We have been struggling with discipline ideas for Harrison. Time outs don't work well because he won't stay where we put him, he hits, kicks, even bites us, and when we put him in his room he just screams & beats on the door.
So, I came up with this simple idea and crossed my fingers that it would work: I grabbed a plastic "jar" that toy links came in & a couple bags of river rocks from the floral arranging section of the craft store (it is sad that I had to buy rocks, but we have none in our yard). There ended up being 63 rocks and they filled the jar just right.
For every good thing he does he gets a rock. Examples: get dressed when asked, finish his entire dinner, pick up his toys, bring me a diaper for Andrew, go to bed without any problems, etc. He also can lose rocks: throwing a fit when Mommy or Daddy tells him "No", being mean to his brother, not listening, unbuckling his seat belt in the car, etc.
When the jar got filled he got a surprise. I thought it would take him about a week but this first time around took him a little over two weeks to fill. It worked great! He was so excited to put rocks in and saw it fill up. When he did something wrong & had to take one out sometimes we had a meltdown and would end up losing two rocks. He quickly realized that throwing a fit & losing two was worse than just losing one.
Yesterday I took him to the dollar store for his surprise. I told him he had $5 to spend. We browsed the store together & I made suggestions as to cool things he might like. I wanted him to be happy with what he got, but not have cheap, plastic toys that would break or get lost within a day.
He made his choices and ended up with:
a Phineas & Ferb coloring book
a writing pad for practicing his name & letters
a Winnie the Pooh puzzle
a sheet of Spiderman stickers
a smiley face balloon
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| His jar full of rocks! |
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| Excited to show off his selection of goodies. I love Andrew peeking up over the table. I am sure it won't be long before we will have to do a rock jar for Andrew! |
1 comment:
Great idea...I think I will try this with Riley, and maybe all the other kids as well. :)
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