Few random things, completely unrelated...

[conuly]

Anybody heard of this book? The comic artist keeps reccommending books I'd already read (and liked), but this one is new to me. Should I devote part of my weekend to it?

From the Times:

In an effort to motivate our 7½-year-old grandson, Nathan, to call us, I decided on a monetary incentive: $1 for calling me in my office after school, $2 for

Comments

[leora]

Sometimes I wish parents/grandparents had to run their plans past psychologists. This has been well studied and the child is responding exactly as expected. If you over reward for a behavior, you make the person like the behavior less and less likely to do it if/when the reward is removed. This counts for things the person actively wanted to do initially. For things that the person doesn't want to do, you need to use the minimum amount of encouragement that will achieve the effect. Praise is a lot more effective for manipulating emotions. Yes, rewards affect behavior. It's easy to get behavior you want while the action is monitored using rewards and punishments. But it goes well against getting the behavior through intrinsic motivation of the child.

[conuly]

Forget psychologists, what about plain common sense? What person wants to think that they have to *pay* people to call them? Didn't that *ever* cross this woman's mind? (Apparently not, so don't answer the question)

[conuly]

And I agree with you, of course :)

What this woman *should* have done to encourage phone calls is twofold: start calling them more often and, additionally, talk to the parents about setting up a weekly phone call to her, that's made no matter what.

Which would set up a habit that'd be hard for the kid to break later.

[leora]

Oh, and it looks like it's a man, not a woman. It looks to be signed by Ray, which I think is more often a man's name. I can't get a clear bit of info on the sex from the text.

[conuly]

Edited.