EP49: The Truth About Rewarding Children | Rahela Tayyebi

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]You know what my son did one day? He walked up to his sticker chart, looked at it, and just ripped it off the wall.

[00:00:07]And I stood there in the kitchen staring at his torn up chart on the floor thinking, "What just happened?" And honestly, looking back now, that was the smartest thing he ever did.

[00:00:24]>> [music] >> Hi, I'm Rahila Tayyabali, a trauma-informed parenting coach and a mom of two boys who has tried almost everything. Sticker charts, reward tables, if you're good, you get a treat system. I have been there. But today's video is going to make some of you a little uncomfortable because I want to talk about why rewards, stickers, charts, prizes don't actually teach children anything. And more importantly, what does. If you want honest parenting conversations, not the sugar-coated kind, subscribe and stay till the end because the last part of the video is the part that actually changed how I parent. So when my son was little, I thought I had found the answer. Five stickers for good behavior, gold star if he ate his food, smiley face if there was no shouting at bedtime. Yeah, it was perfect system that at least on paper.

[00:01:24]Does it sound familiar? Maybe you have got a chart on your fridge right now.

[00:01:29]Maybe you have tried it. Maybe you swear by it. There is no judgement because here's the thing, reward chart comes from a good place. You want less chaos in the house. You want more cooperation.

[00:01:41]You want your child to just do the thing. I get it. Maybe you have been there. I did the same thing. But here's what that was actually happening in my house. Most days, he didn't get the sticker. And slowly, without me realizing it, the chart stopped being about behavior. It became a record of his failure. Every empty box on the chart was saying something to my son. It was not very loud, but he could hear it.

[00:02:07]You couldn't do it today. You couldn't do it yesterday. You couldn't do it again. And you know what happens to a child who hears that over and over? They don't feel motivated. They feel stuck, you know, like defeated. If your child mostly can't earn the reward, you're not motivating them. You are making a record of everything they couldn't do. I remember one evening so clearly. I said to him, "If you don't shout at dinner, now, you will get a sticker." And he tried. I could see him trying. He was holding himself together, and then something small happened with his brother. His food was too hot, or I don't know, his brother said something, and I can't even remember what it was.

[00:02:50]And he shouted, and I took the sticker away. And he looked at me with his face, not angry. He was just tired. He didn't want to do it. And I thought I was teaching him to behave, but what I was actually teaching him was, "You are not enough. You keep failing. You keep failing, and you keep failing." This is not what I wanted to teach my child.

[00:03:14]That is not what I want any of us to teach our children. A reward a child mostly can't reach doesn't push them forward. It tells them over and over that they are behind. So, let's talk about what is actually happening here.

[00:03:30]Because this isn't just about my story.

[00:03:32]There is real research behind this.

[00:03:35]There is a psychologist called Dr. Ross Greene, and he said something that completely changed how I see my son. He said, "Kids do well if they can." That's it. That's the whole idea. If a child could be doing well, they would be doing well. And if they're not doing well, something is getting in their way. And it's not laziness, it's not the attitude problem, not that they don't care. It's something is getting in their way. Think of it like this. Imagine you are given a math problem >> [music] >> and it's three levels too hard for you.

[00:04:08]You don't even know where to begin from.

[00:04:11]So, you start to panic and someone says, "If you solve it, you get a chocolate."

[00:04:15]Does the chocolate help you solve the math problem? No, right? Because the problem isn't that you don't want to solve it. The problem is you don't have yet the skills to solve it. Understand this one thing, it changes everything.

[00:04:30][music] The reward doesn't give the child the skill, it just makes them feel worse for not having it.

