The Ikea incentive

I’m in a sophisticated phase of parenting called bargaining, negotiating and bribery.

I’m not proud, but I’ll do what it takes to ensure that the monkeys not only know that they shouldn’t pull their teacher’s hair in school but that they don’t actually do it.

A couple of weeks ago there was a lot of misbehaving at school. In a single day they were in and out of time out about four times each at school. I was unsure of how to handle it. But I knew that I didn’t really want to be the parent of the worst behaved boys at school. After all, our parent-teacher conference was just around the corner. So I tried a tactic I thought might work: bribery. 

At dinner, I set up the challenge: “If you can get through the day without getting into trouble tomorrow, we’ll go to Ikea for dinner.” By far, the monkey’s favorite place to go out to dinner is Ikea. I guess that’s what happens if you never take your children to McDonald’s. 

The next day I reinforced the bribe with a simple message. “There will be three rules for school today. 1) No crying when mommy drops you off. 2) Listen to your teachers. 3) Have fun. If you follow all the rules we get to go to Ikea for dinner.” For good measure, I let their teacher in on the set up. That way she could invoke the Ikea incentive if she needed to.

It worked like a charm. They were little angels at school and we had a fun dinner at Ikea. Easing my guilt on invoking the Ikea incentive was the fact that I am not the only mom at school that uses that particular motivation tool - we ran into another family eating there, too.

I was quite pleased with the result of the bribe. The problem, of course, is that I don’t really want to eat dinner at Ikea every night. This particular spate of bad behavior subsided without the need for another bribe, though, and we moved on.

Until this Monday, when the monkeys came home from school. “How was school?” I asked innocently. “Monkey #1 stepped on teacher’s toe,” reported Monkey #2. (No, they don’t actually call each other monkey). “On purpose or by accident?” I ask. “By accident and on purpose,” he replied. Turns out Monkey #1 stepped on the teacher’s toe a lot. Four times before he got sent to time out, in fact.

So I tried a new incentive – their favorite brunch place, Morning Glory. “If you behave in school all week, we can go to Morning Glory for lunch on Friday. You can have Monkey French Toast.” (Yes, it’s called Monkey French Toast. It is a delicious sugar bomb with fruit thrown in for good measure.)

I sent them to school with this great promise, only to end up with some very sad monkeys at the end of the day. See, they’re 3. And when Mr. Daddy picked them up from school, they wanted to go to Morning Glory for Monkey French Toast. They’re not really up on the days of the week and they didn’t understand that I didn’t mean tonight, I meant at the end of the week. And the end of the week looks a long way away when it’s Tuesday.

Morning Glory closes at 3, so I couldn’t make good on the promise they thought they’d heard. I talked them down, and explained everything, and they kind of got it, but not really. I had to keep explaining it and re-explaining it all week. They did behave in school, though, and we are going to Morning Glory tomorrow. 

The Ikea success vs. Morning Glory failure taught me something about incentives. The Ikea incentive works because there’s a direct correlation between their behavior and the reward. It’s timely for the way that they perceive time. The Morning Glory incentive might work for an adult, or even an older kid, but a week is too long long for 3 year-olds to wait for their reward.

The folks that I work with  are smart, overachieving people who generally do great work. We try to reward them for their work with salary increases, promotions, and recognition, but we don’t always do a great job. Often, I think, our incentives feel less like the Ikea incentive and more like the Morning Glory incentive. The connection to their particular contributions isn’t always clear. And we don’t always promote people and give them raises in a timely fashion. Of course, they don’t throw tantrums or hit me when I’ve missed the mark, but a lack of good incentives can still be a problem.

Sometimes I teach my kids. And sometimes, I learn from them.