It’s no secret that kids can be stubborn and cry and whine when they don’t want to do things, and while parents will do anything to get them to calm down when they are at their wits end, some are simply resorting to bribes.
And we’re not just talking giving them an extra hour of TV. In some cases, parents are shelling out big bucks to get their kids to simply go to the doctor or dentist. One New York mom tells the “New York Post” that in order to get her kid to go to the orthodontist for braces she promised him a trip to the Ferrari store, where she spent several hundreds of dollars on a variety of Ferrari-branded items. T
hat same kid also got a $2,500 go-kart that takes real gas when he had to have his tonsils removed. “It wasn’t a bribe — it was a reward because he behaved so well,” the mom claimed. “It’s OK to reward a child to get them to do something they don’t want to do. For my kids it works now.”
- Dr. Zev Kaufman, a prosthodontist on the Upper East Side, tells the paper he sees parents bribing kids all the time, promising everything from tickets to the World Series, a fancy bag, Apple products, or even a trip to Disney World.
- While some dentists simply laugh at parents who shell out big bucks to bribe their kids, not all agree that it’s harmless. “It gives a signal to the child that something bad is happening and they need to be rewarded,” Dr. Mark Hochberg, a pediatric dentist, says. “With a lot of millennial parents, the parenting isn’t as good as in the past.”
Source: New York Post