Behaviour chart

The other day we decided to put a behaviour chart on our fridge. That’s a piece of paper with a green area in the middle, a yellow and a red area underneath, and a silver star and a gold star above. On it, we placed two stickers, one for each of our children. The stickers start the day on green and then depending on the childrens’ behaviour they can move up or down. A bad deed relegates them to yellow and then red; a good one promotes them to silver or gold. During the day they can travel up or down.

It wasn’t our idea. It was a direct copy from their school. They use the same exact chart for all the kids in the class to mark their behaviour during the day and make sure that everyone else sees where they stand. This is supposed to incentivise good behaviour as the kids want to go to gold and most definitely not go below green.

Our kids are lovely – as if a parent would ever say otherwise! – but we do have the occasional misbehaviour. Nothing too serious, but as every parent knows, it’s a constant struggle to enforce rules and to steer good behaviour. There are not enough sticks and carrots available, and the ones that exist do wear off very quickly. Our four year old daughter has been disciplined with the threat of not having her toys in bed at night if she misbehaved. We would remind her of this before having to enforce it a couple of times. This worked – for a while. Then she seemed to not care any more.

So we moved to this new plan. We drew the big piece of paper and put stickers with their names on blu-tack on them and told them that from now on this would be in effect at home just as in school.

And it worked! Amazingly, the threat of going to yellow influenced the kids’ behaviour more than the previous threats of withholding toys (I’m not even mentioning rational talking and explaining the merits of each action/behaviour).

I was positively surprised to observe this, because there are really zero consequences to going to yellow or red or silver/gold. There’s no other penalty or reward linked or associated with the chart, and the positions reset at the end of the day anyway. And still, my young daughter was more obedient than usual and fiercely protested (unsuccessfully) a downgrade to yellow when it inevitably happened.

I was then thinking that while in my adult mind this is nuts – she shouldn’t really care – it is in fact not that much different from what we rational adults do frequently in our society. When we struggle at work to win a promotion, or show off in social circles or even in anonymous social media to earn some reputation among other people. Sure, sometimes there are tangible rewards that come with social or professional status. But often there are not. And yet, the thought of being seen as lesser people terrifies us. And the prospect of being admired or otherwise looked up on motivates us.

We think we are rational adults, but we are still easily manipulated children. We think we know better, but we don’t. We are tricked by The Man, just as my kids were tricked by our behaviour chart.