Oh My Goodness, The Chips!

Implementing a Token Economy

A token economy is a psychological tool that is used to encourage desirable behaviours in children. Children earn “tokens” or points for exhibiting a range of desirable behaviours and can then redeem them for goods from a store at a pre-determined time.

A few weeks ago we started implementing a Token Economy at home. Josie had been getting progressively more and more difficult to manage since she turned 4 so we decided to try it. We had actually heard of this method from The Mommycast, a couple of years ago, but it was too early to implement then. Now however, is a different story. We bought a case of real poker chips, they are the good quality heavy ones that feel like you are holding something substantial, not the fake plastic ones, and away we went.

And what a change. I hardly recognise my daughter. She has taken to this like a toddler to Toys R Us!

Whenever we see that Josie has done something we have asked her to straight away; has obviously listened to what we have said; is told not to do something and actually stops her actions to talk about it with us; is being attentive, helpful, pleasant, etc she gets a poker chip.

The poker chips come in 4 colours, red, blue, green and black, with the red being worth the least, and the black being worth the most.

Red is 10pts.

Blue is 20pts.

Green is 50pts.

Black is 100pts.

1 point = 10c.

Usually she will get a red, however when we see that she has done something extra good or say if she has had to behave through a number of activities in a row (eg getting up, dressed, hair and teeth brushed of a morning without throwing any tantrums or refusing to co-operate) she will get a blue. After just 3 or 4 weeks she has even started to earn greens! Which she does by being a good girl for an entire afternoon/evening. The blacks she can only get by trading in groups of the lesser ones. Although we have told her if she is good for an entire weekend she will get a black one. But that is more as an encouraging, "lofty goal" to give her an emotional boost rather than a real expectation on our part. No 4 year old should be expected to be perfectly behaved every minute for days. As luck would have it the black ones are her favourites. So that gives her an extra incentive and a longer term goal to accrue the smaller ones so she can trade them in.

She's collected quite a few of the chips now and her behaviour has changed dramatically. She still gets into a mood occasionally, but it is now the exception, not the rule. Its amazing.

Last week we went and made our first purchase with her chips. An elephant game where the elephant blows butterflies out of his trunk and she has to catch them with her net. She loves it. And she knows that it was her good behaviour that bought her the game.

Also, a couple of months ago we were at Tony's uncles place and Josie found cousin Jacqui's Nintendo DS and wanted to play with it. To all our astonishment she was immediately able to play the thing! Well, we had a trip to Dubbo coming up and this was obviously the PERFECT thing for the long drive. So we borrowed Jac's and it worked a treat! Coincidentally we started the token economy shortly before the trip so we decided to offer her a second hand DS Lite from ebay "if she got 3 blue chips!". Remember this was early on so we couldn't foresee how quickly she would accrue 3 blue chips. Given what we have learned we would probably have set her the goal of 3 green or even 3 black ones! Anyway she got it last night, and as it happens it depleted her of the majority of her chips as we fiendishly devised a way to make up for the blunder with the initial cost of the thing; she had to pay extra for each of the games she got with it (it came with 14 GBA games). She was not too thrilled that she was left with only a few chips (of course being a 4 year old she is as fond of the poker chips as she is of a high-tech game system!), but we just reminded her what a good girl she was and told her we were sure she would have piles of chips again in no time and she was ecstatic!

Its brilliant. Its fantastic. I highly recommend it to all parents.

We have tried many disciplinary methods (has anyone else noticed how many punishment-based ones there are compared to so few reward based systems? Change comes slowly I guess.) over the years and never got a tenth of the results we are getting now.