Why you can't pay grades

Many parents whose children have difficulties in assimilating the school curriculum there is no, but thought about whether to motivate their child with monetary rewards - can take up the mind! And for sure, Aunt Lucia from the neighboring entrance shared with you the positive experience of such an adventure with the daughter of her uncle’s niece or her sister’s quadruple brother.

I feel that many have already prepared to throw stones at me, they say that it is impossible, then it is impossible, everything is bad for him!

Wait a minute! Money motivation really helps the child earn grades.

Not to receive them as a result of knowledge, but to earn. And here I would like to ask the question - what do you want, dear parents, that your child would aspire to get good grades or quality knowledge? Of course, one thing comes from the other and it will be logical for parents to note that since my child does not strive for knowledge, then at least he receives grades, and then he will get involved, understand that it turns out and will normally learn. And indeed, such a scheme of artificial motivation may well work, but not with money! First of all, traditionally, we will understand the terms.





Motivation is the motivation to act necessary to achieve a goal.

Motivation can be directed at yourself or someone else (when we want to encourage someone else to act). Both of these types of motivation go hand in hand in the learning process.

I think it is worth a little more to understand the definition of motivation and conditionally divide it into constructive and destructive. How to distinguish one motivation from another? A person who has chosen the path of constructive motivation necessarily answers the question: What do I want to achieve in the end, that is, what goal do I want to achieve?

Let's take an example. In order for a skier to increase his performance on the track, he, together with the coach or independently, needs to identify weaknesses in his technique and improve them, as well as acquire completely new skills through certain training techniques. And now to the most important question – why does he need it? A constructive example of motivation: in order to grow up the career ladder, increase the importance of competitions, get a medal, sign a serious contract, etc. As you can see, the topic of money also appears here, however, not as an end in itself and there is nothing wrong with this.

Destructive example of motivation: Because the coach beats him, the coach gives the skier money to raise his level for the coach’s personal goals, so as not to disappoint the coach.

It turns out that the destructiveness of motives is that the achievement of a successful result for any reason needs more coach than skier and such motivations, if they work, are short-term, ineffective and even destructive.



I think even with this crude example, you can draw a parallel with the motivation of the child. We figured out that if our coach motivates a skier, it motivates him for his own success, not his own. The same often happens with raising a child.

After everything has become more or less clear with motivation, you need to figure out how to motivate a child, and why money is not the best tool for solving this problem.

As you can see from the example, because of monetary stimulation, the child will not learn better, but will bring home good grades.

How is that possible?

Let's take an example from practice. I was approached by the mother of a second-grade student. The mother complained that her daughter has great problems with concentration, so the mother has to constantly force her daughter to study, sit with her while doing homework, monitor and check lessons. Constantly doing lessons with a child is not the most constructive thing that parents can do, but this is not the case now.

At the first consultation with the child, we drew up a sign where the pros and cons of doing homework with the mother should be located on the left, the advantages and disadvantages of working alone on the right.

After the work with the first item was finished, we tried to move on to the advantages of working alone, but the girl refused to name the advantages of this form of work, assuring me and, first of all, herself that there are simply no advantages, and there are only disadvantages. I wondered what her attitudes were, who suggested it indirectly or directly, and we decided to start with the minuses.

The first minus the girl indicated as follows:

If I do my homework alone, my piggy bank will be empty!

After this phrase, I immediately realized that the girl was paid to study, but it was not clear what this had to do with working alone.

But the girl understood better than me: If I study alone, I will study worse, which means I will not have any more money.

Do you think that if your mother heard this phrase, she would sprinkle ash on her head from what she did? Would you? If you give your child money for tasks, then forever deprive him of independence and honesty!

And so, after we have thickened the colors, we need to understand why you can not give money to children:

The thing is that you distinguish the child from the general background. No matter how you make this secret (worse, you’re making your child cheat), sooner or later both teachers and children will find out that the child is being paid for grades. And here the negative effect is formed both on the part of the social and internal sensation of the child.

