Although teachers deciding to provide tangible rewards to elementary students for good behavior does make the students happy, the rewards have actually caused more harm than smiles. Frankly speaking, the teachers have failed to reinforce their students’ behaviors. Acceptable behaviors come from morality, not golden stickers or pizza coupons. Better yet, teach the child to behave without any materialistic rewards that they could later depend on for encouragement.

These tangible rewards have trapped children to the process of justification or laziness; this means giving a child rewards (extrinsic motivation) for something they already enjoy doing (intrinsic motivation) will eventually cause them to demand the same reward after every time they have done the task. If they stop receiving a reward, they will threaten to never do the task again. Similarly, if a child who loves to read begins to receive cookies for every book he/she reads, he/she will gradually only read if he/she receives a cookie.

However, extrinsic motivations do help when it comes to reinforcing a behavior. As long as those extrinsic motivations start to fade after a period of time, it should not be too harmful. When a student receives a perfect score for first time, he/she should be rewarded to encourage repetition of the same results. Yet he/she should not be rewarded after every A+ they get, or else the child becomes crippled by helplessness. How about getting money for good grades? Same conflict, the minute the child starts receiving money for every honor grade, the parents have began crippling their child. Some parents blindly view their money rewards as motivation, unfortunately the wrong type of motivation; extrinsic. Eventually the child will either start to fail school when they see a decline in money rewards or they will attend an Ivy League University with the thousands of dollars they have collected from the As in coloring class only to cry when they fail the courses. If a child obtains some kind of tangible reward after every single “A� he/she achieves, he/she will eventually become overconfident with his/her work and fail when a harder challenge arises.

Imagine a 9-year-old memorizing all the states’ capitals for a test, she then of course passes the test, which only asks for 20 capitals, and you treat her to ice cream. Days later, a new test asks for 20 more capitals and once again she passes with her parent taking her for an ice cream once more. The same situation takes place the following week. Has she really achieved more success after the first test? No, she only succeeds at memorizing the 50 capitals. Unfortunately, by the third time she is taken out for another round of ice cream, she has already begun to develop overconfidence. About a year later, when she is asked to name 50 world capitals she will fall into helplessness because the tangible rewards have made her believe she has succeeded so much that she can do anything.

Do not reward a child for every little thing he/she has accomplished but if you must, please fade those rewards after a certain amount of time.

Kids model the people they see, despite the age gaps. They are also very manipulative; they can trick adults into witnessing what they want them to witness. A child could merely pretend to behave just for the extrinsic rewards, but the minute they get home, they return to their usual misbehavioral ways. If one student cleans a desk for some cookies, others will clean the desks for cookies. But if one kid pretends to be nice in the classroom and transforms into a bully in the playground, more kids will follow suit and do the same. It is almost like a mirror image. Whether it is pro-social behavior, constructive behavior, anti-social behavior, or destructive behaviors; children tend to imitate the behaviors in their environment.

Money can’t buy happiness, and tangible rewards can’t buy good behavior.