Paying off your Children

Human behaviour control. That sounds controversial. Kind of sounds scary. But, it also sounds an awful lot like parenting doesn’t it?

My wife and I are really not fans of the trends we see where parents let their children spend hours upon hours in front of screens. Those hours turning into days and weeks. And, what is it that they are taking in? Might be good, might not. One thing for sure though; it’s pretty much out of your control when they are starring at the screen and unless you’re watching with them, you really don’t know what they’re being subjected to.

In this day and age it seems that almost every kid over the age of 10 has their own cell phone. If not, at least their own tablet style device that is connected to the internet. Kids spend an insane amount of time online. Kind of terrifying really.

Back to child manipulation. My wife came up with a reading list for each of our kids with each list being tailored to the particular child’s reading level and capacity. Keep in mine we have 4 kids so coming up with the list was a bit of work. All of which was my wife. If the list was fulfilled before the end of summer, we would have a reward. See? Manipulation. It’s great.

Now, here is where some folks might start to shake their heads. That is if you are indeed on board with behaviour manipulation with a reward system. Which I’m sure you are. You do work for money right? See; it’s just like that.

Check these bad boys out. Best looking (and tasting) heart attack I’ve seen in a while.

Milkshakes and french fries. Yup. We got our kids to read all summer long for milkshakes and french fries. Not just any milkshakes and fries though. This promise was for the experience of eating food from Regrub. Burger spelled backwards. Part of this equation is that my wife and I have done a great job at raising little food snob copies of ourselves. It’s great. And expensive. We ordered 2 baskets of truffle fries with Asiago, 6 milkshakes: 4 Oreo shakes which include two deep fried Oreos on top and 2 cookies milkshakes with include an actual doughnut on top. Yeah. Makes no sense. I also didn’t get a picture of the Cookie milkshake so that’s dumb.

You can see the 2 deep fried Oreos stabbed with a wooden stick an 3 mini Oreos under those. Chance of developing diabetes after this shake is 93.71%. Might be worth it though.

But, I did manage a pic of the fries and the Oreo shakes to give you an idea of what we’re talking (and eating) about. Now, I think I mentioned the price a few sentences ago. Grand total for these treats (really not enough food to call a meal) was $92 Canadian Pesos. Yeah. Not cheap. But, when I think of the hours of my kids mindlessly starring at screens that we prevented, I think it was money well spent. Add to that the fact that we got out for an afternoon, had some great food and made some memories, I really like the idea of manipulating my kids and paying them off.