ORANGE WORKSHEET: Reward System
Establishing goals alone will not ensure that a child’s behavior will improve. For a DRC to be effective for a child,
he must be motivated to work hard and reach his goals. That motivation is provided by setting up rewards for the
child to receive when he does a good job of reaching his goals. However, rewards do not have to be new, “store-
bought” things that you run out and buy every day. Instead rewards should be things that are already available in the
home or community that can be given to your child only when he reaches his goals and not at other times. For
example, television time is “free” for most children—they watch T.V. regardless of their behavior at home or
school. You could decide that your child must earn television time by reaching his goals on the Daily Report Card.
The same can be true for many activities that children enjoy—they can be allowed, based on your child having
reached his daily goals.
Thus, you need to talk with your child to find out which rewards will motivate him and will fit within your daily
routines. You have some idea about what is rewarding for your child—things that he spends a lot of time doing
when he has the choice or things that he says that he likes to do. Talking with him can help clarify that. We have
given you a start on this by providing a list on the next page of possible rewards that you might find useful with your
child.
These pages provide a chart for you to fill in, based on what rewards you and your child choose as most appropriate.
The chart is broken down into the proportion of yeses to nos earned each day. You are to fill in the reward or
rewards that your child will receive given each type of performance. Then, a second chart allows you to indicate
what weekly rewards your child would be motivated to earn, based on the number of days that he earned twice as
many yeses as nos. In addition, there is a Weekly Daily Report Card Chart that can be used to summarize your
child’s totals over the week. This sheet should be used to determine which rewards for your child.
TO DO
- Read the List of Possible Rewards and discuss them with your child—Have your child rank the rewards to learn
which ones he desires the most.
- Choose as many rewards from the list that you think would motivate your child and fit with your home routines,
and put a star beside each with more stars next to the ones that are most rewarding for your child.
- Ask your child if there are any other rewards that he would be motivated by, and if you approve, add them to the
list, putting a star or stars beside each.
- Consider the following points:
- To make sure that children do not get tired of a reward, it is a good idea to have a menu, so each box
might consist of a choice of rewards.
- For rewards that can be given in chunks, more of something can be a larger reward than less of it (for
example, 60 versus 30 versus 15 minutes of TV time).
- It is important to have multiple levels of rewards—both daily and weekly—in order to make sure that
your child will work hard.
- Even longer-term rewards can be added to this list if you had planned on a major purchase for your child
anyway. For example, your child could be promised a new bicycle when he has 16 weeks of at least 5 good
days. You could cut a picture of a bike into 16 pieces, giving him one for each successful week; when he
has all ten pieces of the “puzzle” together, he gets the bike. The weeks do not have to be all in a row—
Your child just has to have enough of them to finish the puzzle and earn the reward.
- Fill in the boxes on each of the two charts on Page 13 with each of the rewards. Some rewards may be used more
than once.
- Check to make sure that the best rewards (or the most rewards) are listed towards the bottom of each chart.
- Note that there is no box for earning less than half yeses.