Page 80 - The Intentional Parent

could make the case that people who work for commission are “incentivized” to work harder for more reward -- and we can capture the importance of the idea of reinforcing a child’s behavior right here, with the word “incentivized.”
Bribery, in every connotation of the word is not a good leadership strategy.
Different words, even scientific words can have different meanings in different contexts, especially when we are trying to take terms that were constructed to explain the results of experiments and bring them into the real world. The word “reward,” from a technical point of view, refers to something that increases the probability that a behavior will increase in frequency over time. Training a dog to sit with bacon treats is an often used example, although scholars still argue over whether this represents a pure reward-based paradigm. In any event, if you want to teach your dog to sit, push his butt down, say “sit” and shove a doggie treat in his mouth. The more you do it, the more your dog will sit when you say “sit” with the expectation of receiving a treat. Many dogs (especially puppies) are so compliant and generous with their behavior that they soon learn to sit without the treat, or they will sit just to get a pat on the head, or they will sit to hear you say “good boy,” or they will sit just out of habit, presumably because they have a history of getting a reward for that behavior.
Professionals have written books suggesting that raising a child is just like raising a puppy -- yeah okay -- it should only be that easy, and that relatively inexpensive. However, I won’t deny that there are elements of the processes of raising a child and raising a puppy that are common to both.
The Intentional Parent by Peter J. Favaro, Ph.D. 80