Social Experiment

My little girl Nora loves to put money in the money jar. When I come home from work if I have change in my pocket I give it to her and she goes running to the jar gets all excited and pops the coin in the slot. I look at it as a fun little way to teach our almost two year old a basic financial skill of saving.

On Monday my wife Amanda and little Nora got to go shopping for undies... yup its that time. As Amanda was strategizing about how to motivate and reward little Nora in her potty training adventure I had an epiphany.  Instead of rewarding her with candy for going potty in the toilet we are going to let her put coins in the money jar.

This all came about by the latest book I am reading on incentives and why we as a society do certain things the way we do and have the rewards that we do. As I was thinking about this I was reminded about a study in a nutrition class in college and thought back to how we as a culture reward ourselves with food (most times junk food). Not necessarily a good thing. I realized that Amanda and I are teaching our daughter this horrible habit at a very young age. That along with my desire to always teach our kiddos good moneysaving principles led me to this idea.

We are now three days into our social experiment and  no accidents yesterday! It is exciting for me, I think we are going to have to try more experiments like this.