To put it mildly, we have difficulties with my son, Jacob. More bluntly, he often feels more challenging than the other five children combined. One of the issues that we struggle with is that Jacob doesn’t seem to be motivated to do what’s expected of him. In fact, he frequently seems to be highly motivated to do the exact opposite of what he knows he should be doing. Another problem that we struggle with is that he doesn’t seem to be very good at anticipating the consequences of his actions. He tends to be (or at least tends to act) surprised when his ill-conceived schemes inevitably backfire on him.

This isn’t something new. The pattern has been pretty consistent for at least 3 years now, and I see no indication that things will change significantly in the near future. Several months ago, Marlene and I sat down together and brainstormed a novel way to attack the problem. The result was the Popsicle Stick Program.

The endowment effect

The endowment effect is a theory of economics (and by extension, psychology) that hypothesizes that people place more value on an item that they own simply because it belongs to them. The corollary theory is called loss aversion. Loss aversion is an attempt to explain and quantify the observation that people seem to prefer to avoid losses over acquiring gains.

This is all very academic. How does it apply to my unruly 6-year-old? Prior to the Popsicle Stick Program, one of the ways we attempted to motivate Jacob to perform well was to promise him a reward. For example, “if you clean up your toys, you will have time to play afterward.” Sounds logical, right? Not to my son.

So, in the spirit of the endowment effect, we have tried to re-image gained privileges as “privileges not lost.” We do this through the introduction of a fake currency: popsicle sticks.

The privilege allowance

Jacob has been provided with the following:

• income – Each morning, Jacob is given an “allowance” of eight popsicle sticks.
• catalog – We drew up a conversion table that shows the “price”, in popsicle sticks, of various privileges.
• expectations – We also provided him with a list of specific behaviors that would result in a popsicle stick being taken away from him.

Here is Jacob’s privilege catalog:

Item	Cost (sticks)	Opportunities per week
30 minutes playing a video game	1	many
Hot chocolate at Bob's Diner	1	1
Dessert after dinner	1	7
Play outside without adult supervision	2	up to 7
Stay awake during weekend naptimes	4	2
Go to Awana	4	1
Do something special with Daddy	5	1

I calculate that, ignoring video games, Jacob could do everything on this catalog for a grand total of 39 popsicle sticks per week. Since he has an allowance of 56 sticks each week, that should leave 17 extra sticks to play video games with, or just to save up.

The bank, and bigger rewards

There are three larger rewards that Jacob can save up his “money” for:

• Movie theater – 6 popsicle sticks
• Sleep over at a friend’s – 8 popsicle sticks
• Whole family spend the night at Chuck-E-Cheese – 15 popsicle sticks

These three rewards can’t be paid for out of Jacob’s revolving supply of popsicle sticks. If he wants to do one of these, he must pay out of the “bank”. Every Saturday at 6:00 PM, my phone reminds me to ask Jacob if he wants to put any popsicle sticks into the bank. The popsicle sticks that Jacob has in his supply can be lost or spent at any time. Sticks that he puts in the bank can never be lost, and can only be spent on one of the three large rewards.

How well does it work?

I have to admit. I am a bit disappointed with the results. When we were planning out the system, I had such high hopes, but it has not been the silver bullet that I had been dreaming of. Looking just at the numbers, the outcome doesn’t seem all that impressive:

• Jacob has never once, in several months of this system, put a single popsicle stick into the bank.
• He has purchased a privilege costing more than 2 popsicle sticks only a handful of times, despite many dozens of opportunities.
• I haven’t calculated exactly, but I’m pretty sure that more than 90% of his sticks are either lost because of behavior, or go to playing video games.

Yet, Marlene and I both agree that it is worth continuing with the system. Here are some of the good results that have come from this program:

• Jacob is able to plan at the beginning of the day what he wants to do with his popsicle sticks.
• When he is (almost inevitably) not able to accomplish his plans, I can ask him what interfered, and he is able to relate to me specific events that prevented him from cashing in.
• Jacob has a very specific measure to help him gauge his behavior.
• Marlene and I can also better track behavioral trends over long periods of time, based on his spending.

I’m going to conclude with a story about a recent interaction between Jacob and Marlene. Marlene instructed Jacob not to do something. Jacob looked right at her and deliberately did what he was told not to do. Marlene took away a popsicle stick. He made a face at her and did the forbidden act again. She took away another stick.

This repeated several times until Jacob got very agitated and started to throw a fit. It turns out that he had a specific number of popsicle sticks that he wanted to spend that day, and he had been sacrificing the extra ones to make a point. Unfortunately for him, he got carried away and accidentally lost one more popsicle stick than he had intended to.

The Popsicle Stick Program, while not quite what I had hoped for, has been successful at highlighting Jacob’s impulsive behavior. I believe he is more aware of his actions and their consequences, and that’s a pretty good place to start.

– danBhentschel