I went to a talk at school about executive functioning. (I learned that people’s frontal lobes are not fully developed until they’re 25.)
There was a side discussion about using rewards for task initiation (e.g. actually starting when asked to put away your toys). There’s a hesitance to use these because you don’t want to reward something that kids should be doing anyway.
The point was made: But what’s the alternative? There are a lot of tasks that aren’t intrinsically motivating to people that haven’t yet developed a sense of long-term consequences.
You can also scale down rewards over time. I brought up the possibility of using virtual rewards that have zero marginal costs, like points or tiers. These can be scaled infinitely, no matter how much inflation happens. The problem is, the kid has to believe in them, the way people believe in cryptocurrencies.
These near-virtual rewards already do exist, though, in the form of stickers! Other parents confirmed that they can work as long as fifth grade.