Giveaway winners

So the winners of the giveaway are Kristine and amazon_mom! I decided that since I only had two people comment and they were both great comments that I would hook both of you moms up! So look for a package from amazon!!

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How to give logical Consequences

Ok now that you understand what a logical consequence is I am going to explain to you the best way to give a logical consequences. The first thing to remember is that you are not trying to punish your kid, but are teaching them to accept responsibility for their actions. This is key because when our goal is to punish our kids we tend to have the attitude of "I'll show them whose boss" and when we look at it as a way of teaching we are kinder, and tend to be more respectful to our kids and for me I find it easier to come up with consequences when I am using it as a teaching moment.

The next thing that is key is to be respectful, when you are yelling the consequence at your kid they are probably feeling unloved and like their opinion doesn't matter. I am far from perfect, but I try really hard to not yell at my kids - but I am the first to admit that when I am really frustrated I do yell but you will also always see me apologize to my kids for yelling at them and telling them that it is my fault I yelled not theirs.

On that note it is all about the approach and the way you phrase a logical consequence that makes all the difference. Take a look at the two different approaches to the following misbehavior.

Misbehavior: Jill leaves her toys lying all around the house and doesn't pick them up.
Approach 1: Mom says "Jill, pick up these toys right now or they are going in the garage!"
Approach 2: "Jill, you can either pick up your toys yourself or else I am going to pick them up and put them in the garage. It's up to you."

Which approach do you think is the most effective way to give a logical consequence - the second one! You always want to use either/or choices or when/then choices because it puts all of the power in the kids hands, which is where we want it to be! An example of a when/then choice would be: Johnny wants to play outside but his room is a mess so you say: "when your room is clean then you can go outside and play."

We also want to involve our kids in choosing the consequences as often as possible. My in-laws did a form of this when their kids were growing up and it made for some pretty hilarious stories. Here are a few of them that you might find amusing as well:
1. My sister in law said that if she didn't clean her room her mom could poor water on her head. Some friends of hers were going to the mall and she wanted to go, even though her room wasn't clean, and as she was walking out to the car her mom came running out with a pitcher of water and dumped it on her head in front of her friends - she then chose to clean her room.
2. My brother in law said that if he didn't clean the bathroom he would sleep in the bathtub, he didn't clean the bathroom so to the bathtub he went to sleep!

Now those aren't really what a professional would call "logical consequences" but they worked for that family, and that is what matters most. None of us have cookie cutter lives and what works for my family might not work for yours, the important thing is that you find a way that does work and teaches responsibility not punishes!

Which brings me to the next step - ONLY GIVE A CHOICE YOU CAN LIVE WITH! It doesn't do you any good to punish yourself with the consequence given to a kid. I have a friend who always threatens their kid "either do this or you don't get to go . . . " and all that does is punish both a kid and a parent because now the parent doesn't get to go either! If you can't live with a messy house don't give them the consequence to not clean up after them, if you can't handle your kids going to bed without dinner don't give them that as a consequence.

Finally make sure you always follow through because your kids are going to test you! State the consequence one time and then if they choose not to do what is expected dish out the consequence. Kids will test you to see what you are going to do all the time, they want to know how much they can get away with so if you tell them that when their room is clean they can go outside and play, but you get tired of them crying about cleaning their room so you cave and say fine go play outside - well guess what next time they are definitely not going to clean their room. Now on the other hand if you say, I know you don't want to clean and that's o.k. it just means you can't go outside then depending on how badly they want to play outside will determine how quickly their room gets cleaned. I always reinforce to them when giving their consequence that they chose it, not me and that I am not the bad guy and hopefully the next time they will make a different choice. In this way I am not the bad guy, I am just the enforcer of rules.

Being grateful

I was just checking on my kids and they are all safely tucked into their beds and sound asleep and I was just overwhelmed with a sense of gratitude that we are all safe in our homes tonight. I don't know if you have been watching the news or reading any of the news updates on what has been happening around the world, most specifically Japan, and seeing how much devastation there is now, but I have been and it just makes me so grateful for my family and my children.

There were definitely times today when I would get frustrated with my kids or just wished they would leave me alone for a few minutes, and as I am sitting here thinking about the people in Japan whose children may be dead or missing or whose children are now orphaned all I can feel is a huge amount of humility and am filled with a huge sense of gratitude that I was able to be frustrated with my kids today and that I was also able to sing silly songs for an hour with them and teach J how to spell his name and receive lots and lots of hugs from all of them throughout the day.

I encourage all of you to just take a minute and really appreciate the fact that you know where your kids are right now and that they are safe and alive.

Give-away!

So the other day I was thinking about a comment made on my logical consequences post about it being hard to think about a misbehavior until it is happening and I thought how true is that! It is often hard for me to sit down and think of all the ways my kids misbehaved throughout the day, often all I can think about are the funny or good things they did throughout the day. So I am going to give you and myself an assignment with a promise of great reward.

