To endeavor to secure goodness in a child by means of bribery, to promise him a reward in case he obeys you, is manifestly an absurdity.  You are destroying the very traits in his character you are presumably endeavoring to build up.  You are educating a human being who knows good from evil, and who should be taught deliberately to choose the right for the right’s sake, who should do his duty because he knows it to be his duty, not for any extraneous reward connected with it.  A spiritual reward will follow, nevertheless, in the feeling of happiness engendered, and the child may early be led to find his satisfaction in this, and in the approval of those he loves.

There are, of course, certain simple rewards which can be used with safety, and which the child easily sees to be the natural results of good conduct.  If his treatment of the household pussy has been kind and gentle, he may well be trusted with a pet of his own; if he puts his toys away carefully when asked to do so, father will notice the neat room when he comes home; if he learns his lessons well and quickly, he will have the more time to work in the garden; and the suggestion of these natural consequences is legitimate and of good effect.

It is always safer, no doubt, to appeal to a love of pleasure in children than to a fear of pain, yet bribes and extraneous rewards inevitably breed selfishness and corruption, and lead the child to expect conditions in life which will never be realized.  Though retribution of one kind or another follows quickly on the heels of wrong-doing, yet virtue is commonly its own reward, and it is as well that the child should learn this at the beginning of life.  Froebel says:  “Does a simple, natural child, when acting rightly, think of any other reward which he might receive for his action than this consciousness, though that reward be only praise?...

“How we degrade and lower the human nature which we should raise, how we weaken those whom we should strengthen, when we hold up to them an inducement to act virtuously!”

Emulation is often harnessed into service to further intellectual progress and the formation of right habits of conduct, and this inevitably breeds serious evils.

It is well to set before the child an ideal on which he may form himself as far as possible; but when this ideal sits across the aisle, plays in a neighboring back yard, or, worse still, is another child in the same family, he is hated and despised.  His virtues become obnoxious, and the unfortunate evildoer prefers to be vicious, that he may not resemble a creature whose praises have so continually been sung that his very name is odious.

If the child grows accustomed to the comparison of himself with others and the endeavor to excel them, he becomes selfish, envious, and either vain of his virtue and attainments, or else thoroughly disheartened at his small success, while he grudges that of his neighbor.  George Macdonald says:  “No work noble or lastingly good can come of emulation, any more than of greed.  I think the motives are spiritually the same.”