Money as an Incentive

we pay for grades...athletes can't really be expected to work IMO. No grades no allowance, no gas, no dates, no Taci Bell...playing ball year round and getting great grades is a JOB...paying for performance I don't think is a good idea..IMO. Reward for academic performance is a key I think.

School 7-2
Practice 2-5/6
Homework 7-9
12-13 hour day

personal training 2-4 hours a week

60-70 hours a week...most parents don't work nearly that hard. So, great grades with all that = allowance + enhancements for the weekend. It has worked for us...and our son.

Starzz....agree. We have always put academics before baseball. He has his own car, and gets a good allowance, based on his grades. We also don't expect him to work....his academics and baseball are enough. We never rewarded him for baseball accomplishments. We were not willing to put more importance on baseball...over school....and monetary rewards would have done that....we did pay him for books read each summer! Each family and player is different....think I'd try and find another way to motivate for sports....

SBK

I hope you get a lot of responses to this question because it is one I feel strongly about. I would like to know where this board stands on this issue.

I will be the first voice to say I strongly disagree with payment-induced success for baseball, basketball, whatever....

The need to succeed on ones own ability should be enough to drive a boy to do everything in his power to be successful. Suggesting that an accomplishment, or set of accomplishments determined by you in advance, will be rewarded in cash to my way of thinking is bribery.

Your son now becomes outcome-oriented, based on the $$$ dangling in his outer consciousness, rather than process-oriented...which is where the coach and the TEAM need him to be.

I think Starzz is right that an allowance may need to be looked at just because there is only so much time in the day with baseball and studies. BUT, I hope that all that is wrong with MLB....being all about the money....does not become a regularity in hs baseball because we are now using parental incentives rather than a boys determination to be the best...to succeed.

Nothing personal....just passion here

JMO

If you have to pay him to motivate him for sports then he isnt a "true" ball player

I never rewarded for academics directly either

I bought the car and handled insurance but they paid to maintain the car and they got an allowance for chores around the house

Are you paying because YOU want him to excel on the court / ballfield? It just smells bad to me. If I had to pay my son to perform on the field then I would have serious doubts as to if he was playing for the right reasons.

If they've got the drive they've got it - I've got one son who has it and one son who doesn't. I've done everything I could to encourage the one that doesn't have the work ethic that he needs to excel, but I have not and will not pay him to work harder.

I tend to agree with previous posts here ... we define school and baseball (in that order) as The Job. Money for going out, etc. is earned through regular, recurring household chores. Sports performance has got to be through his own goal setting, i.e., he decides he wants to lead the team in hitting ... he spends the time in the cage, he makes the appointments with his hitting coach. If he wants to earn extra spending money in the summer, he does individual hitting instruction with younger kids around his own summer ball schedule.

Uh oh, we must be bad parents. We never gave our son a dime for good grades or for performance in baseball or any other sport.
He wanted a car when he got his license, he got a hand me down, he had to work and did for three years in HS which covered his spending money and gas, cell phone. The use of the car remained conditional based upon his keeping up his grades.

We used to sit at the field and hear parents tell their sons while up at bat if they hit a homerun they would give them 100. To us, it sounded more like bribery.

I went to a workshop years ago on parenting. The instructor talked about how we as a society place too much on monetary rewards. With that we changed our way of thinking, brought up our son completely different than our first born.

Our son "earns" everything he gets. Nothing is "free". He earns his grades, earns his baseball opportunities.

More than anything he earns the right to be treated with respect.

But money is supplied along with his other needs, based on his needs to function as a student athlete, no-more-no-less.

He receives $100.00 week stipend which he puts into his checking account that is there to cover his basic out-of-pocket expenses.

There is no delineation about you-do-this-and-get-that sort of agreement. He knows what we expect out of him and we are not reticent in sitting him down and expressing our displeasure when he screws up.

It just so happens that he is a good guy, and so having to come up with ways to motivate him is not one of the things we have to worry about.

In other words we treat him like what he is, a youngman who is a student-athlete going to college with certain rights and obligations.

But we don't bribe our son into living up to his responsibilities...that would be a disaster to his character.

