What parents should know about motivation (before it's too late)

Transform Your Parenting with these game-changing, neuroscience based motivation tactics

Cajoling children to get on with the hard graft of preparing for examinations is difficult. Like any competition, when it comes to demanding examinations, a fraction of it is about learning new and interesting things, and much of it is about practice.

For practice is the difference between understanding a topic, and getting the highest marks in a competitive process. That second part is far less interesting for anyone, let alone a 7 year old.

The challenge for parents is balancing the source of motivation. Neuroscientists cite two types of motivation: extrinsic and intrinsic.

Extrinsic motivation is an external reward for effort. It may be sweets or some TV time, after a bout of demanding work.

Intrinsic motivation is the inner motivation that is the result of satisfaction - it is the motivation that comes from effort and satisfaction that effort has been worthwhile.

Stop using sweets and gaming

Parents have a propensity of slipping into some understandably alluring, but ultimately damaging habits.

A significant portion of parents coerce their children with what neuroscientists would refer to as extrinsic motivation. For example, sweets, gaming time or TV time.

These interactions stimulate a chemical reaction in the brain called dopamine, that makes humans, in this case children, happy.

The problem is that this source of motivation isn’t healthy in the long term. First, neuroscientists find that maintaining satisfaction or happiness requires larger and larger doses: so if 5 mins of gaming got the child motivated, eventually it will need to be 20 mins, or a day at the arcade - the dose is getting larger.

The second problem is that the child stops progressing once the motivation is removed. I.e. you haven’t created a genuine interest in the subject matter, and so interest in it is likely to wane in the long term.

This is an extract from a talk by neuroscientist Andrew Huberman on the subject.

There’s a classic experiment done at Stanford many years ago, in which children in nursery school and kindergarten drew pictures. They drew pictures because they liked to draw. The researchers took kids that liked to draw and started giving them a reward for drawing. The reward, generally, was a gold star or something that a young child would find rewarding. Then they stopped giving them the gold star, and what they found is the children had a much lower tendency to draw on their own. No reward.

And so what you see is that children who were previously intrinsically motivated (i.e. they just liked drawing) can become extrinsically motivated (with stars), and then they lose interest altogether - that is not what most parents would seek.

We believe this could be linked to the propensity for burn out, in teenagers within highly competitive academic environments - i.e,. the extrinsic dopamine stimulation isn’t working anymore.

Thirdly, neuroscientists believe that the brains wiring has what they call neuroplasticity: i.e. the pathways in the brain are organic, reshaping along behaviour. So this practice of utilising dopamine (sweets, gaming, etc) results in a deeply entrenched neural pattern.

Finally, there are of course direct consequences to the child’s health. Excessive sugar is quite damaging and gaming habits can be sticky, and later social media addictions can bring new challenges.

What is the mindset I want in my child?

First let’s set the objective: to motivate your child through effort - i.e. they see effort as the prize; the hard work they did, not the result. It seems odd, given we are working to a goal, but if a child is used t the idea that effort is good, the results will follow.