Your daughter brings home a 95 on her math test, beaming, because she loves the subject and worked hard for it. Without thinking, you say: “From now on, every time you get a 95 or higher, I’ll give you ten dollars.” It feels generous. Rabbi Lawrence Kelemen would tell you it’s one of the most common mistakes loving parents make — and it can quietly undo the very motivation you’re trying to reward.
Kelemen draws a sharp line between two things parents often lump together: bribes and gifts. The difference isn’t the object you hand over. It’s the timing and the message it sends.
A bribe is announced in advance: “If you do X, I’ll give you Y.” Kelemen teaches that bribes have a real and legitimate place — but only when a child isn’t going to do the right thing on their own, lishmah, for its own sake. A child who hates reading might need an external nudge to pick up a book at all. That’s a reasonable use of a bribe: through doing it for the wrong reason at first, a child can eventually come to do it for the right reason. You’re bridging a motivational gap until the real motivation kicks in.
But here’s the rule Kelemen insists on: never bribe a behavior that’s already happening for good reasons. If your child already loves learning, already feels proud of her grades, already has a good relationship with her teacher — announcing a cash reward for the same achievement doesn’t add motivation. It replaces an internal reason with an external one. Psychologists call this the overjustification effect; Kelemen simply calls it undermining something beautiful that was already there.
A gift works differently, precisely because it isn’t announced ahead of time. “I noticed how hard you’ve been working, so I got you this.” There’s no deal on the table, no performance being purchased — just a parent noticing and celebrating. A gift confirms an internal motivation rather than replacing it.
Kelemen adds one more caution, drawn from his own experience raising children: be careful what kind of gifts and bribes you use. Food given as a reward can distort a child’s relationship with eating for years. Constant toys can tip into spoiling. An ice cream now and then isn’t a crisis — but Kelemen says it’s not a reliable, long-term strategy for building character either. There is, he says, something far more powerful than any object you could buy at a store: attention, warmth, and words that tell a child specifically what you saw in what they did.
So here is the practical test to run before you reward anything: ask yourself honestly whether your child would have done this anyway. If the answer is yes, skip the transaction — notice out loud instead, after the fact, with no strings attached. If the answer is no, a bribe may be a legitimate bridge, but treat it as temporary scaffolding, not a permanent system. The goal was never to build a child who performs for prizes. The goal is a child who eventually doesn’t need you in the room at all.
Chinuch, at its core, isn’t about engineering better behavior for a week. It’s about launching a person who will keep choosing the right thing for the rest of their life, long after the rewards stop coming.
If you’d like more of Rabbi Kelemen’s practical chinuch teachings like this one, join the inner circle at lawrencekelemen.com.
This blog was co-written with Artificial Intelligence.