While potty training my now three year old, I’ve talked to a lot of mothers who are going through a similar process. I’ve noticed that a lot of them seem to feel guilty about “bribing” their children to use the potty with candy or other treats. I wanted to take a short minute to say there is no need to feel guilty about this. Yes, offering your child a bead made almost entirely out of sugar is not the healthiest thing for them, however, it produces the desired result, so I, personally, feel that it is worth the cost. I taught my own daughter how to use the potty by offering her 10 jelly beans every time she did the deed in the proper location, in the proper way. So I just wanted to take a couple minutes to hopefully offer some peace of mind about what some consider bribery, and that is to briefly explain that there is a difference between bribing a child with candy and offering candy as a part of a reward system.

Definition time: In Applied Behavior Analysis, a bribe is something that is offered either while a behavior is already occurring in attempt to get that behavior to cease or to get a willful child to preform a behavior that they are resistant to. While it may work in the short term, the fact of the matter is that the behavior you are actually reinforcing is the likelihood that they will resist doing whatever it is that you have asked of them until they receive something in return. The image that usually comes to mind is that of a child throwing a tantrum as his parents are trying to leave the store. She’s screaming, she’s flailing, she’s knocking things off of shelves. His mother says “If you come now, I’ll give you a chocolate.” The child gets up, she dusts herself off, receives her chocolate and is on her way. In this instance, it isn’t the being compliant that is being reinforced, it is the tantrum, so it should come as no surprise that the child will throw larger and more outlandish tantrums in the future in order to receive a treat. Though it often is quite a surprise, and the parents are shocked that it continues to happen long after it is age appropriate.

This is different from a consistent reward system, in that the candy, stickers, access to a favored toy, or whatever it is you have in place to reward the behavior you are seeking, has already been established prior to even beginning. The child knows that they will get rewarded for a certain behavior, that they will only be rewarded if and when that behavior occurs, and that if they decide not to produce that behavior, they will not be rewarded. We can use my daughter’s potty training as an example. I told her that if she uses the potty like a big girl (behavior) she will be rewarded with ten jelly beans. Once we instituted this, and she consistently received jelly beans for her use of the potty and not for peeing in a diaper, over a matter of days, she stopped peeing in her diaper and started telling me when she needed to use the bathroom. And what may seem counter intuitive is that, opposite of what happens during bribery– where promise of a reward is essentially required, if not demanded– you can usually quite easily phase out the reward system once your child consistently performs the behavior, and the behavior will continue to… well… continue.