Where I was rewarded with stickers for doing something good in class ten years ago, my sister now receives likes from her teacher. I don’t know what went wrong in the decade between us, but I do know it is so problematic up and it is going to cause huge problems with her self-esteem in the future.

When I was little and still in primary school, I got stickers when I behaved well. I received a sticker when my desk was tidied or when I had completed one of my tasks. Once I had collected enough stickers, I could exchange them for something out of the treasury. I often chose a funny looking eraser or sometimes even a pretty notepad.

Reward systems have been around for centuries and have been proven to be very effective. My teachers used it on me and my class when I was little, my mom used it on me and my brother at home and I used it to train my dog. It’s a system every grownup is familiar with and it is a widely used method to teach someone something. Nothing peculiar about it, right? Wrong.

Individual and collective

My little sister of 11 years old is about the same age as I was when I was collecting stickers by being on my best behaviour. Her teacher obviously uses a reward system as well to encourage her students to do the same. However, my sister doesn’t get stickers. No, my sister and her classmates collect ‘likes’ by being well-behaved. She receives a ‘like’ when she does her homework or when she spontaneously helps her teacher.

There are individual rewards that can be exchanged for a number of likes. For example, my sister gets to sit next to a person of her choice for a day when she has reached ten likes. And if every student in the class has reached a total of twenty likes, they all get thirty minutes extra recreation time.

Messed up terminology

Right now, there is still one child who hasn’t collected his 20 likes yet, so the rest of the students try to encourage him to be on his best behaviour. While this system creates a collective conscience where they learn to help each other for a greater cause, I think the terminology is so insanely wrong.

The concept, and more so the importance, of likes is already planted in their young brains, long before they even create their own social media account. That is so beyond problematic.

Mental health dangers

To me, it sounds like something straight out of an episode from Black Mirror. Getting likes when you do something good for someone or society and only being rewarded once you have reached a certain number of likes…

It makes me think of the scene where the woman wants to get a seat on a plane, but can’t pay for it as she hasn’t received enough social credits from other people. It hurts my heart to think this could become the absurd reality for my sister when she gets older.

It absolutely baffles me that children are already subjected to the insane concept of ‘likes’. Social media has been proven to take a huge toll on adolescents’ mental health, just imagine what it could do to that of children.