Should we pay our kids to read?

Should we be paying our children at all?

Every summer, our local library runs a reading challenge. A few summers ago, the librarian (who I absolutely love and is a wonderful human), asked whether my children might be interested in participating.

The deal is, you read a certain number of books a week and then you get a reward for it - I think it was sweets or candy in this case.

Basically, you are paid to read. Because isn’t a reward just a euphemism for payment? When an adult gets “rewarded” at work, it’s usually a pay rise or a bonus, right?

Perhaps, just perhaps, rewards are to payment like spanking is to hitting (minus the violence.) In other words, they are the same, but codified in order to make them sound more palatable to adults: when it’s an adult, we say compensation or payment, but when it’s a child, we call it a reward. Am I onto something?

You may be aware of the piece that was published a few months ago on the New York Times, titled I Paid My Child $100 to Read a Book. There was some backlash to this, but the reality is that this mother is doing nothing new. She just happens to be privileged enough to be able to pay her 12 year old a substantial amount of money to read one single book. But really, that’s all that is new here.

Because a quick google will tell you that parents have been paying children to read books since the beginning of the internet, and probably a while before that. In the NYT piece, the author Mireille Silcoff, ascribes her daughter’s reluctance to read at least partially to having been gifted a new phone. Her once curious child was now apparently bored by anything that didn’t flash and lasted more than 30 seconds.

This mother was actually grappling with something we have all faced as some point in time: the angst of suspecting our child might not know what they don’t know, and that something (in this case, the phone) is preventing them from facing a little bit of discomfort, or newness, in order to experience something that they might ultimately love (in this case, reading an entire chapter book).

In other words, how do we encourage them to move outside of their comfort zones (if we’re not ‘rewarding’ them)? Can’t rewards help reluctant kids try new things?

I don’t want to bash this one person because I understand her predicament: she loves books and reading and feels that her child is missing out by refusing to even try to read a chapter book.

We’ve all been there. And some of us, who recognise that children are their own people, that have comitted to partnering and not controlling, have been in this place too. Except, that we have approached this differently: we have chosen to not view the relationship between adult and child as transactional and adversarial.

We are ON THE SAME SIDE. And so we treat our child more akin to a human that is on equal footing with us, than like someone we need to control or be in charge of. We see parenting as something we do with our children, not TO them. We take what our child has to say seriously, just like we take what our partner or friends says seriously.

Power matters

Should your husband pay you to exercise because he thinks it would be good for you?

Should your wealthy mother-in-law pay you to learn a skill she thinks you would love and would benefit you?

Notice these examples are of someone in a position of relative power over (husband, more resourced MIL), and you, who in this case may hold less power in the relationship. It echos the relationship between you and your child: we as adults, inevitably hold more power. We are using our power (in the case of payment, our financial power), to make our child do a thing.

This is not payment in the same way that we might pay the plumber to come and fix the kitchen sink. That would be an equal exchange - the plumber is solving a problem, and we are paying them for their labour. They are a professional and they can say no and dictate terms.

When you pay a child, you’re manipulating the fact that they have very little power in the home and in society, and little to no financial resources. They don’t have a way to earn money another way, and if they did then they probably would have had more autonomy about whether to refuse. If Silcoff had bought her daughter $100 of Sephora products the week before, then perhaps her child would have said no, because she would already have had the thing she was ‘earning’ money to buy.

Payment (especially when it’s not much) is only attractive to someone who is lacking resources. It’s an unfair bargain to begin with, because we are relying on our child’s lack of spending money and lack of autonomy. When a child consents to being paid for something, we can’t ignore the role that power has in that exchange.

I am not saying it’s always wrong to pay your child to do things. I’m not even saying it’s wrong to pay them to read. (I will admit, it doesn’t feel okay to me personally, but I don’t want to be out here judging other families. I don’t know your children, and you do.)

My kids painted the outdoor fence once, and my husband paid them for their work. I don’t know whether I would have done the same, but I didn’t find it that objectionable because it’s the kind of job we would have had to pay someone for anyway, or spend time on ourselves. It felt like more of a legitimate job than reading a book (which is arguably, not a job).

Reading is not a job

Reading a chapter book is non-essential. And reading is also something that we might want to consider fostering a sense of intrinsic motivation around.

Let me explain what I mean by “non-essential". Trying a food just because someone else wants you to, might be fun and nice if it’s consensual - but it’s not an essential element of learning and living. You will be just fine if you don’t do it.