To each his own.
I always dangled the dollar for baseball and for grades. It was never much. $2.00 for a home run, $1.00 for a line drive...deduct $1.00 for popups. Unless popup came in the at-bat following a homerun and then popup deduction was $2.00. If he owed me after a game we would call it even. I started this when he was about 9-10 and continued into mid-high school. The dollar amount was insignificant and soon became a non-issue and faded away during his senior year. It basically was a way we could discuss the game and the good and bad at bats. Pitching and fielding were not included in the wager wars.
Good grades were rewarded with dollars and bad grades drew some form of mild punishment. Punishment was no phone or TV for a period of time. $2.00 for A’s $0.00 for B’s and minus $2.00 for a C. Add $5.00 bonus if all A’s. I never had to worry about “D”s and “F”s because the baseball coach gave licks for “D”s and “F”s. I never gave my son a designated allowance and he never worked an outside job during school. He came to me when he was about 14 and said he wanted to work at Kroger so he could buy things he wanted. He and I came to an agreement at that time that I would provide him with those things a job could provide him if he would work at baseball. The choice was his...work at Kroger stocking shelves and they can pay you money and then you spend your money for the things you want...or...work at baseball and I will pay you (not actual cash but with things he wanted).. He chose baseball.
Did it work?? I'm happy with the outcome.
Fungo

I see no harm in giving the kid a few bucks. Unfortunately, I never had a few bucks extra to give the kids when they were young boys. And when I did it was just because I wanted to, not because of their performance on the field. Our money was spent on required equipment, clothing, paying bills and putting food on the table.

I expected them to play the game right without any financial rewards. I bought only what was necessary for them to play the game. They've all received their rewards from baseball later and it didn't come from dad. It came because of their love for the game. I did invest a lot of time, however. Does that count?

I think it depends on the player. Fungo makes a great point about how it was a “game” for them and allowed a way to talk about the hits after the game. He is right but that would not work for my son. Just wouldn’t work for him.

His best at bats are normally pressure situation and I don’t want to change that. If he struggles, it is normally when he is a lead off hitter in an inning when the team is comfortably ahead or in games where it “doesn’t matter” (over statement but I think you know what I mean).

It was funny the other day when I was cleaning up I put all his HR balls (the ones we were able to retrieve) in his drawer – he had no idea that he had hit that many – the smile on his face was worth major $$$$ to him.

My son and I talk all the time – I ask him what makes him happy/mad/etc. My son hates striking out but over time I have convinced him that a weak grounder to the pitcher on a bad pitch is worse then striking out aggressively.

Again, all kids are different.

From Posts I have made in the past I’m more in a listening mode to my son rather then me directing him. The vast majority of the times his decisions are way better then mine.

I don't see anything wrong with rewarding good play or grades. Positive and negative re-enforcement of results is reality. The sooner learned the better.

We never did much of either though. God given competitive drive seemed to be enough to stay ahead of the game.

I did dangle a carrot this year for a good academic start in college, which he earned.

I'm with Chill. The rewards should be intrinsic, not extrinsic.

Thanks for the input,

It looks like there’s no consensus but both sides have valid arguments and concerns. I must add that the reason for me considering providing an incentive has nothing to do with motivating him to play. He plays Football, Basketball, Track and Baseball and excels and enjoys each.

As I mentioned, my objective is primarily two fold, one to encourage attention to certain parts of his game. For example, on defense I’d consider giving him a buck or so for drawing a charge. I’d come up with something similar on offence. As the season goes on and I notice something else in his game could use some attention, I’d come up with an incentive for that.

The second thing is to provide a catalyst to talk about the game and especially the parts of the game that could use highlighting.

As others have mentioned, doing it probably depends on the kid as well as how the incentive is structured and communicated.

Any other ideas or comments are appreciated. I’m going to try something and let you know how it worked as the season goes on. If it works, we’ll have a little fun with it in baseball.

I agree with Chill.

This is a subject that we(wife and I) have discussed through the years and have reasoned that there probably is no definitive answer to financial rewards being
right or wrong, proper or improper. There are no classes(that I know of) to teach
parents step by step how to raise their children. I think the answer is - you do what
you think is best at the time and if it doesn't work you adjust.