[00:04:37]>> [music] >> Your child is not choosing to fail your reward system. They are struggling inside it and they don't know how to tell you about it. Now, here's something I want to address because when our kids struggle, we try to make sense of it and we end up using these labels. We say things like, "He's doing it for attention. She's manipulating me. He just doesn't want to try. She's testing all my limits." Such bolu to maybe a simple to give you but let's think about each one for a second. He's doing for it for attention? Okay, so you are saying that he has the skills to ask for attention nicely but he is choosing to behave badly instead because it works better? Have you ever seen a child who genuinely had the skill to ask for connection in a calm way but preferred to have a meltdown instead? Neither have I. If you say she's manipulating me, here's the thing about really good manipulation. You don't know it's happening. The best manipulators in the world, you find out years later. But do you know what a good manipulation actually requires? Planning ahead, controlling your own impulses, reading other people's emotions. And those are exactly the skills most struggling children don't have yet. I got to put that right here and manipulate the whole thing.

[00:06:02]Honestly, I wouldn't lose my sleep over it. Sometimes we say that my child he's very unmotivated. I never use this word about any child, never. Because the moment you actually sit down with a struggling child and ask what's hard about this, where do you get stuck, what feels too big to you, you realize unmotivated doesn't even come close to what's really going on. It's not that they don't want to, it's that something in the way and we have been calling that something by the wrong name. The labels we use for struggling children aren't just inaccurate, they stop us from asking the right question. What is getting in my child's way? Okay, so here comes the uncomfortable list. Things we use with children that don't solve the problem and don't teach the skill. The first one is time out, taking away recess, keeping them after school, detention, suspensions. None of these teach a child anything. They might stop the behavior in the moment, but they don't give the child the skill to do better. And now, I know this one's going to sting a little, stickers. Sticker charts, reward tables, star systems.

[00:07:17]But here's what Dr. Ross Greene says about it. A sticker is just a sticker. A child cannot have a relationship with a sticker. A child cannot talk to a sticker about what's hard. A child cannot feel understood by a sticker. And for children who mostly don't get the sticker, we are labeling them at very very young ages as the ones who couldn't do it. And the children who do get the sticker easily, they would have done well anyway. You have just taught them to do good things for a prize instead of because it matters. Researchers call this moving from intrinsic motivation to extrinsic motivation. Big words, but simple idea. Intrinsic means I do this because I care about it. Extrinsic means I do this because I get something out of it. So, when you reward a child for something they were starting to value, you actually reduce how much they actually care about it. They stop asking, "Does it even matter?" They start asking, "What will I get?" That's not the child any of us wants to raise.

[00:08:23]Stickers don't teach skills. They teach transactions. And the kid who cannot earn them, we are just tracking their failure at 4, 5, 6 [music] years old.

[00:08:34]So, I have taken the sticker chart away.

[00:08:35]I have thrown out the reward system.

[00:08:38]Now, what? This is the shift that changed everything for me. I stopped asking, "How do I make him do this?" And I started asking myself, "What is getting in his way? Is the task too hard? Is he overwhelmed before he even start? Is he tired? Is he hungry? Has something happened at school that he hasn't told me about? Does he actually not know how to do what I am asking?" Or you want to say game changer here.

[00:09:07]Because when you know what's getting in the way, you can actually help them. Not rewards, not punishment, help. Just sit with them. You say, "I notice this is hard for you. Let's figure it out together." You treat them like a person with a real problem, not a behavior to be managed by you. There's something else that I found. So, with my son, I felt like I was on his side, not watching him fail. He started trying differently. It was not perfect, and it did happen overnight, but it different.

[00:09:38]So, shift from how do I make them to what's getting in the way. That one question changes the entire relationship. You don't need a sticker chart to raise a child who behaves. You need a child who feels seen, who feels capable, who knows that when they struggle, you are going to sit with them and not score them. Because that child that child doesn't go through life asking, "What do I get for this?" They ask, "What can I do?" And that that is a very different child. That is the child I want to raise, and I think you do, too. If this resonated with you, share it with one parent who needs to hear this. Drop a comment below that have you tried reward charts? What happened? And I will see you in the next one.

[00:10:25]>> [music]