If you eat two more pieces of broccoli, you can have candy for dessert. 

If you’re nice to your little brother on this car ride, I’ll buy you a new toy at Target. 

If you get your homework done on time, we can go get ice cream. 

It’s natural to default to an award system like this when you are wanting your child to correct, change, or improve behavior. In general, there are two ways to change a child’s behavior: reward or consequence. Bribery is tapping into the reward side of behavioral change, which has been scientifically proven to be effective.

When conducting a study on 8,000 different children, researchers found that bribing them to eat healthier not only worked in the short term but in the long term:

 “They found that giving the students a small incentive for eating healthy — in this case, a 25 cent token the kids could spend at the school store, carnival or book fair — doubled the fraction of kids eating at least one serving of fruits or vegetables… The researchers also found that the effects lingered after the experiment ended, though they did subside somewhat. Two months after the end of the…