Parenting Defiant Teenagers: The Problem with Using Rewards

How many times have you heard to use a reward to motivate your teen? The idea is simple - reward good behavior and the good behavior will occur more often. The only problem is that when you're dealing with an Oppositional Defiant Disorder teen, or a normal but difficult teen or difficult defiant teen, giving rewards can be a big mistake.We're going to discuss the three basic problems with giving the rewards.

One problem with using rewards to motive your teen is this is not how your teen's world operates. Your teen has to learn to listen to what he's being told to do without rewards.

For example, let's say your son goes to school. When he enters his classroom and the teacher has 30 children to teach. She cannot make a private deal with each teen by giving rewards to get them to behave. This is not how your teen's world functions. That's not how your world functions either. When was the last time you received a note from the police department for not speeding on your way home from work? The world doesn't work that way.

The second problem is teens are smart. Your teen is going to catch on to the idea of getting rewards for his behaviors and he's going to start holding out for more.

So for example, when your child is 3 or 4 years old, you might give him a little sticker or something to get him to do something so he doesn't ride his tricycle in the street. When he's 9, you might have to buy him a videogame to get him to wear his helmet when he rides his bicycle. But what are you going to give your 17 years old not to drive drunk; a new car?

The rewards just escalate onward and onward. Your teen understands that you're rewarding his behavior and he's going to start holding out for more and more and for better and better rewards.

The third problem, and this is really a big problem with an oppositional defiant disorder teen and teens who are just difficult in general, is that sometimes the reward just is not big enough. You just can't buy good behavior.

So why is this?

The real issue is that the major problem ODD teens have is they want to be in control at all times in all situations. They want to be the ones in charge. So if your teen refuses to listen to you and he gets away with it, he's the one in charge.

There are some things money can't buy, and no rewards that can beat the pleasure of an ODD teen feeling he's the one in charge.

So what typically happens when you try to motivate your oppositional defiant disorder teen or difficult teen with rewards? Let's take a simple case. Let's take the case of Robert.

Robert is 13 years old and Robert is a teen with oppositional defiant disorder. As often happens, he's a very smart teen. Robert's mother wants him to take out the garbage on a regular basis.

There are going to be times when Robert doesn't mind taking out the garbage. It doesn't bother him that much to do it. But at other times, it's going to happen that he'll be upset with his mother or bothered by something else, and he's going to really want to assert himself. In this type of situation, there's nothing his mother can do to get Robert to take out the garbage.

Let's say Robert's mother is someone who uses rewards to motivate her teen. She is trying to get Robert to take out the garbage regularly so she has made up with Robert that he gets a certain prize for taking out the garbage. She finds that the reward she has chosen is working less and less, so she realizes she needs to increase the reward to take out the garbage more consistently.

Maybe Robert will do it at that point. But, when Robert's mother does that, she has fixed the price of taking out the garbage at a higher level. Robert will never take out the garbage again for less.

And that's the basic problem with giving rewards. The size of the reward just escalates and escalates.

That's not to say that rewards cannot be used as a very powerful technique to motivate your teen to listen, even if your teen has oppositional defiant disorder or difficult behavior problems. However, the problem here is the way rewards are commonly used to get behavioral compliance.

There are ways you, as a parent, can use rewards properly to motivate even the most difficult defiant teen and we will discuss in a different article.