4) Decide on rewards and consequences. Will your child receive a reward at the end of the game? Rewards do not need to be monetary, although for teens, monetary rewards often work well. Some example of rewards might be: having a friend sleep over, renting a movie, going out for ice cream, getting to pick out their favorite dinner, staying up late or spending the day at the park. Use your child's interests to come up with ideas for rewards. Will there be consequences? If your child does not follow the game or refuses to cooperate what will happen?

Deciding all of this in advance will help you to make this a fun way to improve behaviors.

There are five ideas for games below. For example purposes, I have continued to use the completing homework example, although all of these games can be used to work on any number of behaviors. I hope that readers will be able to add their own ideas on how they motivate their children.

Horse races

Find small toy horses, many times these can be found at the dollar store. Use construction paper to cut out a racetrack. Based on your expectations, decide how many spaces you want to have. If you are using the example above for completing homework, and you want to include: completing homework, putting supplies away, and putting homework in schoolbag, you could use 15 spaces. (One space for each task times five days in a school week.) Each night your child would have the opportunity to move their horse 3 spaces. Place the "board" you created and the horse in a spot that it will not be disturbed except when your child is moving the horse, put also in a spot where they can see their progress. If they reach the winners line at the end of the week, they can have the reward.

This game is easily modified to use play cars instead of horses.

A Peaceful Home

This idea was shared by a father of two children, both with ADHD and was used to help his children learn to get along with one another.

Use plastic cups, one for each child and one for you. Place five dimes in each of the children's cups. Make sure you have a few rolls of dimes on hand. Try to catch your children being nice to each other (or even civil). Each time they say a kind word, help someone else, not talk back or simply not hit each other (depending on your situation), add a dime to their cup. If they do yell, hit or speak meanly, take a dime away and put it in your cup. Decide in advance a day to end the game and then let your children spend their money on something.