Basis of a Contract
Making a contract with your child is making a deal. You offer to give your child something if he does something. The contracts we will be discussing in this blog are simple verbal contracts that occur in daily living activities. A contract follows the relationship that “if you do this, I will give you that.” A slightly simpler relationship is “first do this, then do that.” Your child will be more successful with contracts if he has first mastered the second relationship expressed as “first do this then do that.”
Developmental Requirements
Ability to benefit from a contract requires certain cognitive skills. Thus, a contract won’t do much to manage a child’s behavior who is under 6 years of age. First, your child needs the ability to delay gratification. Children under 6 years of age need their behavior rewarded soon after it occurs. Secondly, your child needs to have a more sophisticated understanding of cause and effect. The type of cause and effect understood by younger children is simpler than that required by contracts. In a contract, the child needs to understand that a particular reward will occur after certain behavior occurs and at a certain time. This relationship is not as obvious as the effect of pushing a tower of blocks to watch it fall. The effects that younger children comprehend are much more immediate.
Identify Your Child’s Reinforcers
In the contracts you will be using, you will be agreeing to provide your child a reinforcement for the occurrence of certain behavior. The more your child prefers the reinforcement that you will provide, the more motivated he will be to perform the behavior your contract requires for the reinforcer. Remember, a reinforcer increases the occurrence of the response it follows. This also results in an increase in your child’s motivation to perform the behavior that your contract reinforces. A person generally prefers things that reinforce her behavior, but not always. Also, a preferred object may not always act as a reinforcer for a particular response. If your child is not more willing to perform the response you reinforce, then that object or event probably doesn’t reinforce that response. You need to find a different reinforcer for that response. However, the things your child prefers will generally reinforce responses they follow.
Determine Delay Time
The delay time is the time between your child performing a response and when the reinforcer is provided. Some children can wait longer than others for their reinforcer. You will need to observe your child to determine this time. If your contract requires the reinforcer to be provided at a time longer than your child can tolerate, then the contract won’t be successful. In fact, your child will likely not be reinforced, that is, the behavior she performed will not tend to reoccur. She will be less likely to want to do whatever the contract required of her.
State Contract in Simple Sentence
How simple you need to state the contract depends on how old your child is. However, even for older children, the simpler the better. The contract statement should state the behavior that is expected, when it should be done, when the reward will be provided, and any other conditions that apply, such as frequency, duration, or quality of performance. Since you will be using contracts for simple daily responsibilities, such as putting toys away after play, then you will likely need only a statement of the behavior expected. Make sure that the action you are requiring for the reward is attainable for your child. If your child is young and simply can’t do what you are expecting, then she will just not earn the reward, but she will probably not tell you it is because she can’t do it. Your child will learn from this that contracts are not a winning situation for her, and this technique will cease to be effective for her. You don’t want to make contracts in which your child will fail. Always make contracts in which your child will succeed. Your child learns very little when he fails; at least he doesn’t learn what you intended to teach.
Considerations for Contracts
There are considerations important for using contracts effectively. Remember, always be aware of your child’s rate of successes. It’s easy to teach and to have no one learning. Having used an instructional technique is not the end of teaching. You need to access whether or not learning is occurring. In other words, whether or not your child is being successful. The goal of learning is success, not failure. That seems like an obvious truth, but it can be overlooked.
For a contract to help your child, you need to deliver the reward promptly and consistently. Parents are busy and can forget about having made a contract. If your child meets the conditions of a contract and never receives the reward, the contract will be ineffective.
Verify that the action to be performed for the reward is sufficiently performed. It is easy to fall into rewarding performance that is systematically less than expected. By rewarding poor performance, you are teaching your child to be less than his best. If your child is not achieving the expectations that you have for her, then reconsider what you are expecting. You may be expecting too much. In that case you need to adjust what you are requiring of your child. If your child lacks motivation to perform the action, then you may need to change the reward you are using. Maybe, your child is not interested in the reward.
Once you have found a performance requirement that works for your child, don’t randomly change it. This is easy to do in the natural environment. Environmental conditions change and so do the performance level that the environment demands. Be sure that what you are requiring of your child is not randomly changing. Never change the conditions of a contract in response to your needs produced by a changing environment.