In order for this blog to be as effective as I want it to be I want to be able to use experiences of my readers and address issues that they are concerned with. So here is what I want from you: Watch your kids throughout the day and write down 3 or more things your kids did to "misbehave" or that was something you are frustrated/concerned with. Even if you already know how to handle the situation write it down, because one of my readers might be struggling with the same thing. It can be anything from your child hitting to your child refusing to read out loud. Then leave a comment listing the things your child did and for each issue you post you will be entered into a drawing for my favorite parenting book Active Parenting Now and is the book I go to the most for answers on how to help my own kids. Share this link on facebook (the little button on the bottom of this post) and leave a comment saying you shared this post and you will receive 2 extra entries (but you also have to post a concern/misbehavior).  I will announce the winner on Friday morning!!

Natural and Logical Consequences

This morning when I woke up I looked at the clock and saw that it was 8:00 and I thought wow my kids must be playing so nicely since they let me sleep in so long - usually I am being woken up at 6:30 with demands of food, tv, diaper changes, cuddles, etc. So I come out of my room and the first thing you see when you turn the corner from my room is our playroom which is still spotless so I am really impressed with how well behaved my kids have been this morning, then I turned the corner again and this is what I see . . .


At this moment I just stood there and thought "Oh wow! Huh, not what I expected" What you don't know by seeing this is that there was a tie on the doors of the game cabinet to keep this mischievous 2 yr old out of the game cabinet. What I didn't know was that he could bypass that tie and still manage to get into the games and puzzles, and when I say get into I actually mean dump the games everywhere! This mess is actually a lot bigger than the picture shows because there were literally games and puzzles strewn across my entire living room.

At this point I have a couple options as a parent in regards to disciplining O for the huge mess he made. 1. I can spank and yell at him and really show him who is boss (while also teaching him that when people do things we don't like it is o.k. for us to hit and yell at them and encourage him to feel unloved) 2. I can have the attitude of saying well he is 2 and that's what 2 yr olds do so I will just send him off to play and clean it up myself (which teaches him to not take responsibilities for his actions and that he can make as big of a mess as he wants and mommy will just clean up after himself) or 3. I can come up with a consequence that fits the crime and will teach him responsibility, still feel loved and will last him a lifetime. I obviously chose option 3, which is to have O help clean up the mess he made and not be allowed to play until the entire mess is cleaned up.

If you were ever to spend a day with me at my house you would see the use of a lot of what "experts" call natural and logical consequences being used. I do not believe in time-outs as mentioned in a previous post and I do not believe in the use of physical discipline (spanking, slapping, kicking, etc. etc.) Sure those methods work to instill fear in children and teach them to obey or else . . . but why not teach them to make good choices because that is what is the right thing to do and also teach them that when they make bad choices there are consequences that make sense and that they can understand. There are a ton of great parenting books out there that explains this concept and one of them is called "Parenting with Love & Logic" by Foster Cline and Jim Fay and they have an amazing website full of helpful advice that you can check out here.

The basics of logical and natural consequences are simple to understand but not always easy to come up with. My sister in law told me once that she has a lot of friends who call themselves love and logic dropouts and I think the main reason for that is that this is a hard way to be a parent - not hard in the sense that it is impossible, but in a sense that you as a parent HAVE to THINK beyond the reach of your arm (or wooden spoon for my wooden spoon motivators out there) and be involved as a parent. How hard is it really to send a kid to time out? Not very, sure it might take up a few minutes of your time to make sure the child stays there and you have a nice little chit chat afterwards about why they are in time out and then it is done. How hard is it to spank a kid, actually really easy just reach out your arm and swat them until all of your anger is relinquished and they are properly demoralized and you can get right back to whatever it was you were doing before the child interrupted you with their misbehaviors. But coming up with consequences that fit the crime are a lot harder but also a lot more effective in teaching kids how to properly behave. So what do I mean when I say logical and natural consequences?

According to Active Parenting by Michael H. Popkin (by the way I LOVE this book) a good definition of logical consequences is: "discipline that is logically connected to a misbehavior and applied by an authority to influence a child to behave within the limits of the situation." Now you might be saying, huh? to that definition but basically when you think of logical consequences think of the Law of Moses - you stole something so they cut off your hand, you lied they cut out your tongue - only not as severe as cutting off our child's limbs!

Here are some examples of logical consequences:
Children are arguing over what to watch on tv so no one gets to watch TV
Child makes huge mess in living room, child cleans up huge mess in living room
Child refuses to clean up toys, child's toys get taken away until they can show that they can clean up their toys
Child hits brother, child has to help brother feel better
Child refuses to eat what is made for dinner, child doesn't get to eat dessert and may possibly go to bed hungry.

The main idea is to make sure it fits what they did wrong, if they aren't eating dinner what sense does it make that their punishment is to go to the room for the rest of the night? It makes more sense to say o.k. you don't get to eat anything else later. I don't believe in making a child sit at the dinner table all night either when I am done eating my dinner my kids may also get down from the table and the food gets put away and if they ask for a snack later all I have to say is "did you eat your dinner?" and if the answer is yes then they can have a snack, if the answer is no then they can't have a snack but I can reheat their dinner for them at my earliest convenience. Does this make sense to you? Do you have any questions? I know I also mentioned Natural consequences but this post is already long so I am going to save that for another post. But please leave your thoughts on logical consequences, and it would be great if you put examples of what logical consequences you use in your house if you use them!

