Teens can do nearly anything when motivated properly
Two weeks ago, I wrote a post about 9 key principles I have learned from a career of working with teens. These principles can help the teens reach their fullest potential, and they can help parents facilitate that process. Last week, I wrote about the first of those principles and today I am going to talk about—wait for it—the second.
An important caveat
Before I do that, however, let me give an important caveat to everything I write: the things I articulate are general principles I have learned. These are my best effort to distill a lot of details, examples, and specific situations into basic, general ideas.
These are not meant as one-size-fits-all prescriptions. For every rule, of course, there are exceptions. Even when there are not exceptions, applying a principle or pattern in a specific case will require flexibility and attention to a specific context. Every time I write a post, I could easily use double the space to articulate disclaimers, exceptions, and contrary examples.
In all that I write, my hope is to give parents things to think about and, hopefully, to talk about as well. I hope to help parents see potential blind spots and to provide an additional perspective. I am convinced that when parents combine all these things they will find the right answers for their unique situations.
The power of incentives vs. punishments
With that in mind, let me address the second of the 9 principles I mentioned: Teens can do just about anything, but they must be motivated properly.
One of the things I have realized about teens and adult is this: in their own lives, adults frequently respond to incentives. However, adults often expect teens to do things either to avoid punishments, bad consequences, or based on the idea that something is the right thing to do.
Consider the difficult things you do in your own life. I would imagine that a lot of these things you do come because of an incentive you hope to get. You got to work to earn a paycheck. You exercise because you want to feel/look good. You work hard in order to build a career or build savings.
Flip that around—what do a lot of people ignore or cheat on? Taxes. Driving the speed limit, other traffic rules, texting and driving, etc. On and on. A lot of the things that many of us ignore have to do with a situation where we are trying to avoid a punishment. The punishment just isn’t big enough to change the behavior consistently.
I suppose at some point, a punishment can be so harsh and draconian, that the disincentive will be potent enough to change our behavior, but I doubt most of us want to impose that level of punishment on your child.
I can’t tell you the number of parents I have seen over the years who decide they will try to punish their child into good behavior. It just doesn’t generally work all that well, not in the long term. It causes tension in the relationship, then, when the kid inevitably slips up, you have to impose the punishment, which just makes it more tense and you create a negative spiral. Often, punishments ignore the reason for the behavior, and thus, they are simply not successful.
At best, punishments prevent problem behaviors. They rarely create positive change.
I am not saying that there is never a place for punishment and/or some kind of negative consequences. There are times when it is critical to respond in this way. However, I maintain that punishments have very limited reach and impact.
One of the silver bullets of parenting
Here is one of the great silver bullets of parenting I have discovered: the more you can set up incentives for your teen, the smoother your life will be.
I have had people push back on this before. “Shouldn’t kids learn to do the right thing for the right reason?”
Well, yes. So should we all—and yet, most of us really tend to work by incentives.
At the same time, let’s not think of rewards and virtue as either/or binaries. Rather, think of rewards as training wheels, a way to help the child develop habits of intrinsic motivation.
If your child is not doing what you want them to do, try to come up with some incentives. Note: make sure you involve your child so that the incentives you come up with are sufficient to motivate your child.
Simply put, define the terms and the ratio of work to reward “If you do x, then you will earn y on the following schedule.”
Create some upward momentum and build some good habits. Once you have this going, move away from this fixed interval to a more variable interval: provide the incentive with less regularity so that the child never knows exactly when it will come. Then start stretching out the time that elapses between rewards. This is an important thing to do.
Ideally, you can then help your child realize that their life is better.
“Isn’t it nice when you do you your homework and you aren’t always in trouble?”
“Doesn’t it kind of feel good to have a clean room?”
“Isn’t it better when you have our trust?”
This then hopefully builds intrinsic motivation, which is far more powerful in the long run. But you have to start somewhere.
Remember: it is far easier to reward good behavior than punish or correct bad behavior.
Sea lions and 7th graders: A short case study
Many years ago, I was having a difficult time getting an unruly group of students to concentrate in my choir class. They just didn’t care. Nothing worked. Not lectures, not punishments, not threats, not calls home—nothing. And, in this case, the grade was simply far too distant to be of enough import to change their behavior on a day-to-day basis.
Then I went to a sea lion show at the St. Louis Zoo. I was struck by the fact that every single time the sea lions did what the trainer wanted, she threw them a fish. Every single time.
Adolescents are not sea lions—but they are mammals with developing brains. I decided to try the technique. I bought a huge bag of Starbursts and started throwing them out every time someone did something I wanted—answering questions, performing correctly, running errands, etc.
As the year progressed, I cut back. By the end of the year, I was giving very little candy, but by then we had created good habits (me as well as them—I learned that my manner had a lot to do with the dynamic). Class was much more enjoyable. The students did better work, and that created an upward spiral.
I should note that doing good work is not going to motivate someone on the front side. It can be very motivating once someone has experienced it, but it’s rare that the idea of doing good work will motivate reluctant teens. That said, I do think teens like being part of excellence, whatever the context. They like to feel they are doing good work, so a constant focus on doing good work can be very motivating over time. But again, it won’t jump start things, generally.
The more I thought about the idea of incentives, the more I found other, better incentives. For example, I found that the students would do almost anything to earn a few minutes of recess outside. That was something I leveraged with great success.
Over the years, nearly every difficult teaching or parenting problem I have had was most effectively solved through the careful, thoughtful (often prayerful!) application of the correct incentive. It is truly magical, and the wonderful thing is that it removes so many sources of tension and conflict.
A few other more internal factors for motivating teens
Another important key to motivate teens is that they will do almost anything for someone who they feel genuinely loves and values them.
Additionally, teens have very little power over their lives. They have so much of their lives defined by adults. If you realize that one of the things they often want badly is a degree of autonomy and control, as well as being seen as a competent adult (even though they aren’t!), you can use those to create powerful incentives.
Another important key is this: if you give them a task, job, or responsibility, do not do it for them. Once you do that, you have made it very difficult for them to have any motivation. On that note, do not give them a responsibility that you are not willing to truly let go of. If you give a responsibility, then you step in and do the task for the child, it will be very, very difficult to ever get them to take over again. So give them responsibility—but mean it!
One more note
I am on Spring Break this week (yay!) so posting may be a bit light this week.
Happy parenting; you’ve got this!
Best,
Braden