The reward screen trap. Why we do it and what it teaches.

I had just told him that vegetables are the price you pay for screens. That screens are the thing you earn when you do the things you're supposed to do. That the relationship between eating your dinner and playing a video game is transactional in exactly the same way that working overtime and buying something expensive is transactional.

I don't think I believe that. But I said it. And I've said it many times before. And every time I say it, I'm giving him a data point about what screens are for, and what vegetables are for, and how rewards work.

The research on reward systems is more complicated than parents' intuition about them. When you use something as a reward — anything, screens, sweets, screen time, money, a sticker on a chart — you change the child's relationship with that thing. The thing becomes instrumental. It becomes the prize rather than the thing itself.

The thing I keep returning to is the asymmetry. I made the vegetables punishment and the screens reward without ever deciding to. I just said what felt easiest in the moment, repeatedly, until it became the policy. Children are very good at identifying policies their parents haven't noticed they have.