "do well in the exam". This does not mean that these children have nothing to be recognized.

When children are frustrated about their grades, parents need to have empathy and never criticize or discourage them. When children doubt themselves, parents have the responsibility to guide them to see the glimmer of light in themselves.

Parents can try to praise their children for their perseverance, even if their academic performance is not ideal, they have not given up learning. And let them know that the exam is just a ruler to check the level of knowledge mastered, and it is not terrible to find problems through the exam, because only by finding problems can we study in a targeted manner, and finally turn the knowledge that has not been mastered into the knowledge that has been mastered.

Part 2

Can money be used to cultivate children’s interests?

After talking about exams, let's analyze another situation: If you want to cultivate your child's interest in something, can you use money to "stimulate" him? For example, "I will give you 20 yuan if you play the piano for an hour" or "I will give you 30 yuan if you read a book seriously for an hour", will this be effective?

Someone once did an experiment, hoping to use rewards to get children to spend more time playing math games. The result was that when children were able to receive rewards, they did spend more time on math learning; but after the reward plan was stopped, the time children spent on math learning became less and less, even less than when there was no reward.

Why do such incredible results occur? The reason is that children have learned to infer through these reward operations that "the purpose of my learning mathematics is to get rewards." When there are no rewards, children will also infer "Why should I spend extra time studying if there are no rewards?"

Therefore, when you use money to reward children's interests, they may feel that "learning (a certain skill) is not my business, but my parents' business." At this time, if you say earnestly, "learning is your business, not mine," oh, sorry, this sentence may not work. The child may even think you are lying.

In addition, using money as a reward may also have a side effect: making children care too much about money. Just as people often overestimate the relationship between fluid intelligence and academic performance, people generally overestimate the relationship between money and happiness. In my consulting experience, the formula "more money equals happiness and happiness" is extremely misleading among adults. Sometimes, in the persistent pursuit of money, people often think that they are working hard for happiness, but in fact, it may be the opposite. This lifestyle itself poses a threat to their own happiness.

Perhaps, cultivating interests is the process of discovering children's interests and cultivating them. Children's interests and talents are not the same. Some children are sensitive to music, some are sensitive to colors and graphics, some are sensitive to numbers, and some are sensitive to words. In this regard, parents really should not have the idea that "if you work hard enough, you can grind an iron rod into a needle." What is really valuable is time (and tuition fees, of course). Letting children spend the time they spend developing their interests on things they are not interested in is torture for both parents and children. Some interests are the interests of parents, not necessarily suitable for children. When children are young, they can have very "broad" interests, and it is not easy for them to stick to one or two in the end.

Bonus tips 3:

Eye contact, companionship...

Generally speaking, parents’ role models are particularly important in cultivating interests. If both parents love reading, children are more likely to be interested in books. If both parents like music, then children are also likely to be fascinated by music.

When children stick to their interests, parents can also give them rewards, but this kind of reward does not necessarily have to be material: it can be a look of approval; it can be more parent-child time, such as going for a walk outdoors together; or even creating conditions for children to get together with friends...

Part 3

Conclusion

With the decrease in the number of children in the family and the increasing emphasis on parent-child relationships by parents, rewards in family education are becoming more and more popular, especially material rewards. With the abundance of material life, parents can also provide various forms of rewards; generally speaking, children also like rewards. Therefore, rewards seem to be a "win-win" situation.

However, through the above analysis, every coin has two sides, and material rewards do not necessarily only bear good fruits.

In short, we should not simply understand rewards for children as material things or money. Sometimes free things are better than spending money.

Source: Science Institute

Author: Wang Kui (Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences)