You know, this is a sticky subject… No, we didn’t get a red cent when we got good grades in school. But at the same time, parents always talk about how grades are so important to get good jobs. So basically, we’re saying that good grades amount to money. Why not back that up in a way that kids understand? Sure, it can be viewed as a bribe, but if the children are studying and learning in order to earn the money, they’re still studying and learning. Who knows, the kid might find out he is in love with Writing or chemistry or physics in the process. I’m just saying, if it doesn’t hurt your kids or anyone else, why not try it out?

You know, this is a sticky subject… No, we didn’t get a red cent when we got good grades in school. But at the same time, parents always talk about how grades are so important to get good jobs. So basically, we’re saying that good grades amount to money. Why not back that up in a way that kids understand? Sure, it can be viewed as a bribe, but if the children are studying and learning in order to earn the money, they’re still studying and learning. Who knows, the kid might find out he is in love with Writing or chemistry or physics in the process. I’m just saying, if it doesn’t hurt your kids or anyone else, why not try it out?

My answer is Yes. I do this to my kids. I reward them for doing good in school, to which I think is really working. This is the same technique my mom did to us when we were in school.

I say whatever works. I spent hours on end arguing with my old man about why I shouldn’t be expected to study things I didn’t care about, and I suspect those arguments would’ve been shorter had I known there was a payday involved. And I would’ve been able to get better scholarships once I graduated. I see no bad side here.

I totally agree. If we work to make money, why shouldn’t they? I hate that whole “they should WANT to do well in school”. Really? Because I wouldn’t WANT to work full time if I didn’t get paid.

the reality is, plenty of better-off families HAVE been doing this for generations. I was the child of a single mom and a dad who didn’t pay his child support, so I wasn’t one of the kids getting paid for good grades, but I had friends who were growing up (and I’m 31 now). And the other side of the reality is that, for our parents’ generation, a decent job didn’t even necessarily require a high school diploma. I only have one grandparent who finished high school, and both of my grandmothers were stay-at-home moms. In today’s economy, many college degree requiring jobs can and have been outsourced overseas and the high school kids are seeing this and knowing that a college education isn’t necessarily a ticket out of poverty (especially when you add in the extortionist student loans they’ll need to attend even some community colleges or state universities anymore). So they really have little incentive aside from “love of learning” to study, it’s a damned if you do damned if you don’t future they see at the moment so they live in the now as much as they can (which is the default setting for teenagers anyway).

As I see it (and I was a public school teacher before I became a mom, my husband is an inner-city high school science teacher), programs like these level the playing field for families who CAN’T afford to “bribe” their kids to try harder the way the upper class kids have been for a long time. It may not always have been as direct as $10 for every A, $8 for every B (tho in some families it WAS that blatant), but you can bet that a lot of families rewarded the kids’ good grades with tangible goods/vacations/priviledges historically. And that’s something that, today, is even difficult for a dual-income family to manage a lot of the time.