What Actually Belongs on a Kid's Rewards List

Writing a rewards list feels straightforward until you actually sit down to do it. Every family lands somewhere different, and there's no single correct list. But two pieces of research are worth knowing before you write one, because they point at a real trap and a real fix.

The trap: rewarding what a child already loves

In one of psychology's best known field studies, researchers Mark Lepper, David Greene and Richard Nisbett watched preschoolers at Stanford's Bing Nursery School to find children who already loved drawing with felt-tip markers, then split them into groups for a 1973 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Children promised a "Good Player" certificate for drawing later spent about half as much free time drawing as children who got nothing, or who received the same certificate as a surprise afterwards with no prior expectation. Promising a reward for something a child already enjoys, with no other reason attached, can quietly turn an activity into a chore done for the certificate, not for itself.

The catch that matters for a reading list: this effect shows up specifically for kids who already find the activity interesting, and for rewards promised with nothing else asked of them. It isn't a blanket case against every reward, every time.

The fix: what kind of reward, not just whether

A separate study by literacy researchers Barbara Marinak and Linda Gambrell, covered in an earlier piece on this blog, found that third-graders given a book as a reward, or no reward at all, stayed more motivated afterwards than kids given a small toy or trinket. The type of reward mattered more than whether one existed at all.

Outside reading research specifically, psychologists Leaf Van Boven and Thomas Gilovich found in a 2003 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that people report more lasting happiness from experiences than from possessions, even accounting for price. Their explanation is that an experience gets reshaped and retold over time and becomes part of a person's story, while a possession mostly just sits there, inviting comparison to somebody else's better one.

What this points to on an actual list

Put together, the two studies push in the same direction without contradicting each other. A trinket handed over just for finishing risks becoming the whole point, and doesn't hold up well against a toy shelf at home already. An hour on the console, a choice of what's for dinner, a trip to the park, a friend over for the afternoon: these are exactly the kind of reward that's harder to get bored of, because it's an experience with the family rather than an object competing with every other object a child owns.

None of this argues against rewards altogether, and plenty of kids need a reason to pick up a book in the first place before any of this becomes relevant. It argues for choosing rewards that are experiences a grown-up actually wants to spend on their kid anyway, tied to something real the child did, rather than a drawer of prizes handed out on autopilot.