Praise Over Punishment: Incentives Adolescents Need to Succeed

As an adolescent, what was your primary motivator for success? Did you succeed because you were driven by rewards (e.g., recognition, monetary benefits, autonomy), or were you motivated to avoid punishment? Most people tend to respond more positively to rewards (i.e., positive reinforcement) than punishment. However, the juvenile justice system is set up to focus more on punishing bad behavior than rewarding good behavior. This creates a situation where systems are more likely to fail.

One such system is juvenile probation, in which youth are supervised by probation officers for a given amount of time (usually instead of detainment). Richardson and colleagues (2025) examined how probation incentives influence success in their paper “What Youth Want: Youths’ Perceptions of Incentives in Juvenile Probation.” Researchers examined three types of rewards: recognition, monetary benefits, and autonomy. Recognition involved the probation officer sharing the youths’ successes with their families, judges, courts, and victims. Monetary rewards included gift cards or reduction in payments to the court. Autonomy offered youth less supervision (e.g., fewer meetings with the probation officer, removal of electronic monitoring).

The researchers surveyed 491 youth on probation from age 12 to 19 years (average age of 16). The youth were mostly male and Hispanic. They rated 10 incentives on 5-point scales for how much it would motivate them to succeed while on probation. Recognition was the most desired reinforcement, followed by autonomy, and then monetary rewards. This finding is especially promising because arguably recognition is the least resource-intensive reward to implement. However, recognition is not entirely free and still might be a lot of work for overworked probation officers.

Future research should continue to investigate the benefits of recognition. Most research to-date focuses on monetary rewards, which were rated as the least motivating. Even if recognition adds some burden on probation officers in the short-term, if it improves long-term youth success on probation, it might decrease probation officer workload long term. It is possible that positive recognition can improve adolescent’s self-esteem, promote continuous growth, and reduce repeat offending. Policymakers would benefit by working with researchers and practitioners to identify areas, such as increased recognition, that can result in positive change to the system.