Willpower

for it. That would apply even if it were true that children who get money for grades somehow lose a little of their personal passion for learning. (Frankly, as much as we’ve enjoyed the research in our own careers, we wonder if love of learning is overrated as a motivational tool.) Money symbolizes value, and using it to pay for grades conveys to children the high value that society, and the family, places on school, particularly if the money is reserved for outstanding achievement.
    We’ll grant that paying children just for routinely attending school might well reduce their desire to go to school without pay (as if that were a concern). But if you’re paying them for working extra hard and excelling, what’s the problem? The results from randomized experiments in paying for grades have been mixed: In some places they haven’t done much to improve students’ performance, but in other places the payments seem to be remarkably effective. We don’t see the downside in trying this experiment at home—although of course you can always stick with noncash rewards if you prefer. Just remember that if you want to instill self-control, you need to be consistent in whatever rewards you give. Don’t haphazardly give the child something from your wallet for a good report card. Instead, set the goals in advance: how much money for each A, how much for each B, which subjects count most, etc. For a young child, you may have to set the payment schedule, but older children can start negotiating bonuses and penalties, and perhaps even drawing up formal contracts for both sides to sign. The rules and the rewards will change as the child gets older, but it’s important to keep a disciplined system in place, no matter how difficult that seems when the dreaded teenage years arrive.
    The problem with adolescents—from the parents’ point of view—is that they have a child’s power of self-control presiding over an adult’s wants and urges. Whatever harmony emerged by age nine or eleven is disrupted by biological growth that gives rise to new sexual and aggressive impulses, and new thrill-seeking inclinations. At some level, teenagers know they need help. That’s one reason they buy millions of copies of the Twilight novels, in which Edward the vampire and Bella the teenager know that she will lose her humanity, and probably her life, if they consummate their love. Thus they struggle:
    Edward: Try to sleep, Bella.
    Bella: No, I want you to kiss me again.
    Edward: You’re overestimating my self-control.
    Bella: Which is tempting you more, my blood or my body?
    Edward: It’s a tie.
    Their struggle is the same blockbuster ingredient that sold nineteenth-century romantic novels with titles like Self-Control and Discipline (both written by Mary Brunton, whose books outsold those of her contemporary rival, Jane Austen). Nineteenth-century farmers fretted about their children being tempted by the new freedoms available in industrial cities, but those temptations are mild compared with what’s available today in suburbia and on the Web. Today’s teenagers, even ones in no danger of becoming vampires, understand what Edward is feeling when he tells Bella: “I can never, never afford to lose any kind of control when I’m with you.”
    Until adolescents’ self-control catches up with their impulses, parents have the thankless task of somehow providing strict external control while at the same time starting to treat the child as something closer to a grown-up. Probably the best compromise is to give the teenager more say in the rule-making process, and to do it when everyone is in a calm, well-rested state—not when the teenager first comes home at two in the morning. If teenagers can help draw up the rules, they begin to see these as personal commitments instead of parental whims. If they negotiate a curfew, they’re more likely to respect it, or at least to accept the consequences for breaking it. And the more involved they get in setting goals, the more likely they are to proceed to the next step of self-control: monitoring themselves.

Wandering Eyes
    Before his famous marshmallow experiments with children near Stanford University, Walter Mischel made another discovery about self-control while working in Trinidad. He went there with the intention of studying ethnic stereotypes. The two main ethnic groups in rural Trinidad were of different descent, one African, the other Indian, and they held negative but different