Use Behavioral Design To Take The Pain Out Of Kids’ Chores
And Yours, Too
1: On Allowance
About two years ago, we switched our kids from a coin-based system (adapted from a behavioral therapy technique) to allowance. This was a major shift, because the coin system and an allowance have two very different purposes, but most parents don’t see the difference.
In brief, in the coin-based system, when your child does something good (like clearing the table) you give them a coin. When they do something bad (like hitting their sibling) you take a coin away. When they reach X coins (10, 20 etc.) they can trade it in for a fun toy that they want.
The intent is clear: the coins reward good behavior and punish bad behavior.
Allowance is much different. It is usually given at the end of the week, so it is not immediately gratifying. It is a collective incentive for a catch-all assortment of activities, so it does not reward any specific behavior. Its value is also much greater. A coin in our house had a real monetary value of about 20 cents when traded in for a typical prize, whereas the lowest increment of allowance these days is a dollar. This makes allowance much less granular.
For the above reasons, allowance is a poor reward structure for behavioral science and gamification.
Meanwhile, the value of a dollar is “real,” and not symbolic. It is more analogous to a salary. In most jobs, mal-behavior results in a correction from your manager, not a reduction in pay, and your boss cannot go into your savings account and take away money they previously paid you.
The purpose of an allowance is to get kids comfortable with money (owning it, spending it, managing it, and understanding its value), not to act as rewards and punishment or behavioral correction.
So when a kid refuses to do a chore, what do you do? Threaten to not pay them six days from now? When they already have $30 saved up and their allowance is $2? Clearly other techniques must be employed.
2: On Coercion
At a loss for a meaningful system of reward and punishment, many parents turn to other forms of coercion: yelling, bargaining, and threats.
I don’t recommend any of these as a regular solution.
You hate yelling at your kids. It makes you feel bad and it sends a strange message about how the world works. Of course, everyone loses their temper sometimes. But do you want to resort to yelling every day? Even if you don’t mind doing it, it loses its punch after the 10th time in a week.
Generally, we shouldn’t be bargaining with our kids, either. An example of bargaining might be, “I’ll take out the garbage if we can get ice cream tonight.” Tying chores to an extrinsic reward undercuts their purpose. Chores must be done to keep the house in order, not so we can eat ice cream. And once the expectation of ice cream has been added to taking out the garbage, why would a kid ever do their chores without promise of a treat?
Oh, and let’s not forget, they’re already getting an allowance, so if they want ice cream, they should go and buy it.
Threats are effective due to a principle known as Loss Aversion. Yu-kai Chou calls it “Core Drive #8: Loss & Avoidance.” The fear of losing something you already have (money, possessions, privileges) is something like twice as motivating as a reward of the same value. This is because people are wired to highly value what we already own through a behavioral science concept called the Endowment Effect.
So threats work, and are sometimes necessary (“No TV for a week!”), but should be busted out as a last resort. They can be highly motivating, but combine the worst bits of yelling and bargaining. After all, what’s a threat besides a backwards bargain delivered through a yell? Use them only to break extreme log jams.
3: On Disentangling Chores And Allowance
The first step in making it all make sense is separating chores from allowance. The chores are done because they need to be done. The allowance is given to teach responsibility with money. One is not a reward for the other. If the allowance is “earned” it is earned by being a good member of the household.
4: On Being A Good Member Of The Household
Although your kids are children, they can understand good citizenship. While they’re still in lower grades at elementary school, they need to begin taking on responsibility for themselves and doing what they can to make life better for others.
When they do their chores, they need to understand that they are doing them because they need to be done, not for a reward. But, it’s not enough to tell them a chore needs doing. They must understand why.
For example, my 9-year old son Finn has been cleaning out the cat boxes for about a year now. We chose this chore for Finn because he loves the cats very much and because we hate cleaning the litter box.
Yu-kai Chou describes this as “Core Drive #1” in his Octalysis framework: Meaning & Calling.
It’s a dirty job! Maybe the worst one in the house. But it needs to be done. Why? Because the cats need a clean place to do their business.
