Motivating Your Teen With Incentives

Hi. Thanks for tuning into today's episode of Parenting Your Teens podcast. I'm your host, Chris Taylor, and like every week we take a question that's submitted from a viewer at home and we answer it so that I can give parents practical tools that they can use right now to address any issue that they're facing with their teen. 

So today I'm going to take a question that I got in my practice this week, and it's really starting to tie together a lot of the other episodes that I've put out. And this is not just how to motivate kids to do things but how to create an effective incentive plan so that teens will motivate themselves on their own and want to do the thing that you're asking. 

What motivates your teen?

So here's the thing - we all are motivated by earning things, right? I don't know any person I know that goes to work just out of the goodness of their heart and doesn't care whether they get a paycheck or not. Now the only time this really doesn't show up and shouldn't show up is in relationships, because we never want relationships to be transactional, we want them to be based on sort of the selfless giving, meeting of needs and compromising throughout those disagreements. But again, this is about incentivizing to accomplish tasks, to get homework done, to get chores done and so let's just jump into what that looks like. 

Now I describe it as a daily incentive plan, why? Because law of diminishing returns shows up really quick in kids, delayed gratification is almost non-existent for at least younger teens and a lot of older teens as well, and primarily because their brain structures aren't fully developed to be able to support that forward thinking and that idea of delayed gratification and executive functioning. 

Structuring Your Teens Privileges

So what I'd like to do is talk about how to effectively build a daily incentive structure. Now the first thing that you want to do is you want to create a list of all the things that your kid is interested in, okay? And then once you get that, and here's a side note - this should always be done in conjunction with your teen, so this should be a sit down as a family talking it through. 

What are the things that you love? Is it video games, is it car, is it time with friends, is it your phone, is it riding your bike - whatever it is you want to make sure that you get that list down. 

And then you want to create a list of what are the chores that we need to have accomplished, or I should say tasks because chores and homework, and you want to list all those out, right? You got to get your homework done, you have to do the dishes, you have to take the trash out, you have to clean your room - whatever those things are, create a big list. 

And now this is where the rubber hits the road, what we're going to do is we're going to find a way to bridge those two things together. 

Your Teen Needs Independence

Now I'm going to back up a little bit. Your teen is going through a process of individuation which means they are rapidly approaching their independent self. Now we all frame that around 18, but kids start developing that really at birth but it doesn't show up in response to pulling away and wanting to do things away from the direction of a parent until the teenage years, generally. And we really need to reinforce that, because if we don't we're going to have a battle they're going to feel sort of disempowered and the likelihood of these things getting done is almost non-existent. 

So how do we do that? Well, the first thing we want to do is we want to create deadlines for when these tasks need to be accomplished. So say it's 5:00 in the evening, 6:00 in the evening, 8:00 in the morning - cleaning your room, whatever that might be. 

And then we create a chart, and that chart is very simple - there's three columns and those columns are do what, by when, to get what. Very simple - do the thing by this time to get the thing that you want. 

Now what you also want to do is create a lot of rows underneath that and start filling it in. I'll give you an example. Do your homework by 6:00PM; get access to video games for 2 hours. Take the trash out by 8:00PM and get your phone until bedtime. Here's a nice one - turn your phone in by 10:00PM to gain access to your phone in the morning. 

So you can link different ones together by saying, "See the second row," so that those two have to be accomplished at the same time before the incentive is earned. You can use anything and everything that you want at your disposal to incentivize. 

The Daily Incentive System

The key is it's daily. So say you have a kid that doesn't do it, it causes you frustration, and then what you do in response to that is ... generally I should say what parents do in response is they shut down the whole system - give me your Xbox for a week, give me your phone for the next four days. And kids just give up, right? They also have other technology that they can pull from, burner phones that they're keeping in their mattresses that they've got from friends that don't have service on it anymore, they can go get Wi-Fi at the local Starbucks or libraries, sometimes they keep them on all night, so kids are pretty savvy when it comes to this. 

But by doing it daily what we're saying is, "Okay, if you messed up today, you're right back in the saddle tomorrow." So it's not a punishment cycle, it's a reward cycle. And what we're doing is conditioning them to a new behavioral response. Within that, they learn how to meet their needs independently. And because it's by a deadline, parents are not nagging, arguing or prompting. If it doesn't get done, it's simply not done and the kid misses the opportunity to earn his incentive.

Now even with the hardest kids in my practice, I've seen kids turn around and get this within the matter of a couple of days. Those are kids that are outwardly defiance, cursing out their parents, throwing things in the house, slamming doors, punching holes in walls - you name it and they get it, right? Because as long as they do what they're supposed to do, they have access to all the things that they want. 

What about Disrespect?

Now you can also tie sort of an overarching theme into this of respect. So if you have a teen that's just sort of disrespectful to you in a day and they show up and they like maybe say something rude or curse you out or whatever that might look like, you can just shut the whole plan down and say, "Hey, we're not doing it. You don't have the opportunity to earn your privileges." Now understand that that's going to kind of bring on a fight or nothing that you want to have done is going to get done anyway, so be very cautious in putting that sort of overarching piece to shut the whole plan down. But with those kids that I just referenced earlier, that can actually be an effective tool, just to let them know that sort of you mean business. 

Now the language if a kid doesn't do something, because they're going to come up to you the first couple times and be like, "This is stupid. I don't understand. How come you did this?" And you just simply say, "Look, we created a plan," and remember the we-created because they created it with you, so you say, "We created a plan so that I didn't have to tell you what to do anymore. And as long as you do that you got to do everything that you want to do. So I'm really confused, I don't understand why you don't want to earn the things that you want." And you can just say, "Look, I know it didn't work out well today, but tomorrow is a new day and you have an opportunity to do it all over again." 

If you keep using that language and keep pushing it towards an opportunity to earn, and really hone in on that incentive the kid's going to buy in and the things are going to turn around really quick. Promise me, I've seen it time and time again. This is a single biggest tool I use in my practice because it works. 

Well, I really appreciate you guys listening and watching today. Like I said, this isn't one of those questions that we took from a viewer at home, this is just something that I heard a ton about in my practice, and honestly I hear it really every week so I thought it would just be good to give you guys this information. Again, I'm taking stuff out that I give to my clients and I charge a lot of money for, so take this free advice as really good advice too. 

If you do have a question that you would like answered on the show, please email that into chris@parentingyourteens.com. If you'd like to learn more about how to end teen defiance and disrespect, please submit those or please visit the website rather www.parentingyourteens.com, there's a ton of good tools and information that you can use to help your teen deal with pretty much any issue that you're going to find. 

So again, thanks for tuning in today, and we'll see you next time.

About Christopher Taylor, MFT

Christopher Taylor, MFT is a teen expert, therapist, author, and speaker with 16 years of experience working with teens and families. He provides teen and family therapy services in Folsom, Granite Bay, El Dorado Hills and surrounding areas. Chris is the author and creator of the Back to Basics: Tayloring Your Teen For Success Program, consisting of the book, workbook and online course.