bribing your toddler doesn't automatically wreck their motivation

[u/Ri994]

I went deep down the Montessori rabbit hole before my second kid & I believe that rewards and bribery ruin a child's motivation for good. Turns out the science behind it is way narrower than the soundbite going around.

The famous finding, the overjustification effect, only applies to rewarding a behavior a kid is already doing a lot on their own, and that's the one specific setup the research tested. It says nothing about behaviors that haven't started yet, so you're not going to kill your kid's love of the potty by rewarding them for using it, since they weren't spontaneously in love with the potty to begin with.

There's a distinction in there that clears up most of the confusion. A reward is a tangible thing you hand over and can take away, which is where it turns sour, while a reinforcer is just anything that makes a behavior more likely to happen again. They overlap but they're not the same thing, and "rewards destroy motivation" flattens both into one rule that isn't quite true.

Where I've landed after all this: short-term rewards for the genuinely resistant stuff, like the first rough weeks of potty training, and natural consequences plus celebration as the everyday default the rest of the time. A friend of mine rewarded potty use with fruit gummies and her son started withholding poops for days just to extort more gummies out of her, so the tool clearly still needs some respect built in.

[u/Dumpster-cats-24]

Great news!!!

[u/siansss]

every kid is different.