Finding The Right Currency
It all begins with an idea.
Diary Entry: October 12th
10:45 a.m.: The Goldilocks Principle, or Why My Sticker Drawer is Now Useless
I just finished a 15-minute wrestling match with Ezra (my three-year-old) over a four-piece puzzle. My RBT brain knows I need to teach him new skills, and my parent heart knows a structured activity gives me a blessed 10 minutes of quiet.
The struggle today is admitting that I’m making assumptions about what motivates my own child. I was trying to teach him to complete the puzzle, and I was using positive reinforcement—praise and a sticker. That's textbook, right? It works for most of my clients!
But here’s the sequence that just played out:
My Prompt: "Ezra, put in the next piece."
Ezra’s Behavior: Stares at the wall, then attempts to eat the puzzle piece.
My Consequence: "Good job looking at me! Here's your star sticker!" (He lets the sticker fall to the floor.)
I tried this ten times. Zero progress. I sat there, defeated, thinking, "I am literally a professional. Why can't I reinforce my own kid?" I felt like The Professional Know-It-All Who Knows Nothing.
The truth is, I was committing the biggest mistake: I chose the reinforcer for him based on what I thought was high-value, not what was meaningful to Ezra in that exact moment. The sticker meant nothing to him. The praise was just noise.
My messy, imperfect attempt to fix it was abandoning the "lesson plan" and just grabbing things nearby. I put out three random items: the rejected sticker, a handful of puffs, and his favorite blue toy truck. He immediately lunged for the truck.
This is the Goldilocks Principle of Reinforcement. The reward has to be Just Right. The sticker was Too Low (not worth the effort). The iPad would be Too High (too disruptive). The blue truck, offered for a few minutes of play, was Just Right—it was highly motivating and easy to deliver immediately.
I changed the consequence right then: "Puzzle finished, then blue truck for 30 for 3 minutes!" We completed the puzzle instantly. It wasn't about the puzzle; it was about the truck. As parents and or ABA professionals we have to perform a constant, informal Preference Assessment because their motivation changes as fast as they can drop a puzzle piece. Stop using that dusty sticker drawer, and figure out what currency they value right now.