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I would reward. I would personally try not to always make it a food reward (though they often are!) but I don't see anything wrong with rewards for good things. We've been having nap time battles (3.5 years old and I still want her to have quiet time if she doesn't sleep). The other day she finally played quietly in her room until time was up and I was really proud of her and ended up painting her toenails because she'd been so good. And then she did it again the next two days!

I would totally reward in this situation. I probably wouldn't make it a tangible reward EVERY time, but would offer tons of praise, high fives, and hugs when I didn't reward. I personally find that tangible rewards (a treat food, a toy, or the chance to stay up late/do a special activity) are most effective for my DDs when they are kind of a "surprise" rather than expected each time, if that makes sense.

ETA: I've offered "surprise rewards" to my three year old recently for behaving nicely around the baby (not squashing, pestering, etc.) and it's worked well.

For us, rewards have to be big to work....but on the flip side, so do the consequences for non-compliance. So I try to limit rewards to things that we're actively working on for maximum impact.

In this case, it sounds like an active project, so I would have rewarded.

Absolutely reward and praise! My oldest has done a few things in which he was terrified to do. We were able to talk him into doing them in a gentle way, and I was so proud of him for being so brave. We talk about how a brave person is someone who does something that they're scared of doing, but does it anyway because they know it's the right thing.

His egg challenge was his biggest accomplishment of this sort. All of his life, we've been telling him eggs did bad things to him. So when it came time for his egg challenge, we prepared him the night before and he started crying because he didn't want to eat something that was going to hurt him. We explained that it was perfectly ok to be scared, and asked him what made him feel safe. When he said me and daddy, we told him that we would be right there with him to help him to feel safe. He did the egg challenge with no issues and passed. We made sure to tell him how proud we were of him for conquering his fear and got him some Italian Ice that night

I'd probably do a high five and mention how proud she must feel for standing up for herself, and leave it at that. Not that there's anything *wrong* with rewards but I want to try and encourage intrinsic motivation which I think is ultimately more powerful than external rewards/prizes.