Author’s practical guidance
A sticker or treat for eating vegetables stops working after a while
Source named in the book: rewards and food preference (Birch)
Rewarding a child for eating a food tends to work at first and then backfire — Birch's studies found children rewarded for eating a vegetable often come to like it less over time than children simply offered it with no prize attached.
Say this now
“Let's put the vegetables on your plate without the sticker for now.”
States the change plainly.
“You don't need a reward to try it. It can just be there.”
Reframes the food as ordinary, not a task.
Do this
- Phase out food-based rewards for eating specific foods.
- Keep offering the vegetable at meals without comment.
- Save praise for effort or trying, not for finishing a specific food.
- Let a few weeks pass before judging whether it's working.
- Keep other rewards, like stickers for chores, entirely separate from food.
Avoid this
- Raising the reward when the old one stops working — the same mechanism, working even less well at a higher cost.
- "But you used to love getting a sticker for this!" — treats a predictable shift as a personal betrayal.
- Switching to bigger prizes like toys or screen time — escalates the same pattern into a bigger habit to break later.
If it repeats
If removing the reward causes total refusal of a food that was previously at least tolerated, go back to offering it without pressure or reward at all — a neutral plate, repeated often, usually outperforms both bribing and forcing over time.
Why the book suggests this
Rewarding a child for eating a food tends to work at first and then backfire — Birch's studies found children rewarded for eating a vegetable often come to like it less over time than children simply offered it with no prize attached. The reward quietly tells the child the food must need bribing to be worth eating.
This is not a flaw in the child or a sign the sticker chart needs to be bigger. It is the reward doing exactly what research on this kind of external motivation predicts, just showing up later than anyone expected.
From this collection
Same Words: At the Table
45 prepared situations in this family area.