How to Reward Your Child in the Correct Timing

As we get older, we are more willing to tolerate delays between our behavior and rewards, such as monthly salary. The importance of immediate rewards is really not lessened, however, for we still expect some kinds of continuing social reward at work, such as attention, recognition, or verbal praise. The size of the monthly salary is not the most important factor in job satisfaction for most people. Instead, things like a friendly working atmosphere, feelings of self-worth and accomplishment are far more important. Among the beauties of social rewards are that they can he given immediately and there is no end to the supply.

With any age it is important to socially reward right away. Hug, smile, compliment! If material rewards are also to be given, it is not always possible to give them immediately. However, one can give some sort of immediate symbolic or `token' reward such as a gold star, points, or 'happy faces' drawn on paper. These tokens in effect provide 'credit' that can later be cashed in for material rewards, and thus bridge the time gap between behavior and result.

While it is important to reward others immediately, the same applies to one's own efforts as well. Often accomplishments can go unnoticed by others, not because they don't care, but because they are busy, preoccupied, or just fail to notice. We have all experienced waiting for somebody to compliment some nice thing we have done, but the compliment never comes. It is easy then to say to yourself, 'Why bother?' Such silent suffering is self-defeating.

When you do something nice that goes unnoticed, you can 'prompt' another person (whether adult or child) into noticing it. It's perfectly acceptable to belp people to notice the nice things you have done. If you prepared a special dessert and your children didn't respond or act differently, what could you do? Ask them how they like it! When parents fail to notice something children have done, the youngsters may come and tell Mum and Dad about it.

We need all the social rewards we can get, so when we earn them let's make sure someone notices. It's unrealistic to expect that somebody else will always give us those important rewards without prompting. Children can be taught to prompt and to compliment others as well.

Now, at last, you are ready to change a child's behavior. You have pinpointed the behavior in question, used a positive focus, broken it down into small steps.

You want the child to 'get the message' about the behavior quickly as possible. The way to do this is to give the message loudly, clearly, and often. That may mean using a liberal amount of social rewards, token rewards - anything that clearly communicates your satisfaction and pleasure to the child, and which the child you are rewarding.

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