Most parenting advice treats bribery like a dirty word. Rabbi Lawrence Kelemen takes a more precise view: bribes and rewards aren’t inherently wrong — they’re a tool, and like any tool, the question is whether you’re using it on the right job.
His rule is simple. A bribe — “if you do X, I’ll give you Y” — belongs only where a child has no internal motivation yet to do the behavior on their own. The Hebrew formulation captures it well: mitoch shelo lishmah, ba lishmah — from doing something for the wrong reason, one eventually arrives at doing it for the right reason. You give the external nudge now, fully expecting that the real, internal motivation will grow in later, once the child experiences the behavior enough to like it for itself.
But here’s the mistake Kelemen flags, and it’s one loving parents make constantly: bribing a child who is already doing the thing lishmah — for its own sake. If your daughter already loves getting good grades because she’s proud of her work and likes her teacher, and you announce, “Every 95 or higher earns you ten dollars,” you haven’t added motivation. You’ve replaced an internal reason with an external one, and internal motivation, once displaced, is brutally hard to restore. She’ll start caring about the ten dollars instead of the achievement — a straight downgrade.
So the actual skill isn’t deciding whether to reward — it’s diagnosing first. Before you offer anything, ask: is my child not doing this because they don’t want to, or is my child already doing this because they want to?
A quick way to sort your own house:
1. List the behaviors you’re currently rewarding or bribing.
2. For each one, ask honestly — was there already some spark of enjoyment or pride here before I added a prize?
3. If yes, pull the reward back and let the internal motivation stand on its own — trust it, even if it produces less consistent behavior in the short term.
4. If no — if this is a chore or task with zero natural appeal to your child right now — a bribe is a legitimate bridge, as long as you’re actively working to make the activity intrinsically rewarding over time, not relying on the bribe forever.
Used this way, a reward isn’t a shortcut around good chinuch. It’s scaffolding that eventually comes down.
For more of Rabbi Kelemen’s nuanced approach to motivation and chinuch, join the inner circle at lawerencekelemen.com.
This blog was co-written with Artificial Intelligence.