How You Can Reward Your Child for Doing Good Deeds
Parenting styles have changed over the years, and recently, people have realized how traumatizing physical punishment can be for children. Even simple negative statements can hurt a child mentally, and this can affect them for the rest of their lives. As such, parents these days are more careful with how they raise their children, and many have taken a more positive approach to things. Rather than shunning kids for doing something bad, they praise their children for doing good.
While this approach may be new to some, it’s not as difficult as it may seem. As long as you set up a good reward structure for your children, they’ll feel motivated to continue to do good. Here’s how you can reward your child properly for doing good.
HOW TO MAKE AN EFFECTIVE REWARD SYSTEM
When teaching positive reinforcement to a child, you need to first understand how to create a good reward system. After all, if your parenting revolves around rewarding your child for good deeds, you need to make sure you’re rewarding them fairly and properly. But how do you go about this? It’s simple — reward them appropriately and regularly.
Rewarding them appropriately means giving them rewards proportional to what they did. For example, cleaning up their room is not as significant as, say, tidying up the whole house. The first is more of a given than anything else, whereas the second is something that they wanted to do of their own volition. By giving greater rewards for the second task compared to the first one, they’ll realize that they can strike it big if they simply do bigger, better deeds.
Aside from this, you need to give rewards regularly and consistently. This doesn’t necessarily mean giving them a reward for any single minor good deed, such as washing their own plate. Instead, it means always giving rewards when the situation calls for it. If you don’t give them a reward whenever they do a significantly good deed, they will begin to question whether or not it’s worth even doing good deeds anymore, as there’s no guarantee.
TYPES OF REWARDS
Candy
Candy is a very common type of reward that’s easy to give out and even easier to procure on your own. Kids love sweets, and by giving them a method to earn candy on their own, they’ll be more inclined to do good. Just be careful not to feed them too many sweets as that will take a toll on their health down the line.
If you want to make things more interesting, you can try buying different types of candy. Different flavors will not only make rewards more varied, but you’ll also be able to figure out their favorite type of candy, which you can then save for the biggest of good deeds.
Stickers
Stickers are great for tracking progress. With the help of a sticker book, your child can see just how many good deeds they did for any given day, week, or month. You can use simple stickers to track progress, or you can use fancy stickers that your child will love to collect.