Another factor you should consider is how long you want to use the contract. You may want the contract to become part of you and your child’s daily routine. That often happens even without the parent planning for it. This happens, because the time helping the parent is actually valued by the child. If the contract is done in a positive way, this helping time becomes quality time with the parent for the child. Both, parent and child enjoy it, and both want it to continue. When such a relationship occurs, the child will probably expand what he does for the reward. In fact, the reward becomes inconsequential for the child, because the real reward becomes quality time with the parent.
For what behavior should you use a contract to teach? Contracts are very versatile and can be used to teach any behavior. However, they are best used for your child’s development if you use them to teach developmentally significant skills or skills that incorporate such skills. For example, assume your child is 6 years old. You have him enrolled on a soccer team. It is important to both you and your child that his team wins. You could use a contract that targets his performance in his games. I have nothing against this, but there are other skills he is learning at this time that are more important than his performance on the soccer field. Even if your life goal for your child is to become a professional soccer player, 6 years of age is not a developmentally appropriate time to be focusing on the professional skills in your plan for his future. Learning to practice physical skills in order to get better at them is a developmentally appropriate task in the motor domain for children 6 years old. You could use a contract to improve her motivation to practice her soccer skills. If she practices her soccer skills, her performance in a game will improve.
Examples of A Contract in Daily Life
Getting dressed in the morning is a common task for everyone. Learning to do it efficiently can be a problem for some children. It’s easy for a child to get side-tracked in the morning. One of the cognitive developmental milestones for children 6 to 8 years old is learning to complete instructions with 3 or more steps. You need your child to be dressed at a particular time in order to go to school. You want to make a contract with your child to be dressed by a particular time. The first thing you need to do is to verify that your child can dress himself. This means she knows how to choose her clothes and brush her teeth and hair. If she hasn’t mastered all these skills, then you need to provide the help she needs. The second thing is to state in a simple sentence what it is your child needs to do. For example, your child will be dressed for school by 8 am. He will have all his clothes on, have brushed his teeth, and combed his hair. Remember the contract says he will accomplish this by 8 am, not 8:05 am or 8:10 am. This can be verified by having him present himself to you at 8 am.
Next, you need to establish what the reward will be and when your child will receive it. Let’s make the contract for 5 days and the reward will be given on Friday morning at 8 am. It will help your child to get through to Friday if she keeps a record of her performance. Thus, use a chart that has each day of the week listed and put a plus (+) if she fulfills the requirements and a minus (-) if she doesn’t. A calendar can be useful for this purpose. This will provide daily motivation for her to meet the contract demands.
Then, you need to ask him what he wants to earn for getting a plus on each day of the week, Monday through Friday. Let’s assume she chooses to see a movie on Saturday. Then write on Friday’s square, “Saturday Movie”, on her data chart or calendar. You can set the criteria that he has to meet anyway you want. At first, maybe he needs to be ready on one day each week. Maybe he needs to be ready on three days each week. As he meets one requirement, you can change it to more days required being dressed. Because you are increasing the requirements as he achieves them, his performance will be increasing and he will always be a winner with the contract. This maintains a positive learning environment for your child. When your child is getting ready everyday of the week for a month, lets say, you can eliminate the chart on which she has been recording her performance. If he maintains his performance without the chart, then he doesn’t need the chart to get dressed in the morning. Eliminate the chart but don’t eliminate the reward. At this point your child will be getting ready for school on time independently, and he will have a Saturday routine of going to the movies. This routine will maintain his performance. Getting to this point should happen quite rapidly for your child.
Remember, if your child is not meeting the demands of the contract, then the reward may be one that your child desires, but it may not be one that reinforces his behavior of getting dressed for school in the morning. You may need to change the reinforcer. Another problem could be that she cannot do all the tasks required in the contract. You should verify this; don’t assume he can.
If you started the contract with a performance demand of less than the target, five consecutive days of getting dressed, then you may have increased the performance requirements too fast. For example, your child may have needed to perform at getting dressed three consecutive days for a longer time before increasing to four consecutive days.
Benefits of Using Contracts
Making simple contracts are what parents do each time they make a demand on their child. Normally, the demands are not as precisely made, as well structured, and implemented as consistently. We don’t see demands as a technique of teaching. Each time you make a demand, your are making a contract with your child and are teaching your child something. Through this teaching you are strengthening or weakening your child’s performance of some skill. You want to always be strengthening your child’s performance. Simple contracts can ensure that happens.