Imagine this situation: You’re cooking a new recipe for dinner and
you are so excited about this new dish that you can hardly stand it. At
5:15 p.m., however, you suddenly realize you are missing two
essential ingredients. To make matters worse, your six-year-old and
eight-year-old are in the other room playing well together for the first
time in two and a half years. You’re going to have to interrupt them,
and there’s no time to get a sitter.
Here’s what you do. Tell the kids that you have to go shopping. It
will take about an hour, and they have to go with you. You know they
don’t want to, but you’re stuck. Tell them the deal will be this: If
they’re “good” while you’re out (meaning they don’t hit a count of 4
—you’re giving them an extra count because of the length of the trip
and because they don’t want to go), you’ll buy them a treat. Their
reward will be a dollar in cash or a dollar’s worth of whatever else
they may want to buy. If they hit the count of 4 during the trip,
however, the reward is gone.
Some parents feel this is bribery. It is! But the real definition of
bribery is paying someone to do something illegal. Here we’re paying
the kids to do something legal, and it works.
If the Kids Do Want to Go
My wife and I had a very interesting experience using a TOA tactic
with our kids when we initially tried going out for ice cream in the
evening. The first few times we went out for our after-dinner treat, the
kids fought like cats and dogs in the backseat. By the time we all got
our ice cream, no one was in a party mood anymore.
So finally one evening I told the kids this: “Guys, we’re going out
for ice cream. But there’s going to be a new deal. If you guys hit a
count of 3 before we get to the store, we turn right around and come
home. Nobody will get any ice cream.”