Reading a chapter book at age 12, is also non-essential. Learning to read and being literate is crucial, but that can happen in so many different ways! I know plenty of adults who don’t read entire books. Perhaps they prefer to listen. Perhaps they get their information from all sorts of other sources, and don’t need to read a whole book. As much as us book-lovers might resist this idea, reading an entire novel or non-fiction book is great, but it’s not essential to living a full life.

So to go back to the paying - people are out there paying, bribing and rewarding children to do non-essential things, to do activities they’ve decided would enrich the child’s life, that they’ve decided are “for their own good”, but without which the child would be ABSOLUTELY FINE.

We’re using power over (whether it’s financial power or social power) to get children to do what they’ve arbitrarily decided is “a good thing.” We are not talking about learning to read here - you can learn to read without reading whole books back to back.

We are talking about coercing someone to do something because “they will enjoy it in the end.”

How do we feel about this?

The difference here is that if you pay your child to mow the lawn - this is a legit job that someone is going to have to do, that contributes to your community and home. There is a real value and point to this work.

When we pay children for academic work, or for reading, are we saying it is their job? Are we saying that learning is their job?

Because I see learning as an exercise in autonomy, an expression of personhood and creativity, something that is intrinsically human and that is life-long and universal. It’s not a job (and we know that making learning into a job can kill our desire to do it).

And if learning is a job, then shouldn’t we be paying children to go to school? (Just asking questions!)

Don’t we want instrinsic motivation?

Anyone can read a book if they’re being paid to - but is our child going to LOVE reading if we pay them to read? Will they switch from an extrinsic motivator (money) to instrinsic motivation around reading books?

Educator Alfie Kohn has spoken and written about the way rewards, which he believes operate in very similar ways to punishments, are damaging to intrinsic motivation - children might experience them as punitive, and they don’t generally help to foster an instrinsic love for the task the reward is offered for. Ontop of that, children who are rewarded for tasks they already love, might actually find they have less instrinsic motivation for those tasks as a result of being rewarded.

Research on self-determination theory has also shown that instrinsic motivation thrives best not by the use of rewards, but in an environment where the young person feels a sense of autonomy, competence and relatedness.

Is paying for academic work actually bribery?

Since reading is not a job, when we pay children to do it what are we really doing? We aren’t paying them for labour that somehow benefits us or our community. And so.. is paying children to read actually just a bribe?

bribe: persuade (someone) to act in one's favor, typically illegally or dishonestly, by a gift of money or other inducement.

I suppose we could drown in semantics but let’s just say that if we’re paying someone, they are usually offering something in return, that in some way benefits us.

We can talk up and down about whether a payment is a bribe, but essentially what matters is how a child perceives it.

From my personal experience, which is limited, my child would perceive a reward, bribe or payment for a non-essential task that was clearly not a legitimate job, and that did not immediately benefit anyone, as yet another tool of manipulation exployed by adults to get their own way.

This sounds harsh, but I know that this is how my children perceive it.

And so - while adults are out there paying children to read “for their own good,” I feel like we should all recognise that actually, we are paying children so we can feel like we are good parents because our child is doing the “right” kind of activity.

This feels sad to me, because it’s an example of the ways adults value some forms of learning and some activities over others, rather than getting curious about what it is that children love and why. Naomi Fisher wrote a great, short post about this very thing.

We are paying them for us to feel good.

In some ways, are shifting the burden of parenting to our child, and paying them for taking it on.

I don’t think this is an extreme point of view - because when else in life do you pay someone to do something that is entirely for their own good? Unless you’re somehow trying to manipulate them into something that is ultimately in your own interest?

In which case - can we call it what it is?

Or do we want to continue to pretend that this is an absolutely fair deal, that we would pay our sister or friend or anyone else to do something that is ostensibly for them, but is really for us to feel like we’re being a good sister/friend, etc.

Perhaps people do this regularly to other adults - but I find it a little strange. It’s a weird way of purchasing someone’s attention and love, almost. A weird way of checking off the “good parent” box, of feeling like our child has read the book, tried the new food, and therefore we are doing okay, while disregarding the impact on and opinion of our child.

Is “for their own good” a legitimate reason?

I have chatted online to several parents who truly believe that ultimately, their child benefited from being paid to do the thing they did. I even sort of lingered on it for a moment, and considered what would happen if I paid my child to do, say, maths.

