About 6 months ago, we were leaving Sadie's school and I heard another mom tell her son that if he didn't get in the car right then, he was going to loose a marble. I thought she had lost her marbles! The marble jar is great for school (which is basically a lesson in conforming). No one wants to be the kid that looses a marble for the whole class; therefore, every kid tends to be on their best behavior!
As a parent, I don't want to have to trick my child into minding me...I just want her to do as I say; however, as I thought about our situation, I realized that my way wasn't really working either. So after brainstorming, I came up about 3 discipline methods which we are using right now.
1. The Behavior Jar-Yes, even though I thought it was a ridiculous thing to do at home, I think I've tweaked it to make sense.
Here are the rules of the Behavior Jar:
- 1 good deed earns 1 penny (no more, no less) we realize this will need to increase with age
- 1 bad (don't like using the word "bad" but...) behavior looses a penny (no more, no less)
- Only Sadie can put the penny in, and we state the behavior that the penny was given for before she puts it in.
- Only Mom, Dad (or whoever is in charge of Sadie at the time) can take a penny out
- Loosing a penny isn't a "get outta good behavior free card", she still has to do as she's told. If she does it nicely she earns a penny if she doesn't do it nicely, she looses a penny one at a time until she does as told-One morning when we were trying to get her ready, she said, "I don't want to get dressed, just take a penny out", hmm...it doesn't really work that way, but I like the negotiation skills :)
- Hitting or saying she hates someone, is an automatic penny withdrawal
- We use a glass jar so she can see her pennies and know how well she is doing
- Once the jar is full or to a certain level, she gets to spend the money (her first lesson in Economics :) )
It took Sadie 3 weeks to earn this many pennies (135 pennies)
She wanted to buy her own pack of gum with her money. First we took her to CVS and then the gas station, but the gum was $1.50. She's on a fixed income...and can't really afford that!
So we took her to Dollar General where all the gum was $1.00. She chose orange gum tape.
She had to tell the cashier how she earned her money. You can see the surprised look on the cashier's face. Since you don't know what I know, you probably just think the cashier is just engaging in the conversation...but I know that this lady has seen Sadie throw many fits in this store and really is surprise that she could have this much good behavior in 3 weeks.
$1.05, she has $0.30 change!
Very proud of her purchase, and she has already staked out what her next purchase will be...gummy worms!
2. Counting Backwards-
Counting also seems ridiculous but she is very competitive and the goal here is for her to complete a certain task before we get to #1. We always start with 10 and go down so she isn't compelled to keep counting and try to earn herself more time. We make it seem like a fun game, and stretch out certain numbers as needed for her to win or almost win. I've seen her go from throwing an outfit she didn't want to wear to me saying "10" and she starts saying to herself, "I've gotta hurry, I've got to hurry faster" and she will grab what she didn't want to wear and try to get it on as fast as possible!
3. Providing (verbally) the what (we want her to do)and the why (the reason...as if she is an adult, lol, but it actually works).
Here's an example: We were at the park and it was time to leave. Sadie started to throw a fit and I said, "Here's the deal, if you throw a fit now, this is what we will think about next time you want to come to the park and we will remember our experience at the park as a bad one because you acted naughty when it was time to go. If you walk away like a nice lady right now, we will have a good memory of the park and we will be more likely to bring you back. It is your decision right now, how we leave the park, nicely or ugly, but either way, we are still leaving right now". She said, "Okay, bye park". Dustin and I both looked at each other in disbelief...that actually worked, wow!
There is one more emergency technique we use. This is when she is being impossible and nothing seems to fix it. At this point it almost seems like she is acting naughty because we expect her to keep acting that way. This is when we get creative and we might have her:
- put her attitude, crying, etc. in our hand and then we take it to the toilet and flush it all away so there is nothing left but a happy Sadie
- open up the front door and throw it out (okay, not just Sadie, this was for the older girls too)
- Scribble her anger on a dry erase board and then wipe it all away
Or anything else I can come up with at the time, it's just a way to tell her that we aren't mad at her and it's more fun being happy than sad and angry!
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