Contracts and Rewards: Celebrations, Not Payoffs

Charles Holton, LCSW

Over the past twenty years behavior management techniques have emerged as a dominant trend in psychotherapy, in settings ranging from domestic violence through anxiety disorders to raising children – especially children with behavioral, emotional, or attention problems. The reason is, of course, that these techniques are effective – they produce the desired result: behavior change, and increased compliance with parental directives. For years parents have been asking clinicians, “But aren’t we bribing our children?” And now the methods have come under fire as interfering with children’s internal motivation and their development of personal values. A recent study separated a control group of children doing a word-finding game on their own from the experimental group offered money to complete the game . When the children in the first group were told they could stop if they wished, they finished the game anyway. When the children in the second group were given the money, not only did all of them stop working on the game , so me actually went back and erased part of their work completed after the signal to stop had been given.

How can clinicians and parents take advantage of the beneficial utility of behavior management techniques without losing sight of the long-term goals of sponsoring confidence and values? The answer may lie in a subtle matter of emphasis: where, as parents and clinicians, we focus our attention.

Imagine any “target behavior” you want to replace with a “replacement behavior.” Rather than focusing only on the behavior, and how often it occurs, and encouraging the child with reminders about the video he’s earning or the trip to the pizza restaurant he gets after a week of no occurrences of the target behavior, try thinking about the value this behavior represents, and appreciating any occurrences of early sproutings of that value in the child’s behavior with the “social reinforcement” of noticing. Thomas Phelan has commented that the most common parental errors are “too many words and too much emotion.” In our zeal for effective techniques we can forget the simple power of a brief, supportive comment noticing a child’s maturing. This both guides and encourages internal motivation and values. For example, a youngster getting in frequent fights who thinks about his contract and hesitates before pouncing might hear his parent notice, “Hey, nice self-discipline!” or “You’re really growing up!” and begin to self-identify as so me one with that kind of competence.

In the context of expecting development and encouraging maturation, the contract rewarding a particular behavior becomes a way to celebrate the achievement of a new level of maturity. The goal the child attains is not the pizza dinner, it is the attainment of mastery over yelling, or over tantrums. The dinner, like the diploma the adult earns for years of study and mastery of a discipline, is a symbol and celebration of the accomplish me nt. This approach to using contracts and rewards puts them in their proper place as tools for parents to use in teaching their children without allowing the contracts to overshadow the teaching. In order to effectively keep our eyes on the prize, it is essential to remember what the prize is.