Week 250: Milestone, pajamas, and loss aversion

Woah, Week 250. Hard to believe I’ve written that many of these updates. I wonder how many pictures of the kids I’ve posted. I would guess somewhere around three klatillion. Here are a few more:

As you can see, Sam is now in possession of “feety pajamas” which are basically suits of synthetic fiber that include built-in socks. I had thought that these were strictly for babies and toddlers, but apparently they make them for older kids now, too. I look forward to this trend advancing to the point where I am provided my own pair of feety pajamas, though I would prefer some other color than pink and some other decoration than the word “HUGS!”

Edit: ZOMG! They do make them! Thanks for letting me know, Becky!

At this point, I’d like to offer a parenting trick born out of the science of psychology. There’s this little kink in human behavior called “loss aversion.” Simply put, we hate losing stuff more than we like gaining stuff of equal value. It’s more painful, for example, to lose $5 you already have than it is pleasurable to get $5 you didn’t. This is actually a very powerful effect and pretty well documented, so I decided to see if I could put it to work in getting my kids to eat their dinners.

What I did was before we all sat down to eat, I asked Sam and Mandy to pick out a desert and place it next to their plate. Before, we had held out the promise of a desert if they ate well and had good manners. Now, the desert was theirs, with the only stipulations being that they had to wait until after dinner to eat it and that they lost it if they either didn’t eat well or had bad table manners. The distinction between getting a desert if they behaved well and losing a desert if they behaved poorly is a subtle one, but if psychology has anything to say about it it would be an important one.

Well, turns out we’re batting .500. The effect on Sam was pronounced. The first time I took away her desert on account of playing with her food she squawked as she never had when I took away the prospect of a hypothetical desert in the future. The next night, she jealously guarded her desert and kept telling us that she wasn’t going to lose it THIS time, because she was going to be good and eat all her dinner. And she kept her word, so I call the experiment is a success! SCIENCE!

Well, partially. Not only did Mandy keep trying to eat her desert before the rest of her dinner, she seemed more content to blithely ignore our threats and their executions. I’m putting this down to her tender age, since Sam seems to grok the concept much better and it works for her. We’ll see if Mandy comes around.