In our first blog post my wife and I would like to share our story with KidPoints.
When our son was about four years old we wanted him to start building good habits. We wanted him to brush his teeth, clean up his things occasionally, and say “please” and “thank you”. We were looking for a structured way to reward him doing this as we knew he wouldn’t do it on his own.
A penny jar was never really a consideration because my wife and I did not want to give him money, or any form of allowance, for such simple tasks now, or even when he is older. We knew earning enough money to buy something meaningful would take too long for him. Speeding that up would only cost more for us. Even so, he would likely spend the money on candy and we didn’t need more of that in the house.
Trial and Error
Our first attempt was a craft pom pom puff ball jar along with a chart. Similar in concept to a penny jar but we got to set how many pom poms he got “paid” for things and what he can “spend” them on. For the first day, it worked pretty well after explaining the concept to him. He had several pom poms in the jar by bed time.
Image courtesy of www.freepik.com
The second day though, he’d found the weak spot. We were out running errands and he was being, let’s say discourteous. We reminded him that he can get rewarded for being polite and saying please and thank you. He quickly said, “No, that’s only inside the house. You don’t have any pom poms for me.” We quickly assured him that was not the case and he can, in fact, earn them everywhere. But he wouldn’t accept it and had already made up his mind that he couldn’t earn them outside the house, so his behavior didn’t matter.
Back to the Drawing Board
My wife and I knew we needed something that worked everywhere, that he could see, that would allow us to add and subtract points easily to make the process seamless and the small reward of added points immediate for our son’s short attention span. Professionally, I build software so whipping up a small website that does just that took only an evening. We had the first version of KidPoints the next day.
Our positive feedback and reward system now went with us wherever we go. We also now had the benefit of not having to count out pom-pom puff balls, pennies, or stickers. Not to mention this system can’t be tampered with as easily by a child or sibling.
To the Teenage Years, and Beyond
That was almost 10 years ago and we have been using KidPoints ever since. We’ve changed how we use it, just slightly, almost every couple months, especially in the younger years. That’s what we like about it, how we’ve been able to continue to tweak, modify, change, undo, then do over our in-home currency to meet our needs as those needs change.