Dad pays 14 year old daughter $200 to quit Facebook

It really bothers me to sit in the stands watching my son play football/basketball/anything ball and listen to parents compare notes on how much they pay their kids for a catch/TD/tackle/basket/good play.

I had a similar experience a while back. I was wondering if I was the odd man out - not paying my kids for performing. I tell my kids if they don't want to do a sport they don't have to, I would hate to think my kids where doing it only for the money. Wasn't there a plan a while ago to pay kids to attend school?

I read something about that in the book Freakanomics. They did a variety of pay-schemes where they paid kids to flat out get an a good grade in a class, paid kids money for reading books/doing homework, paid kids to behave in school, and paid kids for good attendance to school. They found that when kids were paid to read books and paid to have good attendance that performance (in terms of grades) was the best.

I kind of have mixed feelings about that, but if I need to use those tricks in order to get my kids to perform better in school I'll use them.

My kids are 2 and 4 years old right now. My 4 year old just started going to the public pre-school program offered by my local school district (NY state is good about things like that). I stress over and over again how important her school work is and I am genuinely interested in hearing about her day and discovering what she is learning in school. I have an awesome job (it is probably a dream job for some coin collectors out there (I work for the US Mint as a chemist. I test the purity of the gold, platinum and silver they make the coins out of and I get to see some pretty cool stuff)). The only reason I have that job is because I busted my ass in school and I even tell my naive-to-the-world 4 year old that too. So I'm corrupting her towards thinking that education is important from the get-go.

However, if parents aren't always there or if they are on the crappy side of the scale, I think that a bribing scheme to get kids to perform well in school could be a good thing. However, performing in sports and paying them for that is just stupid. It's emphasizing the importance in a game, not something they can use in real life.