Extrinsic motivation, like stars or money, can be effective but it can also have undesired consequences. For example, when the stars go away, the kid might end up not doing that activity at all or disliking it even more because s/he does not perceive it as a valuable thing on its own. Research shows that extrinsic motivation tends to undermine people's sense of self-determination (see Deci & Ryan).
I'm not big on extrinsic rewards as a parenting tool. But sometimes kids like having structure. I'm a go-with-the-flow type. My ex husband is a more structured type. When we began homeschooling, we tried it my way -- and it was a disaster. This kids hated it. So we tried it "daddy's way" -- and it was a disaster. The kids hated it. The kids were, surprise surprise, somewhere between their two parents in that regard. And they also differed from each other. My older one is more like me and my younger one is more like their dad. We ended up setting up charts and stuff so the kids had a tool to track activities and goals without having to bug mom all day, every day about how much more there was to do and so forth -- we did this more for the kids' sanity than for mine. They hated not knowing and having to ask so much.
So I think it depends in part on how one uses something like this. I don't think it has to be about the top listed point: Motivate kids with an end goal in mind. It can be more about their next item: Track progress towards goals. It's just a tool. I'm sure different parents will use it differently, depending upon a variety of factors including their parenting philosophy.
On the other hand, it's good to set goals, and for kids especially it's good to have a concrete way to visualize those goals. It's hard for a preschooler (who can't easily count past 10) to understand what it means to do something "every day for 2 weeks." (What the heck is a week?)
I agree that tying it to an external reward can be risky. It might be better to do the chart without any reward. Or make sure the kid chooses an activity as the reward, so it's more like "rewarding myself" instead of "earning goodies".
I came here to say this too. I'm reading Drive by Daniel Pink which does a compelling job of illustrating and explaining the consequences of Deci and others' research in this area. It's a more business focused book, but he discusses this exact thing.
Love it! Could this be used for situations too (ex: a bunch of people living together.) You get stars for doing chores, taking out the trash, cleaning up cat barf, etc. The person to reach the goal of X number of stars "wins," and the scores get reset.
A friend of mine uses this system in his house (he lives with 8+ other people). The points mean nothing, but it really does encourage people to clean up the cat barf!
Great idea. While, I'm not sure about having an online star chart, I'm sure I'm underestimating the prevalence of technology in children's lives today.
There's an opportunity here to extend this into reinforcement tracking for other areas as well.
I visited the site, typed-in my child's name, then got stuck.
I couldn't immediately think of one thing that he's working towards (although now that I think about it...).
What i wanted to do was create the StarChart and send it to my wife to check it out.
You may want to consider (even further) simplifying the already-simple getting started process.
EDIT: Now that I think about it, my son is working most on becoming potty trained. Your mad-lib style form doesn't really work for this case "[name] is working towards a [???]" Of course, we could also argue the value of using a tool like this to help with potty training...
Who says it has to be a material reward? Are you arguing against reward-based systems of any kind and saying that the proper way to raise children is with negative reinforcement (punishment) only?
Thanks rbreve ... if anyone here checks kidsabacus.com out let me know what you think. Will be presenting it at SuperConf in Miami in a few weeks, your comments can help me out with the pitch.
Thanks for the link. It looks like a nicely made app. Can you tell your friend the feedback form on the website is broken? It redirects to a google spreadsheet which forgets your initial form.
This is great! I'd love to be able to have a name of a chart and a picture. This way I can put 'Johnny Draws an A' and at the end is a picture of a toy or ice cream.
Great site! I was just browsing your blog and saw that you're also in Victoria, BC! Great to know there are other HN/startup folks in the city. :) Good luck!
It works both ways: For every 10 LoC removed, you lose 10 minutes of HN time. After all, you wouldn't want to interrupt the kind of flow that's letting you get some refactoring in, would you?
Ha, it looks like I registered this domain name a month after star.me in 2008. As I mentioned in the post, I have been using this for a couple of years with my son and only just now decided to open it up.
