Money and my DD are a rich and complicated topic, and only one part of it has anything to do with motivation. Short version - she gets a regular allowance that isn’t tied to anything she does. That teaches her money management, becomes something we can withdraw for negative behaviors, and ends arguments when she wants things that I don’t want to buy for her - if she wants it badly enough, she can pay for it herself.
She also gets special rewards for things she’s already plenty intrinsically motivated to do, just because they’re worth acknowledging. Every report card period she gets paid, and there’s no conflict there. She quite enjoys getting paid, but she earns the grades for other reasons.
Where money has been used as an inducement was where intrinsic motivation was missing, or was insufficient to overcome her self-doubt/sabotage. And what I found was that the money provided a bridge towards intrinsic motivation. One of those places was grades... when the work was too simple, or too stupid (thank you, Common Core math) to be worthy of her consideration, I basically bribed her to “play the game” in school and do what she was asked. This provided an important demonstration of her abilities that was necessary to get her into more advanced classes, taught her the patience to get through drudge work, and got her to a place where she began to value good grades for their own sake. As I said before, she is past that and no longer requires that external motivation, and the compensation has been retracted to report cards only.
As for chores - are there really any intrinsic motivations for those? The only motives there are negative - I don’t want to live in a dirty house, etc.
