Using RoosterMoney as a Reward Chart

RoosterMoney is great for big kids, old enough to handle their own money and pay for things themselves, but it can also be really useful even when you’re not dealing with money.

Instead of tracking money, you can choose to set your child’s currency as Stars in the app! Stars can be earned, whether as a reward for exhibiting good behaviour or for completing tasks set. The Chores feature can be a great tool for setting a routine for your child with tasks they can earn stars for completing on a regular basis.

You can also personalise the Pots on their dashboard to reflect the things your child is interested in saving for. You could add Simple pots to reflect things your child would be motivated by, or you could create a Goal pot if there’s something they want in the shops which they could trade their stars in for.

Additionally, we’ve built the Reward pot so your child can earn something other than money or stars! The Reward pot gives parents the opportunity to encourage good behaviour, and give kids the chance to work towards things they really want in a simple, easy-to-understand way.

How does the Reward pot work?

Parents decide on an action or behaviour they’d like to encourage in their kids, such as going to bed on time, or eating properly with a knife and fork. Then they decide on a reward. This can be monetary, but it can also be something like screen time, a trip to a theme park – anything really that will motivate your child. Then parents give children a digital sticker every time they behave well. Once all the spaces for the stickers have been filled, it’s time for the reward!

You can make it personal and fun by choosing what type of sticker you want for their Reward pot, and how many stickers are required for the reward. Once the reward pot is completed, parents can close it, or choose to use it again.

Chores and the Reward pot are only available to Rooster Plus and Rooster Card families. You can find out more on how to set up your reward pot here.

A few things to bear in mind, when it comes to reward charts…

🗓 Rewards change behaviour over time
Don’t expect big swings in the way kids do things right away. Alan E. Kazdin, the Yale psychology and child psychiatry professor, and author of The Kazdin Method for Parenting the Defiant Child advocates ‘repeated practice’, arguing that, the more a child does something, the more that behaviours becomes part of an everyday routine.

😊 Rewards can boost self esteem
As a recent article published by the US public health agency, the CDC points out, rewards are better for children’s self esteem. If you’re constantly saying ‘no’ or ‘stop’, you may leave your child with a negative sense of self worth. Rewards, by contrast, make children feel better about themselves.

❤️ Rewards can bring you closer together
In the same piece, the CDC also points out that rewarding children can bring parents and kids closer, as they both enjoy getting something they like. You get the table laid for dinner every night, they get an hour of screen time, and you both feel you’ve achieved something together.

🍫 Watch out for food rewards
You might want to reconsider giving too many chocolate bars or other sweet treats as rewards. A recent Dutch research paper suggested that food rewards can lead to the development of unhealthy eating habits, such as emotional eating or fussiness around food, so watch out for this.

🤓 Rewards work best with boring or difficult, but necessary tasks
You don’t offer rewards to kids for things they already do for fun. Instead, rewards are best used to ease the pain of things that are tough, necessary to learn and boring, such as acquiring the ability to read basic words, or good table manners. Rewards, according to Virginia Shiller, a clinical psychologist at Yale university, can serve as “a bridge to give them a reason to try it—and hopefully, they’ll eventually feel competent and successful, and that will take the place of the rewards.”

We'd love to hear how you use RoosterMoney for Rewards? Let us know at hello@roostermoney.com and you might get featured in a future blog!