Power Trip
We Need New Child Labor Laws for the Digital Age
The case for paying our kids to play video games
I pay my kids to do chores. They vacuum the rug, scrub the toilets, take out the recycling. It’s amazing how quickly they’ll turn away from video games when there’s money involved.
I know plenty of people would object to my method. They’d tell me that it’s not the right way to raise my kids. After all, popular opinion says that extrinsic rewards promote the “bad” kind of motivation. But the truth is, it’s only mainstream pop psychology and revenue-driven human resource departments that still cling to the dichotomy between intrinsic and extrinsic incentives. The experts know that this is a problematic oversimplification.
In the end, what really matters is how a person interprets the rewards. And that’s why I pay my kids to do their chores. I don’t want my boys to grow up thinking that cooking, cleaning, washing, and scrubbing should be a labor of love, a signifier of one’s dedication to the family, symbolic sweat equity that bolsters their moral and ethical net worth. Instead, I want them to see the financial value, to recognize that they’re participating in what economists call “unpaid care work.” A 2015 report from the McKinsey Global Institute suggests that this kind of work…