The cats are living, feeling beings who we are responsible for. When Finn doesn’t want to do the littler boxes, we can remind him, “If it stinks to you, imagine needing to crawl in there every time you need to pee.” Sometimes the explanation is longer and takes on more detail, but the idea is the same. “If no one clears the table, we won’t have anyplace to eat.” “If no one cleans the sink, we all have to look at spit and scum, and it makes life less pleasant.”
If they are a member of the family, they should be a good member of the family, and that means being responsible for their possessions and looking after others.
5: On Selecting Chores
We already discussed one of the keys to selecting the right chore: making it relevant to the child. Finn loves cats, so we tasked him with looking after them.
There are other ways of making chores relevant, too.
Most kids have bad habits that require work to compensate for. They leave toothpaste in the sink. They leave their clothes on the floor. They leave their dishes on the table and their trash all over the house.
Assigning them to keep the areas of the house they befoul the most neat is a good way to correct these habits! Do your kids leave toothpaste in the sink? Their chore is to clean the sink.
This way, they begin to see the effects of their own habits, and start to correct them all on their own. If they are responsible for an area of the house, they are more likely to keep that area of the house cleaner in the first place.
Lastly, you can help your kids select chores for themselves. Come up with a list of possible chores together, then help them narrow that list down to a workable set of easy, medium, and hard chores appropriate for their age. Not only are we more likely to follow through on an action we decide for ourselves due to the Endowment Effect, this method also aligns with Self Determination Theory, which I’ve discussed at length before.
6: On Unpleasantness
Now for the real problem: Doing chores sucks. If it didn’t suck, no one would mind doing them. We can make them more motivating to do (with Meaning & Calling, or with Loss & Avoidance). We can (and should) also make them easier by selecting a very simple chore or slate of chores, then adding difficulty as time goes on.
For instance, start with: “Pick up one piece of clothes and put it in the laundry” at age 5 before eventually working up to “Fold and put away all your clothes” at age 10.
But the real problem with chores is that their suckiness makes them de-motivating. So to help our kids do them, we need to make them suck less.
One good way of doing this is to pair the sucky chore with a truly pleasant activity. If you’ve ever listen to a podcast while you do the dishes or commuted, you know about this already.
In a large behavioral science study, Katy Milkman showed that people who were given access to an audio book they could only listen to at the gym were much more likely to meet their exercise goals.
There are many great audio programs for kids available as podcasts or audio books. The key is to pick one your kids genuinely love listening to, and to play it (or offer to play it) every time they do the chore. Of course, this only works if the chore is long enough to justify it (ex. folding laundry) and won’t work if it’s brief (ex. picking up one piece of clothes).
Another way of making a chore more pleasant is to make a game of it. We can do this with story-telling, or with actual gameplay. An example of making a chore into a game with story-telling would be saying, “Finn, it’s time to play Clump Hunter!” Then have him clean the litter box.
An example of using actual game play might be making a competition out of a chore (racing against a clock or a sibling). You can be creative in how you do this, but the end result is the same: the chore sucks less.
7: On Celebration
Yes, I know we said not to tie chores to rewards a few sections ago, but this isn’t a reward per se. It’s a celebration!
Your instinct might be to downplay your kids’ chore-doing. After all, they are doing the chore because it needs to be done, and you’ve been doing them yourself for decades without fanfare.
But the fact is, we are more likely to repeat an action that is paired with a dopamine rush. This can be achieved through celebration.
Celebration can come in many forms: ahigh five, or “nice job!” It can be a compliment on how clean the area now looks, or how quickly and well they completed the ask. Or even “Thank you.” People love to be appreciated.
Lastly: time the giving of allowance to align with chore completion.
Yes, I know I spent about 500 words explaining that chores and allowance are separate, but there’s a difference between setting up a dependency between them and simply timing them together. A stack of bills can really up the power of a celebration. So at the end of the week, when you hand the allowance over, make sure it comes right after the completion of a big task when possible.
That way, they will remember how good it felt to achieve their task, not how much it sucked to do the chore.
Sam Liberty is a father of two, and gamification expert and serious game consultant. He teaches game design at Northeastern University and was lead game designer at Sidekick health.