And some issues came up for me.

The first is, But why? There would have to be a very compelling reason.

And the second is, ‘you’ll ultimately benefit from this’ is simply not a valid reason, because it assumes that we unequivocally know best, and we can exercise our financial power to prove it.

That does not sit right for me. This doesn’t mean my children don’t do things I suggest - my eldest is taking some Maths lessons because I felt like she could benefit from someone who can actually teach Maths, and explain it to her in ways she understands. We talked about it, and she agreed to give it a go. She can pull out at any time, and we regularly check in about how it’s going. Does she love it? I don’t think so. Would I pay her to do it if she hadn’t agreed to? No - I feel like that would be really disrespectful and manipulative, in this context.

What about our ND/PDA kids?

My youngest child very much operates on instrinsic motivation. If he is in the mood for something, or it is really interesting to him, he will go deep for hours, days, weeks. If he is not - then no reward/bribe will make him do it. I know some of you have kids like this.

When he was a toddler we tried reward charts and would you like to know how that went?

Day 1 was okay. But by day 2 or 3 he got so dysregulated about the whole thing that he scribbled all over the reward chart and then melted down that he wasn’t going to get the reward at the end. We did this once, many years ago, and it was enough to show me that actually this sort of thing, for the kind of child I had, was really manipulative and cruel.

On the flip side, my eldest asked us to make a reward chart, after seeing one at a friend’s house. So we made the aforementioned chart. She did all the things (which she would have done anyway, without any rewards, but simply from being asked), and then got a reward at the end (which she would have gotten anyway, any day at all, if she had asked - the reward was something like a cookie or a new set of coloured pencils.) You can’t see it but I’m rolling my eyes as I write this!

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In summary, I don’t want to be super dogmatic about whether we should or should not reward/pay our child, so perhaps the distinction here is that if we want our child to find joy in something, they will probably need to be instrinsically motivated. And if they don’t find joy in the things we love, well, we kind of just need to suck it up and deal!

If we just want them to help with chores - well, maybe payment is okay? We don’t personally do this, because I want my kids to figure out how to contribute to our household without being paid to do it, but I’m not going to judge you if you do. I get it. Sometimes a task is a means to an end eg. learning to drive so you can get a driver’s license, in which case extrinsic motivation is important! And figuring out how to manage our stress around it might be beneficial.

Ontop of that, I think it depends SO MUCH on the child themselves. Some kids need extrinsic motivation, some do better being self-directed or having an internal locus of control. Some really struggle with rewards and feel a lot of shame over not being able to do the task required, some do just fine, and others will do the thing without needing a reward.

As always, children are not a monolith and neither are families.

However…

What if our children had money of their own?

I wonder how this would change things and alter this entire conversation.

If children had money of their own, say from a regular allowance or from the government, then adults really wouldn’t have a whole lot of leverage, or in any case we would have less leverage than we currently do.

If children had money of their own, paying them for things would probably be less effective. Sure, they might still have strings attached to their own money by parents and others (although this could be something we could work on as a society), but rewarding them with things like candy or toys might not actually work because they would have access to those things independently.

And so we’d have to find another way.

I realise this is a total “what if” situation, but I think it’s helpful to think this way. If children had money, or at the very least, had more access to resources - then the adult-child relationship might look very different. Perhaps Silcoff’s daughter would have just gone to Sephora and bought all the makeup she wanted, and ignored the book. Perhaps, some time later, she would have picked up that book and read it of her own volition. Or maybe she would just have kept scrolling her phone, who’s to say.

The first time our local librarian asked me whether my children might want to do the reading challenge, I said no immediately. Everything I have learned about instrinsic motivation and self-direction, and what I know about my children, told me that rewarding them for something that they already do, and already enjoy, could actually do more harm than good. My children were 7 and 9 at the time.

Last summer, our librarian mentioned it again, and this time I said, Sure, ask them when they come in. (Sometimes my kids go to the library by themselves, it’s walking distance from our home.) Neither of them were interested, but what changed for me was that I’ve learned to trust their instincts and centre their autonomy over what I think it best, and I figured, why not see if they actually wanted to do it?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on paying children to do academic or other work - do you do this? Do you have strong opinions either way, or not so much? Do your children want to be paid?

Thanks for reading lovely people!

Fran x