Chore Auctions are the Future of Parenting
Link: http://offspring.lifehacker.com/have-a-chore-auction-with-your-kids-when-they-cant-wo-1809066285
This article pitches an interesting solution to bickering kids from The Game Theorist’s Guide to Parenting, a book by Paul Raeburn and Kevin Zollman. Having a chore auction can be used to resolve conflicts like two or more children fighting over a toy, who gets to sit shotgun in the car, what channel to watch on tv, or anything similar where one only one child can “win”. The solution is simple, you as the parent, babysitter, or even older sibling, host a chore auction for the children where the winner pays for the prize by doing chores. For example, say you have two kids playing with Marvel action figures, but both of them want to be Captain America and they are currently engaged in a tug of war over it that you know it won’t end well if you don’t intervene. So you ask them who is willing to pick up the rest of the toys that have been left out since yesterday and they both say they will, then you up the price by adding chores until only one of the two kids is willing to do said chores to play with the toy. With that you have mediated the argument and you have convinced at least one kid to help you around the house. As the person watching the kids you have to hold them accountable for whatever the final chore price was, but you also get to teach the kids an important lesson on earning things that they value instead of having things handed to them.
My dad actually sent this article out to our family email chain as a suggestion for my aunt who recently had her second child; he did make sure to point out how much easier it would have been to raise me and my notoriously stubborn little sister had we used these chore auctions. What I think is particularly interesting about this type of first price auction is that the players don’t know the exact value they are willing to “pay” when the auction begins. This is because unlike an auction with money, the price rising is not necessarily going to be in even increments, and some chores might me more preferable to others. The price can vary with whatever creative tasks the auction master can come up with on the spot, whether it be helping with dishes, cleaning up the bedrooms, or emptying out all the trash bins. Depending on the children, one or the other may drop out of the auction if their most-hated chore comes up, but it’s entirely up to the auctioneer if that is the chore that is pitched first (ending the auction then and there) or towards the very end when it seems neither kid will drop out. The order that chores are added to the price really adds an interesting element to this type of auction that you wouldn’t see with just money. I think it would be interesting to try and measure the desirability of each chore in the eyes of each child in order to see if that can be accurately used to predict the outcome of the auction. Perhaps certain chores would be considered “deal breakers” but kids would make an exception if the argument was over something particularly desirable or novel. I know there’s few tasks I wouldn’t do for the last scoop of ice cream in the container, and that’s coming from a 20 year old! With that in mind, perhaps this tactic might not be useful to just children, and I’ll have to start using it on my housemates!