From the point of view of society, everything is obvious: children of any age, and especially adolescence, will at best laugh at your child because of the inability to learn from another motivation, and at worst laugh and bully out of envy. Of course, it is worth mentioning that in schools with social motivation, where communication and social status are in the first place for children, rather than learning (mostly this is the case in general schools), such pressure will not be so pronounced as in schools with a bias towards motivation to study (schools with a special bias, lyceums, some private schools), where the class leader is the most intelligent student, regardless of the ability to spit further than everyone, defeat the elders in arm wrestling, an expensive phone, a personal driver on a Bentley, etc. If your child is in such a school, it will not be easy for him.

From the point of view of the inner feeling of the child, he himself will begin to understand his otherness over time and will realize that this is not accepted in society. A little later, this state can turn either into pride, or into a feeling of inferiority and inability to be like everyone else. I feel, dear parents, how you cling to hope in these last words of mine – and what if after that he understands that he needs to be like everyone else, suddenly this will give him an incentive to the contrary – to give up money and learn by himself? I won’t be so sure and my answer is unlikely. Why?

The fact is that you have already established a system of service in the family – monetary reward, which means that the child will adhere to this model as long as you adhere to it. This happens precisely because the child depends on you - depends on your decisions and your style of behavior, and if you decide to pay the child money, then this style is a priori dominant, suppressing his goals and desires.

If you disagree with me, answer the following questions:

Do I have other ways to influence my child besides money?

If my child begins to spend the money he earned on unwanted purchases (cigarettes, alcohol, etc.), will I stop paying him and thereby achieve my goal of improving his academic performance?

Am I sure that when the child has saved enough money to achieve his personal goal (buying a video game, phone, etc.), he will not give up further monetary rewards, thereby failing to keep up with school?

If you answered negatively to at least one question, you can already conclude that it will not lead to anything good, and in the future all you will have to do is manipulate your child with money.

But we are adults and without the above we understand that paying children is bad.

Then why, or rather, why do we do it anyway? The answer is simple: for yourself. For your peace of mind, to make life easier for yourself, and to shift the responsibility for raising children to money. We just want to pay off our children by justifying ourselves with incredible stories.

Let’s go back to the example of mother and daughter.

When, after a conversation with the girl, I had a consultation with my mother, she objected to me in the following way - I want my daughter to know the value of money, how hard she earns it, learn how to save it and spend it wisely.

Here's the thing - there is absolutely nothing in this explanation except to justify your powerlessness.

Paying your kids to go to school is like your parents paying you to go to work, and paying you an annual tax for becoming independent adults and living separately. Let’s bring the situation to the absurd – and in case no one pays you extra, that you cook food for children and whether the light bulb in the toilet was screwed up?

It’s your child’s responsibility to learn, and if you pay them to do so, you give them a sense of freebie, not a price for money. The child simply performs his duties and should form motivation from a sense of the need for approval and respect for his actions and decisions from family members, not from monetary reward!

So from the above example, it is clear that the goals of the mother do not correspond to the means to achieve them.

Dear parents, I sincerely hope that this article provides enough evidence against monetary motivation to learn. I'm sure that you understand everything yourself, but sometimes we just don't know what to do and we give up. Remember that children are your mirror and if you no longer have the strength for the right, harmonious upbringing of your child, then he will not have any desire to do it!

Once we’ve figured out why a child can’t be paid to study, how do we motivate them to learn?

In the beginning, we talked about constructive and destructive ways of motivation. Destructive methods dismantled, now you can begin to analyze constructive.

Many parents are unhappy with their child’s level of knowledge. In most cases, this may be due to the expectations of parents about the child’s academic performance. First of all, I need to answer the question – what do I want from my child? Many people will say that he should study well. Good is a very vague concept, and its danger is that again it does not lead us to the goal.

Let's go back to the skier.

Productive motivations for achieving the goal of our hero can be the following: to win city competitions. In this case, it is immediately clear that to achieve this goal, you need a certain amount of training, diet, and so on. If the goal is to get to the Olympics, the number of efforts of the skier increases proportionally.

