Garner Technology

Kids can be a wonderful teacher of how we should treat each other.  Here is a short story about how I found a way to motivate my son that is a lesson in creating rules that are not flexible.

My nine-year-old son loves to play video games (which I know is not that unusual) but, given the chance, that’s all he will do.  The challenge, as a parent, is to provide motivation for him to do other things, particularly physical, that will help keep him healthy and round out his personality.  To this end, I instituted an electronics-black-out period; a portion of the day that electronics were not allowed to be used.  My thinking was this would provide more opportunity for him to find something else to do or a time where we could do things together.

For the most part, the black-out period worked but it was hugely unpopular as you might expect.   After carefully listening to my son’s complaints about the black-out being “unfair” I came to realize that he might actually be right.  I had not allowed any flexibility into the black-out and like many hard-and-fast rules that we adult’s experience in our own lives it did, indeed, seem unfair.

What I needed was a way to make my son feel empowered and motivated to participate in activities other than video games.  I came up with a plan whereby he could earn video game time and use it whenever he liked.  Making use of dollar-store poker chips, he earns one poker chip worth 30 minutes of game time for 15 minutes of physical activity.  He can cash in the chip anytime during our electronic black-out period (which, incidentally, had now a larger portion of the day).  The key is now he has more control over when he plays games and I get lots of cooperation to do physical activity – we both win!

The result has been astounding!  My son now sees the whole system as fair and has actually commented on saying he really likes the new system.  He does not see the earning of chips as onerous, in fact, he says it’s easy!  The great thing is that he’s been more physically active in the past week than he has been in months and is keen to get out and do more.

The lesson for me is that there is no faster way to kill motivation in someone than to set hard-and-fast rules without any flexibility.  People are people and we all feel the need to be treated as individuals.  We all need to feel empowered in our lives.

I have seen many organizations take hard-line approaches to managing the use of their IT systems especially when it comes to use of email and the Internet.  Often these policies are unjustified and are simply used to avoid dealing with larger management issues.  Much easier to send down an edict banning the use of the Internet for personal use than actually finding out why someone isn’t doing their job.  The result, of course, is a deterioration of motivation for people to do what you want them to do making the situation even worse.  Maybe it’s time to bring out the poker chips more often!