Ask HN: Incentivizing kids

Recently the family and I went roller skating and I was reminded of a game our local roller rink put on when I was growing up. They would take a jar of pennies to the far end of the rink and spread them out. When the whistle blew everyone (on skates) would dash down to the pennies, slam into the wall, and grab as many as they could reach. The hook was that two pennies were colored black on one side with a sharpy and were each worth $5 (I remember because a pizza at the concessions stand was $5).

It was incredibly motivating to hunt for pennies. I decided to implement it at home for a test.

The system: Inspired by the roller rink I grabbed a small canvass bag and put in 20 white poker chips, 2 blue poker chips, and 1 red poker chip.

White = $0.05 Blue = $1 Red = $5

I then had the kids work on tasks. Small tasks, easy tasks, hard tasks, but after every task was complete they got to 'pull' and grab a token blind from the bag. I'd then add to their running total, replace the token in the bag, and pay them out at the end of the night. The odds being in the house's favor we got the place reset for the week ahead for about $11.50 cost to me and kept everyone engaged and motivated.

My questions:

1. Am I crazy for basically using the casino / gambling / dopamine model against my own kids? I'm even using poker chips, shame on me! 2. How could i make the system better? 3. What have you tried or seen tried with kids that has been successful?

I would say it's a dangerous road. Child or not!

Imagine being challenged at work... in a sales team, for example. Make a sale, get to do a lucky dip. Say two people make an equivalent sale, one wins and the other doesn't. I would personally feel less motivated if I lost.

I wonder if you did it to kids, they would learn to weigh up whether doing any given task was worth some arbitrarily set lost/win.

It's the difference between learning that "washing a car is worth $10 of my time because it will takes x hours and the cost of soap is y and so on" vs "washing a car is 50/50 worth nothing or $10".