Bribing your child.

In the two years that we've tried to encourage Jake to eat, we've never had one doctor, community support worker, occupational therapist, physiotherapist, speech therapist or specialist suggest bribing our child.


All the books and articles I've read about getting your child to eat say, "Don't force your child; it's up to them and they'll eat when they want to."


I was telling this to our behaviour therapist yesterday and she sort of winced and said that all books and workers believe in a "child-centric" approach, which doesn't work. Especially for kids like Jake.


She said that all the behavioural academic literature says the exact opposite - you should "bribe" your children to eat and then phase out the bribe. She did say, "We don't call it 'bribing'. We call it reinforcement."


So why is there such a difference between the people in the field and the people doing the research? No idea. I can only think that as parents we've been brainwashed to think that reinforcement is bad. For some reason, the community workers think the same thing - or agree with general cultural wisdom that says you shouldn't manipulate your kids.



The funny thing is they don't get results. Whenever we asked for help with Jake they said, "We'll get you in touch with other parents whose kids are on a gtube."



No! I don't want a support group. I want advice that works. I don't want to talk to parents with the same problem. I want to talk to parents who fixed the same problem.