A Token Economy (Bribery and Bullshit)

It was a busy week.

Spent some time on Wednesday at my new school with my manager and my new assistant. I did not meet him at the training session last week, he was on vacation. So this was the first time we officially met.

Jim is very nice, and I think we'll work well together.

He's smart and funny and I'm sure we'll get along. He was a great help in getting toys and games onto our rolling shelves and putting things away in the little room we have for our stuff.

He already knows I won't be participating in any kind of trinket/ticket/condescending bribery games with the kids because I talked briefly about it with him.

Funny story about that.

Our inclusion specialist, Wendy (the only person I've met so far that I really don't like... and no, the reason for my dislike is not because she thinks a reward system is a good idea) had scheduled a Zoom meeting with me, my team and our manager.

Before the meeting, I received a questionnaire via email. One of the questions asked my feelings about using tickets/stars/trinkets to 'obtain compliance' with my group.

On that survey it was referred to as positive reinforcement, but I prefer to use the more accurate term, operant conditioning. If what you're doing with a large group of kids makes some of them feel good at the expense of others, it's not positive.

It sets up a hierarchy which places a power tripping adult at the top (Hey, Ma! Look how great I am at controlling kids!) and fosters competition. Coercion is not a positive or respectful way to interact with young humans.

It makes a lot of extra work for the adult in charge, too. Keeping track of stars or tickets or whatever takes extra work and time.

Let me tell you... we do NOT have time for extra work.
We're kept plenty busy as it is.

Whatever rewards you're punishing kids with are inevitably unfair, too. Good behavior is a broad category and 'right' is a subjective concept.

I won't subject my kids to a token economy. About a month after this company hired me I had a lengthy discussion with Wendy about Alfie Kohn's books,  intrinsic vs extrinsic rewards and told her that cleaning up the LEGO or the art table or treating each other with respect should never be tied to any kind of reward or punishment.

"We all clean together because we all made the mess together. The kids participate in the clean up because they are part of our team. I get up and clean, too. I help them organize our shelves. We all just work together and I have a constant dialog with them, both about their expectations and mine. If there are issues between kids or a pattern of behavior that needs to change, I talk to them. We sit down together and figure it out. No reason for all that extra stuff."

We did talk a bit, and (of course) she remained certain then and still believes now that subjecting children to a system of bribery and bullshit is an effective and necessary ingredient for a program's success.

She seriously could not understand how I take care of problem behaviors without cheesy prizes and some kind of system for keeping track of how good kids are.

Fair enough, because I seriously don't understand why people are so ignorant about kids. Weren't they children at one time? I remember so clearly what it was like to be a kid and how powerless I felt.

I tried not to be a jerk, but I did refuse to implement anything like that in my program with one exception. If it's part of a behavioral plan that's instituted by the child's teacher/counselor/parents, then of course I'll do what's asked. 

"I won't like it," I said, "But I won't undermine what a family and school have decided."

When my manager followed up with me, I assured him that this is a hill I am willing to die on. He said that I probably wouldn't have to die.
So far, so good. Ha.

Wendy is well aware of my feelings.
Can't imagine why she thought those feelings would have changed since March, which is when we had that conversation.

So she told me to notify my team about the planned meeting and send them the link so they could participate only to cancel at the last minute 'based on your responses to the survey I sent to you'.

Since I don't have any kids who are on some kind of behavioral modification plan, she decided that we don't have to meet after all. Good. I didn't want to go through the whole thing again. I already said no. That's not changing.

It feels inauthentic and dishonest for me to use those methods in a large group when mutual regard and straightforward conversations feel so much more respectful to me.

It's different for people to do things like that with their own kids, but in my setting and with a large group, I don't find it necessary and won't be pushed into it.

"Positive reinforcement"?
Manipulative crap described in less ugly words.
Why not just say operant conditioning or behavior modification?

And, if you use those flowery phrases rather than being straightforward, are you fooling yourself?
Somehow I doubt it.
You know what you're doing.

So no meeting about manipulating kids this week.

On Wednesday afternoon my new manager (if she's even 30 yet I'll eat the candles on her next birthday cake and possibly the ones on mine) was perplexed when I told her that I didn't need the bag of prizes she brought to me.

"In 19 years of doing this job, I have never had to resort to bribery," I told her. "I'm not willing to start doing that now, either."

"Well, I wouldn't call it bribery," she said.

"Really? That's what it is. Giving kids rewards for expected contributions to the group instead of just expecting it and having a dialog sounds like bribery to me."

I could see the gears sort of grinding along. She is very young, but she's above me on the food chain at this company. I'm fine with that, I have no interest in doing her job. I'd hate it and I wouldn't be good at it, either. I know exactly where I should be and it works.

So then she *had* to say something more.
Couldn't just... leave it, now could we?

I mean, she's a MANAGER!
She has to show me she knows a lot about my job.

She might, I don't know her well enough to have asked about her job experience. She's not a jerk. She isn't a stupid person.

I like her just fine, really.

And I'm aware that it's a pain in the ass to have someone like me. I'm direct and opinionated. I know this.

But I'm willing to bet she was eight years old or so when I started doing this work. I have more experience with children than she does.

She said, "Well, if you're not going to do some kind of incentive system, I would just encourage you to give them a lot of praise and positive feedback."

Flip me a fish, guys, I didn't say, "No shit, Sherlock."

I smiled and said, "This isn't my first rodeo. So far I've managed to have respectful interactions and conversations with kids and most of the time, things go along smoothly and work out pretty well that way. Have you read Alfie Kohn's Punished by Rewards?"

Of course she hasn't.

So I told her to,"Read it. Then come back and we'll talk."
(Spoiler... she's not going to read it.)

We were busy with getting things ready for the family back-to-school event that was to happen that evening, and didn't spend any more time on the subject.

I also feel like it's a waste of my time to really get into the issue with her.

To tell her that instead of straightforward conversations with other people (kids are people, too, just haven't been doing it as long as we have) a reward system makes interactions into transactions.

Rewards work to get the desired behavior, but they don't change how kids think. I'd rather help them learn self control than do some sort of superficial guidance for my own convenience.

The carrot and stick method was invented to get donkeys to work.
Plod along doing whatever their masters wanted.

The difference is that we're dealing with human beings, not jackasses.

Why is this so hard to understand? I realize that people get ideas about stuff like this, and I'm no different, my mind is certainly made up.

But I've changed. I used to see incentives as a good thing. Possibly a neutral thing. I didn't know it could be harmful.

It's only been since I did a bunch of reading, even more reading, expended a lot of thought energy and observed the kids I work with that I was able to think about it differently. The process took several years.

I know I'm once again tilting at windmills.

Haha, I guess I'm the one who's hard to teach.