I am not a fan of bribing. Even though such a practice usually has some positive effects, I think the students can see right through it. It paints the teacher as desperate and devalues skills that should be developed without the incentive offered.
In 1995, the classroom drama Dangerous Minds became a box-office hit. It depicted a former marine played by Michelle Pfeiffer struggling to control a class full of stereotypical lower class misfits. Her plan, neither ingenious nor responsible was to bribe them. Some may have left the cinema hailing her as a genius. I thought it was lazy scriptwriting and left us with no realistic answers for our own classroom management issues.
A recent study seems to come to a different conclusion on the bribing issue:
If your preschoolers turn up their noses at carrots or celery, a small reward like a sticker for taking even a taste may help get them to eat previously shunned foods, a UK study said.
Though it might seem obvious that a reward could tempt young children to eat their vegetables, the idea is actually controversial, researchers wrote in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
That’s because some studies have shown that rewards can backfire and cause children to lose interest in foods they already liked, said Jane Wardle, a researcher at University College London who worked on the study.
Verbal praise, such as “Brilliant! You’re a great vegetable taster,” did not work as well.
“We would recommend that parents consider using small non-food rewards, given daily for tasting tiny pieces of the food — smaller than half a little finger nail,” Wardle said in an email.
The study found that when parents gave their three- and four-year-olds a sticker each time they took a “tiny taste” of a disliked vegetable, it gradually changed the children’s attitudes.
Over a couple of weeks, children rewarded this way were giving higher ratings to vegetables, with the foods moving up the scale from between 1 and 2 — somewhere between “yucky” and “just okay” — to between 2 and 3, or “just okay” and “yummy.”
The children were also willing to eat more of the vegetables — either carrots, celery, cucumber, red pepper, cabbage or sugar snap peas — in laboratory taste tests, the study said.
Surely such bribes can’t work in the long-term. Stickers become boring, star charts get tired, lollies are hardly responsible rewards and prizes are expensive.
If the only way to get a child to do what they should be doing anyway is to bribe them, have you really done your job properly?
Tags: Children, Dangerous Minds, Education, Film, Jane Wardle, Michelle Pfeiffer, Parenting, Preschool, Study, University College, vegetables
Topical Teaching 
December 15, 2011 at 12:43 am |
A bribe carries an unspoken message that what you are wanting the child to do is not worthwhile for its own sake. It robs the child of any satisfaction he or she would derive from doing the task. Instead of operant conditioning there is a danger of embarking upon an auction with ever higher bids needed to persuade the student to co-operate. You don’t have to bribe children to go outside to shoot baskets or play softball.
December 18, 2011 at 2:01 am |
…and don’t get me started about bribing kids with junk food and sweets to get them to eat properly or do chores. What a terrible idea. It just puts the unhealthy foods on more of a pedestal. Take a look around and see where that’s gotten us.
In my home, my son was encouraged to taste things and never forced to eat them if he didn’t like them. (Being force-fed liver as a kid taught me coercion was not the answer 🙂 ) Nor was he ever bribed with dessert. He eventually came to enjoy foods he didn’t originally like. Tastes change.
December 18, 2011 at 8:05 am |
Right, Margaret, and deception doesn’t work either. My family was eating the evening meal. The three children were 12, 6 and 5. The meal was lamb’s fry (liver). The kids eyed it suspisiously as I remarked to my wife, “Lovely piece of steak, this. So tender!” Well I might have fooled the two youngest ones but our eldest went, “It’s liver, yeccch!” That was that. Luckily I like liver so I had a great feed that night.