Short answer: not for chores. The research parents keep hearing about is real. But it only applies to things a child already enjoys doing. Paying a child to draw can backfire. Paying them to empty the dishwasher can't, because there was no love of emptying the dishwasher to lose. The researchers said so themselves, in 1973.
Here is what they actually found, and the one question it gives you to ask.
The study everyone talks about
In 1973, three researchers ran an experiment with preschoolers who already liked to draw. Left alone with markers, these kids drew for fun.
The researchers split them into three groups:
- One group was promised a "Good Player" certificate for drawing.
- One group got the same certificate as a surprise, after they finished.
- One group got nothing.
A week or two later, observers watched the kids during normal free play in their own classroom. Not a lab. The kids had no idea it was connected to the drawing session.
The kids who had been promised the certificate spent about half as much of their free time drawing as the other two groups.
The detail almost nobody repeats
The surprise group was completely fine.
Same certificate. Same kid. Same drawing. They just didn't know it was coming. And they drew a little more than any other group, including the kids who got no prize at all.
That one comparison is the whole finding. It isn't the prize that does the damage. It's the deal. Knowing up front that you're drawing for something is what turns play into work.
There's a second result worth knowing. Judges who didn't know which group any child was in also rated how good the drawings were. The promised-certificate kids made worse art. Not fewer pictures — the same number, just worse ones. They were producing, not making.
Researchers call this overjustification. The child's own reason for doing the thing quietly changes. I draw because I like drawing becomes I drew because I got a certificate.
Later work backed this up at scale. A review that pooled 128 similar experiments found the same pattern: prizes promised in advance reduce how much someone wants to do a thing for its own sake. Surprise prizes, in the same review, did almost nothing at all. Exactly like 1973.
So far this sounds like a clean case against paying for chores.
Why chores are different
Every one of those studies starts the same way. With something the child already wanted to do.
Drawing. Puzzles. Fun games.
They had to. You can't measure something being taken away unless it was there to start with. So the finding isn't rewards are bad. It's sharper and more useful than that: rewards can turn play into work.
Which raises the obvious question about the dishwasher.
No kid loves emptying the dishwasher. Nobody unloads it for the quiet joy of the thing. There's nothing to take away, because the job was never fun to begin with. You can't turn work into work.
This isn't a loophole we found. It's the line the researchers drew themselves, in the same 1973 paper. Their words:
there is nothing in the present line of reasoning or the present data to suggest that contracting to engage in an activity for an extrinsic reward will always, or even usually, result in a decrement in intrinsic interest in the activity.
They went further. They named the cases where rewards should work fine: when a kid has almost no interest to begin with, and some nudge is needed to get started at all. Or when the activity only becomes fun after you've got reasonably good at it.
That second one is worth sitting with. It describes exercise almost perfectly. Running isn't enjoyable until you're fit enough for it not to be miserable. Practising an instrument isn't fun until you can play something. For things like these, a reward isn't stealing a love of the thing. It's a bridge to the point where that love is even possible.
The big review found the same split. On genuinely interesting tasks, the damage was large. On tasks people don't choose on their own, there was no measurable damage at all. The researchers explain it bluntly: there was no interest there to undermine.
But isn't 1973 a long time ago?
Fair question. Here's the honest answer.
The 1973 study isn't the evidence. It's where the evidence starts. Researchers kept testing the idea for the next 25 years. In 1999, a team pooled 128 of those experiments to see what held up. That review is what this post actually leans on. The 1973 study is just the first and clearest version of it.
More importantly: the newer work is what makes chores safe.
On its own, the 1973 study says something alarming. Rewards can kill interest. It took the later research to find the edges. Which rewards matter (the promised kind). Which tasks matter (ones kids already like). And which don't (dull ones, and surprises). Without the newer work, we'd only have the scary half.
Then something more useful happened. A different field started asking a related question. Not what do kids want to do? but what actually changes how kids behave? Different researchers. Different methods. Different countries. Reviews running up to 2019, covering more than 150 trials and tens of thousands of children.
Those two fields don't much like being compared to each other. One 2012 review says so in a footnote, in plain terms.
They landed in the same place anyway. Recognition works. Prizes don't add much.
When two fields that distrust each other reach the same answer by different roads, that counts for more than either one agreeing with itself.
One gap worth naming. The newest research we've read on rewards-and-interest specifically is from 2001. The newer work we lean on measures behaviour, not desire. If you know of a more recent replication, we'd genuinely like to read it.