The destructive motivation of our athlete is the idea that he should skate well or perfectly. In this situation, after all, you need objectivity, which is what I call you dear parents! First of all, you need to determine what specific results you want to get from your child, and secondly, you need to understand whether they are adequate to abilities, opportunities and, most importantly, his interests.

Let’s try to deal with these issues together.

To answer both of these questions, you need to understand what successful learning is. Please note that this is not about making your child a genius, or that he studied for one five, but that he could feel comfortable in the conditions offered by the school. Moreover, in order to be successful, it is not necessary to study at all fives, you can even have threes in some subjects, but at the same time be successful in some specific complex of subjects - whether humanitarian, or natural science, depending on the interests and abilities of your child.

The main mistake of most parents is that they try to make their child was equally good at everything. From this, the endless sitting with the child at lessons, shouting, resentment and other “pleasures” are taken. By and large, it is this behavior of parents that forms, in the language of a motorist, a traffic jam on the track of child motivation. Freeing the child from a thorough study of unloved subjects, you thereby create a favorable ground for the appearance of educational motivation.

And again, I anticipate the questions: Yes, my child is not interested in anything at all, let him go he will not do anything at all, I barely drag him to school on a lasso!

Of course, it will, as long as the child feels unsuccessful.

Such indifferent behavior has quite an objective reason – while you do lessons with him or control him all the time, it is you who are responsible for learning, and not your child, that is, he has a complete feeling that he can not influence anything, and why then he does anything at all.

And again the exclamation from the hall - so we tell you that if we do not require him to do lessons, he will hang his legs and do nothing at all!

I understand perfectly well, because it turns out to be a vicious circle. But I can say one thing: if something does not change, it will not change, and if you try to change something, there is at least a tiny chance that everything will change for the better.

And now, in order to prove the usefulness of the above method, let us put ourselves in the place of your children.

We go to work every day. Let’s imagine that we all have a favorite and in another way can not even be. But even at our favorite job, there are things we just hate. In order not to go far, let’s look at an example of my work:

My working day starts at nine in the morning. I have to get up around seven and leave the house at eight. Nature has not rewarded me for being born a lark, or even completely on the back, and so I have to get up early and come to work on time, and nothing can be done about it, otherwise I will simply be fired. I love my job and don’t want to quit.

Also, in addition to working with children and parents, I have to fill out a lot of paperwork, which I just hate, but I have to do it because it is an integral part of my duties. At the same time, I fill in the paper “good”, but not better than the prescribed functionality.

But in addition to the above routine, I have work with children, communication with parents, conducting educational and lecture classes, and in this case I do not think at all whether I exceeded the scope of work based on my functionality or not.

That is, I, if I may put it this way, “pay” for my favorite business with a certain set of actions that I perform when necessary.

I think we're going to agree by default that life is like this for everyone, including you and your child.

Now imagine that you want to make the perfect employee! They want you to have no weaknesses at all!

Imagine that as soon as you walk into your office, your boss calls you and says,

-Peter Vasilyevich, have you already opened your work mail? - Exactly, exactly? - And if I check?

Maria Sergevna, you need to submit your report in two weeks, why did you write only 586 pages? You'll have to rewrite it.

Your work would become an unbearable horror of endless control. Close your eyes, imagine if you could call it your favorite job.

What would you do in that case? First of all, endlessly lying to the authorities, from this is in a state of constant tension. Second, they would always try to be distracted by something more positively colored, such as social networks or personal calls, thereby increasing the time to do work. This happens because a person tends to postpone negative actions. Therefore, work should be loved!

So, dear parents, you are destroying the motivation of your children.

You just need to accept that some things the child has the right to do formally, simply because it needs to be done, that would be more time to leave on favorite objects.

In fact, he must learn so that on the one hand he would not be expelled from school, and on the other, that he would be successful in any field and have the unconditional support of not only peers and teachers, but also parents and in this case, you will never have to pay for anything!

Your child will be grateful for the opportunity to make independent decisions. And gratitude is not an empty sound, it can be expressed in the desire to learn in order to please you. But that's only if you're "good" parents!

Author: Eugene Lange

P.S. And remember, just changing our consumption – together we change the world!

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