Motivating your unmotivated child
Trying to get your child to do things and it feels like you’re talking to a wall? It matters little whether the thing you’re trying to get them to do is meaningful or menial. You entice, reward, bribe, yell or punish and none are effective and sustainable motivating approaches. So what’s the balance? As much as I try to follow my own advice of not repeating myself, I often find myself doing exactly that: reminding my daughter to make her bed, pull up the window blinds, put dirty laundry in the hamper (not the floor), empty the lunch bag, practice cello, go shower, brush teeth, and on and on. But never once, do I need to remind her to do enjoyable things. In fact, she pesters me to make sure I don’t forget about things she likes to do. I get it, we all hate to do work that is routine and would rather sit on a couch with a device, book or TV whilst eating bonbons. Even though I have modern appliances to do the work for me, somebody still has to load the dishwasher, fold the laundry and mow the grass. I don’t expect my daughter to do or help out with everything, but as a member of this household, I expect her to use good-old-fashioned elbow grease and put in some honest work. And she knows I don’t pay her for that cooperation. So what’s the balance between regulating the time she spends doing things she almost exclusively wants to do and influencing her to do the things she doesn’t want to do but must be done? I borrow three concepts from my workplace.
So what’s the balance between regulating the time she spends doing things she almost exclusively wants to do and influencing her to do the things she doesn’t want to do but must be done? I borrow three concepts from my workplace.
Touch it once. If something simple comes to my attention like an invoice that requires payment, I reply by authorizing it right away sending it off to payables so I don’t become the bottleneck. If I delay and get back to it later, I’ve essentially doubled the time required to do something that was trivial. The more I put it off, the more time I’ve wasted and it only adds to the eventual urgency of that matter. Doing small things right away ensures that the pile of work is being eroded constantly and things don’t stack up. As more work swells, the more off-putting it becomes. At home, when my daughter and I cook, we try not to produce too many dirty dishes. It can be as simple as me telling her to put the dirty ones in the washer right away, rather than aside and have the greasy pile grow on the counter.
Aggregation. Things in life are rarely ‘one & done’. More often, our tasks and our goals require multiple steps which build upon something previously done. Take a look at her math homework and you’ll instantly see that deriving the answer to a question requires solving something else first. Same with her music practice. My daughter loves her cello, but she’s not too keen on practicing. I don’t want to turn her passion into a chore and yell at her to do it; she’ll simply develop negative associations and then she’ll just practice for me and eventually not at all. But when she does practice, she can commit to memory an entire piece of Bach from sheet music in a span of 30 minutes. None of that was possible without years of practicing Twinkle, chords and tonalization. Help her remember that the seemingly menial things she does truly have an additive and meaningful purpose.
Gamification. Rewards are always used as incentives at the work place to motivate, especially when the reward has a monetary value. But privilege and fame also work. When I was in sales, the rep who had the highest numbers of the month got to use the corner office that overlooked the city below from the 34th floor. The employee, being an outside sales rep, rarely stayed in the office so the glass-wall office was only used on Friday afternoons to do expenses, chitchats and other boastful socializing. But the prestige was very effective. Other employees could also ‘win’ an extra vacation day, a parking spot nearest to the door or have lunch with an executive at a restaurant of their choosing (within limits, of course). This can easily be adapted at home. Every time something is done, either by you or your child, put a ‘credit’ in the jar that can be cashed in later. Throw in a joker as a wild card to spice things up.
Motivation sometimes borders on bribery, but remember that rewards always work better than punishment. That’s why I am opposed to the idea some parents have of withholding WiFi passwords as leverage. I’m also not a fan of equating communal responsibilities to transactions as it connotes penalties for failed contribution. We’re a family; her membership is not negotiable and neither are membership responsibilities. I can add more incentives but can’t remove what she and I already have. I’ve always said to my daughter that even though she has two homes, my home is forever hers. Her having a key to my house is very symbolic of this and she feels very much equal in that sense. Getting her involved and motivated isn’t about just doing chores for me masked as being good for her. It’s about involving her in making decisions on doing what is essentially good for us. The best kind of motivation is when she has skin in the game.
