by Peter Johns

Created on: December 03, 2008   Last Updated: May 13, 2010

Ask yourself this question: on your deathbed, do you think you'll wish you would have worked more, made more money, or spent more time with your loved ones? Time is so much more important to a child than money. I guarantee you they will never forget the time you spent helping them with their school work. Throwing money at them to get good grades is like reneging on a fishing trip and saying "Here kid, here's fifty bucks instead!" At the very least it's a slap in the face. We should spend time with our kids, not throw cash at them. In turn, they will spend time with their kids, and so on. That's a beautiful pattern to foster.

When I was in middle school, there was a girl in my class who came in one day all excited because her mother had told her she would start paying her for good grades. I remember getting a sinking feeling in my stomach. I was only twelve or thirteen at the time, but somehow I felt instinctively that this wasn't right. She was running around telling all her friends about it, bragging about how she was going to make a boat-load of money. She was treating it like a game; her mother had challenged her and she was going to win.

Part of me was jealous; what kid wouldn't want money? Somehow though the prevailing feeling for me was akin to "Just Say No!"

A couple weeks, and tests, later the unthinkable happened: she started cheating. It wasn't just a whisper here or a cheat-mark on the arm there, it was brazen. She had cheat sheets out and would openly turn to other students during tests to try and get answers. She had never done that before. What's worse is there didn't seem to be any trace of hesitation, guilt or reservation in her actions - it's as if she didn't realize that what she was doing was immoral.

The problem with cheating, with "going there," is that when you cross that line, it's not easy to cross back (especially for a child). Why would any child want to come back from "Easy Street"?

Many problems can arise from using money as an incentive:

With the promise of money, a kid might bully or bribe other kids into doing their homework for them; they may try to manipulate or even threaten teachers; when we're talking hundreds of dollars, who's to say that kids and teachers wouldn't actually work together? When the teacher gives a better grade, the kid pays the teacher off. That's outright fraud.

This all may sound extreme, but so did "shootings in schools" (For that matter, "paying for water" was once considered an outlandish notion, but

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