Free Gratitude & Kindness by Dr. Carla Fry Page B

completion time; clarity with what successful completion of the job entails; whether the payment is by the job, hour, or other unit of measurement; whether partial payment is allowable for partial completion, etc.).
Paying a child for good grades on their report card.
    Although we do not see this as a pure overpayment situation, we do have thoughts on this. If we teach our children that high grades are anything but for their own benefit (current and future), we are missing excellent learning opportunities. We also know that a child taught to focus on grades fails to appreciate the most important parts of the school experience are:
Ability to set and meet goals
Ability to study and learn
Ability to delay gratification and to work toward something in the future
Ability to motivate themselves when the going
gets tough
Ability to work well with people—both agreeable and disagreeable
    We see more children who are taught to overly focus on
A’s cheat on exams, plagiarize during their writing, purchase the previous year’s exams (college level), copy homework from peers, or sweet talk parents into doing 90 per cent of their science project for them. Yes, the chances of achieving an A are increased, but at what cost to personal integrity and work ethic?
    We see, as with the difference between Process vs. Person praise later on in this chapter, that when we focus recognition (“I’m proud of what you did this semester”) on the letter grade instead of the effort, work ethic, social adeptness in working with teachers/ peers, etc., a child’s
self-esteem is not well supported, and they are easily shattered if, for whatever reason, they don’t attain A’s.

Gratitude Tip Be careful not to confuse teaching your child the value of hard work, earning, and money, with bribing them to do chores. If they will not do it for the sake of contributing to the family, there is very little lesson involved.
    Avoiding the Landmines of Bad Precedents
    The same study that we conducted between 2012 and 2013 revealed a few other interesting facts about our survey group. There are bad precedents running rife in North American homes, contributing to the increasing number of entitled children:
Parents reported using rewards and bribes as a method of controlling their children, or making them do things that they did not want to do (homework, sports, piano practice, chores).
Parents also reported that it is easier and quicker to just do something for their child instead of making the child do it for themselves. For instance, a parent said, “I’m not patient. I can’t stand waiting five minutes for my six-year-old, who is struggling to tidy the covers on the bed. I’d rather just tidy it myself.”
Parents reported that they sometimes make parenting decisions according to whether their child will be happy with them or whether they will like or love them.
Parents reported wanting to be the favorite parent, sometimes giving-in to demands or saying “yes” because of an unspoken competition with their spouse (or ex-spouse) to be their child’s favorite.
Parents reported that they often responded to guilt-inducing thoughts of their own making, for example,
“If I say no, Junior may never get over it,” or guilt-inducing comments from their children, such as, “Everyone else gets to go to the party, and now I’ll be excluded forever because you won’t let me go.”
    What we know is that children who are parented according to the buddy-like style tend to be unhappy, with an inflated sense of self-importance. This is the opposite of good self-esteem. Parents seem to know that these precedents exist and, at some point, end up feeling powerless to change the negative patterns.
    So the damage is done. These bad precedents result in selfish thinking, an inability to take personal responsibility, difficulty establishing personal identity, and incompetence in daily skills, as well as personal and self-care skills. In other words, these children become