Parents, Think Again Before Bribing Kids to Read

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By Lauren Barack November 23, 2010

Bribery is a last-resort tactic parents sometimes use to get kids to finish their homework or a project. According to a recent survey from educational publishing firm Pearson, in the U.K. nearly 50 percent of parents admit to bribing their children to read by offering incentives such as more TV and computer time and sweet treats.

Why the bribes? Nine out of 10 U.K. teachers surveyed believe that reading is becoming less appealing to kids in a digital age, and 86 percent of educators say kids would much rather log onto a computer than read. In fact, children are so turned off by reading that 42 percent of parents must resort to some form of bribery to get them to read, the study adds.

There is some hope, however. Seventy-nine percent of kids say exciting characters would make them more inclined to read, and 66 percent of kids say they'd read more if books were on a computer. And educators agree—80 percent of primary school teachers in the U.K. say kids in their classes would read more at home if they were able to use their computers.

But parents should be warned: bribing children to read and do well on tests isn't an effective way to increase their academic achievement in school, says a Harvard University study released earlier this year, which was based on incentive experiments conducted in Chicago, Dallas, New York City, and Washington, D.C. public schools.

"Remarkably, incentives for output did not increase achievement," says Roland G. Fryer, a professor in the Department of Economics at Harvard University, in his report.

Even teachers are being bribed with pay incentives to help get student test scores up. Yet a recent report from the National Center on Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt University says that tactic doesn't raise student achievement either.

"While the general trend in middle school mathematics performance was upward over the period of the project, students of teachers randomly assigned to the treatment group (eligible for bonuses) did not outperform students whose teachers were assigned to the control group (not eligible for bonuses)," writes the authors.

Nonetheless, incentives are hard for parents to dismiss, and getting a child to complete 20 minutes of reading before playing the Wii may work in the short term. But in the long term, the key is finding ways to make reading and studying just as fun as surfing the web.

This article originally appeared in the newsletter Extra Helping. Go here to subscribe.

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