Bad Behavior Credits

It came to me in that crucible of epiphanies, the shower.

How could I explain the enduring paradox that nine and ten year olds invariably misbehave worse after they've just been praised and rewarded for prior good behavior?

Inchoate as it was, my prior explanation revolved around their erroneous sense of entitlement and freedom from restraint, after having bitten the bullet all week in order to win praise and goods for their good behavior.

I can now define the phenomenon more precisely, having recently heard an NPR story on the controversial practice of pollution credits:

Pollution Credit: An amount of pollutants that a given industrial firm, utility, or state that can be deposited into the atmosphere within a given year.

Pollution credits are bought and sold on the international market. Critics fear the practice, instead of providing incentives to reduce pollution, is a cynical move that will backfire.

I now believe that the system of disciplining nine and ten year-olds has backfired, creating imagined bad behavior credits.

Nine and ten year-olds believe that, once they have been praised and rewarded for good behavior, including that PS2 game they've been wishing for, they have also won bad behavior credits, a kind of surplus reward: the license to behave badly for a determinate period--observation determines about 24 hours.

What is to be done?
Will that be answered tomorrow night in the shower?

by D. Hilary Brown