The one question to ask
Not should I reward my child? That has no general answer, and anyone who gives you one is going further than the evidence does.
The research hands you a better question, and it's about the activity, not the reward:
Would my child do this if nobody asked and nobody paid?
If the honest answer is yes — reading for fun, drawing, building something, helping because they wanted to — that's the activity the 1973 study is about. Leave it alone. Notice it. Don't put a price on it.
If the honest answer is no — teeth, dishes, laundry, bins — you're on the side of the line the researchers cleared themselves.
Most of what ends up on a family chore chart is firmly in the second group. That's not us reading it generously. It's what the authors wrote down.
What makes a reward feel different
Once you're on the safe side of that line, the useful question isn't whether to reward. It's what the reward says to the child.
There's a difference between a reward that feels like control and one that feels like recognition. A reward used as leverage — do this or else, do this and I'll pay you — tends to backfire. The message is that somebody else is steering. A reward that marks something real tends not to. The message is you got better at this.
The same five pounds can mean either one. Three things seem to decide which:
Does the child get a say? This is the best-supported of the three. The whole mechanism turns on where a kid locates the reason for their own behaviour. Choice moves it inward. Which jobs, in what order, what they're saving toward. A chore chart handed down finished is a different object from one your kid helped build.
Does anyone notice? This one surprised us. In the research on what actually changes kids' behaviour, praise is one of a very short list of things that reliably works. In one study, a single home visit plus two weeks of parents practising it produced results as big as full multi-week parenting programmes. Whatever a reward system does, it shouldn't quietly replace a parent saying I saw that.
Is it predictable? Rewards renegotiated in the moment put the parent back in charge of the leverage. A rule everyone knows in advance takes them out of it.
What this research can't tell you
Worth saying plainly.
It can't tell you whether rewards build habits. This is the real open question, and it's not the one parents usually worry about.
These studies measured how much kids wanted to do something, or whether they did what they were asked, or how they behaved over a few weeks. None of them asked whether a paid-for chore eventually becomes something a kid just does. The closest evidence we found is a large review that tested 26 different parenting techniques and found that none of them made effects last longer. Not rewards. Not praise. Nothing.
So the case for paying for chores is that it does no harm and gets the job done. It is not a demonstrated case that the habit sticks around after you stop.
The original studies were also short, and mostly used young children. Family life is neither. This research is strong enough to say the effect is real and it has an edge to it. It isn't strong enough to say therefore your house should do X.
Anyone citing it to tell you there's one right answer — in either direction — is going further than the evidence does.
What we did with it
RiseOhana runs on quests, points and rewards. So this isn't a neutral question for us. It shaped the product, and it's the reason for one thing we deliberately don't do.
Chores and habits are treated as work worth recognising, not as play to be gamified into enthusiasm. Kids pick their own rewards instead of having them assigned, because choice is the part of this the research is clearest about. And the rules are visible to everyone, so a reward is something the system gives for a job done — not something a parent hands out or holds back in the moment.
The thing we're most careful about is that question above. A points system will happily put a price on anything you point it at. Including the things your kid was already doing for free. That's the one place this research says you can do real damage, and it's a call no app can make for you.
References
Lepper, M. R., Greene, D., & Nisbett, R. E. (1973). Undermining children's intrinsic interest with extrinsic reward: A test of the "overjustification" hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 28(1), 129–137. doi.org/10.1037/h0035519
Deci, E. L., Koestner, R., & Ryan, R. M. (1999). A meta-analytic review of experiments examining the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 125(6), 627–668. doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.125.6.627
Deci, E. L., Koestner, R., & Ryan, R. M. (2001). Extrinsic rewards and intrinsic motivation in education: Reconsidered once again. Review of Educational Research, 71(1), 1–27. doi.org/10.3102/00346543071001001
Leijten, P., Gardner, F., Melendez-Torres, G. J., van Aar, J., Hutchings, J., Schulz, S., Knerr, W., & Overbeek, G. (2019). Meta-analyses: Key parenting program components for disruptive child behavior. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 58(2), 180–190. doi.org/10.1016/j.jaac.2018.07.900
Leijten, P., Thomaes, S., Orobio de Castro, B., Dishion, T. J., & Matthys, W. (2016). What good is labeling what's good? A field experimental investigation of parental labeled praise and child compliance. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 87, 134–141. doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2016.09.008