Personally, we reward our 3(freshman son, college, senior son HS, junior daughter HS)
for good grades. Do not know for sure if it has worked but there have been only three
B's in or household. I honestly believe this was accomplished because my wife at an early age would read to all 3 before school age and played educational games with them at every breakfast-she made learning fun for them and I believe it carried over. We actually did not start paying for good grades until middle school.
And it is our way of giving them an allowance.

We've never rewarded them for athletic performances although I see nothing wrong with
it. I remember growing up in Akron, Ohio and playing in "Hot Stove League" baseball
and my Dad taking me to Isley's(sp?) on Cuyahoga Falls Ave. after I had a pretty good
game and buying me a "Skyscraper" ice cream cone(rainbow). He told me for a homerun he would buy me all the ice cream I could eat. Finally got my first HR and he kept his word--wish he hadn't--one can only eat so much ice cream-lol.

Again, I don't think there is a right or wrong here and every parent needs to have a
good idea of what motivates their own children.

Whenever he got good grades - or did well in baseball - we fed him raw meat. Usually a sirloin steak thrown into his cage. When he did really well - we gave him sugar cubes as well.

When he didnt perform well in class or on the field - we gave him only bread and water in his cage.

IMHO, to each his own. I have to agree with Chill. We never did it for either sports or academic's (couldn't have afforded it without a 2nd job ).

We gave allowances for chores, etc. We tried to impress that the personal satisfaction of a job well done should be it's own reward (it's not always about money). We also tried to impress that with continued success, it could lead to opening more doors which would lead to possibly a better paying job, etc.

That said, on occasion we did have side bets with each other on some things and like Fungo, I can't remember getting paid when I won .


Just my thoughts.

I guess the way we've looked at it is everyone in the family has a job ... and the expectation in any job is that you apply yourself 110% to the task and strive to excel. His job is school, then sports. Our expectation isn't for straight A's, a gaggle of homeruns, or a Perfect Game ... it's simply work really hard, every day. He knows that his work ethic, GPA, BA, and ERA are his keys to the next level, so he decides how far he wants to go.

He's the one that has to look back at this era of his life 20 years from now and decide if he made the most of his opportunities and abilities. It won't matter to me if I'm watching him play ten years from now in an adult league at the local park or on TV ... it's his life, not mine.

Since baseball is his passion, he sets his own goals, he decides how hard he wants to work towards them. We've made it clear that if he wasn't 'working' at some sport endeavor, that he'd be required to work a 'real' job with all that available free time to help pay for things like gas, car insurance, etc. ... i.e., I'm happy to subsidize the costs of his sports and privileges as long as he's applying himself to something productive with a goal in mind. If he wasn't playing baseball but instead sat around the house IM'ing his friends nights & weekends ... then he'd be working to pay for his own transportation.

He does get a cash 'bonus' for A's each semester. We've used the lever of he loses the privilege of recreational transportation (dates) if he doesn't achieve a minimum GPA (i.e., he can still drive himself to his 'job' ... games and practices). But we've found that his desire to play baseball at the next level is a bigger incentive than his car keys to focus on his school work.

The Big Question? How do I get him to clean his room?

I always told my son that he should pay me if he hit a home run. I paid for the bat, the lessons, the team fee, etc.

But seriously, I think that good performance is its own reward. I know my son takes a lot of good feeling from the park after he's had a good game. If he played poorly, I didn't have to tell him. I just don't see the benefit of putting money in the mix.

I'm against it. Kids should perform because they care about their teammates and the program, NOT because there is an added "bonus" from home. Athletics are still pure at the high school level - I wouldn't cloud that by throwing some money at a kid. If he needs money to get him to work hard, something is wrong.
I would say treat your kid well, attend the games (which is much more valuable to a kid long-term than money is), cheer appropriately, and give him an allowance based on being a quality kid, not on being a stud athlete.
JMHO.

When my son was 3,4 & 5 playing s-o-cc-e-r I paid him for every score with Power Rangers!!

My wife and I have never awarded the kids monetarily for sports or academis - and they're all High Honors and darn good athletes because they want to be.