Time-out

The other day I was catching up on my shows and I was watching an episode from Supernanny that is the inspiration for this post. On this particular episode it was a military family with four adopted children. The children all had come from other countries and had very traumatic lives before they were adopted and because of this the mom didn't want to over discipline for fear of making the children feel unloved. Her husband had been deployed to Afghanistan and so she was raising these children as a single mom.

In this episode the mom showed Jo (that's Supernanny's name in case you didn't know) that instead of putting her kids in time-out she would put their toys in what she called "toy jail." Jo was flabbergasted by this and basically made fun of the mom for putting the toy in time out and not the kid. Jo then taught the mom the Supernanny's way of time out which is putting the kid on a naughty stair for a set length time that is based on the child's age and every time the kid gets off the stair the timer starts all over and after the child has sat through the time limit quietly they then talk to their child about what they did wrong and the punishment is over.

This is not necessarily a "bad" thing except for the fact that you are really relying on a child's comprehension skills for this to be an effective way to eliminate a behavior and it can be way overused. I personally do not believe in time-outs in the traditional way that many people do and I do put toys in "time-out" if that is what you want to call it.

Parents typically begin employing the time-out form of discipline at around the age of 2 because well let's face it 2 yr olds are "terrible." They are terrible because they are finally figuring out that they can say no and they can do things for themselves and they have a very hard time understanding that even though they are becoming a big kid and are able to do a lot for themselves there are still a lot of things that they cannot do for safety reasons or because it is time to do something else. One of my biggest struggles with my 2 yr old is transitioning from one activity to the next. He gets in his mind that he wants to play cars when it is time for bed and therefore he becomes very upset and very frustrated and takes out that frustration by either screaming, hitting, throwing the cars or by completely ignoring my requests to clean up and get ready for bed. Now I could put him in time-out because he isn't listening to my words, he is hurting others or he is refusing to clean but what do you think is going through his mind while he is sitting in time-out for 2 minutes? I can't say for sure what he is thinking about because I am not in his mind, but knowing that 2 yr olds are egotistical and don't think beyond themselves and their immediate wants and needs I am going to make an educated guess and say that they are probably thinking about how crappy it is that they are in time-out and not so much about why they are there. 2 yr olds also have a very hard time thinking about the "past" or even the future and tend to think more in terms of right this minute. A 3 yr old is much more capable of processing the facts and understanding the fact that they are in time out because they made a bad choice however this is not the most effective way to discipline kids in my opinion.

I prefer to discipline my kids by the use of logical and natural consequences (this will be a post for another day) over time-outs. My kids toys get taken away when they choose to not clean them up, when they choose to play with them improperly (throwing them, using them to hit others) and also when they are fighting over a specific toy. Along with the toy being taken away is an explanation to them about why their toy was taken away. For example, M and J both want to play with a Woody doll (from Toy Story in case you were wondering) and neither one is willing to let the other one play with it first so they are fighting. I will tell them that they need to figure out who gets to play with it first or else no one will be able to play with it. They then have an opportunity to make a better choice and resolve the issue on their own by working out how they are going to share a toy. I always give them atleast 2 - 3 minutes to figure it out before I intervene, and will only intervene earlier if the fight becomes violent. If they choose to continue fighting then I will walk over and take the toy and tell them that because they chose not to agree on how to share the toy I am choosing for them and no one gets to play with it. I will then take the toy and put it where none of them can reach it. If they get upset I tell them that I gave them plenty of time to decide how to share it and they chose to fight instead and therefore no one gets it. I don't put them in time out for not sharing because I don't think it is the most effective of teaching them how to share.

The only time I will put my child in "time-out" is when they are so upset that there is no way I will be able to talk to them and they just need to cool down for a minute and then I will take them to their room and tell them that when they are calm and ready to talk to me in a polite and respectful way then they can come out. I don't set a timer, I just close the door and walk away. When they are calmed down they will come out and then I will talk to them about whatever is upsetting them and help them figure out a way to handle the situation. Sometimes they are in their room for less than 30 seconds and sometimes they are in their room for thirty minutes it just depends on them and how long they feel they need to calm down. For my 2 yr old I put him in his bed and because he doesn't understand come out when you are calm I wait for him to stop crying and then I get him out because I know he is now calmed down. I feel that everyone including adults needs time to get away from the situation and calm down before they can reasonably deal with an upsetting situation and my kids have heard me say that mom needs a time out and have watched me go into my room lock the door count to ten or a hundred and come back out a lot more levelheaded than I was before my time out. My kids also know that they can send us to our rooms when we lose our cool (this is mostly my husband for yelling when we have a rule to not yell in our house).

What are your thoughts on time-outs? Do you use them and find them effective and if you use them what is your time-out procedure?

Birthdays

This past month we celebrated two birthdays, my oldest daughter turned 6 and my youngest son turned 2. Because of this I have been thinking a lot about celebrating birthdays and all of the different ways that people choose to celebrate birthdays. My husband and I both have VERY different opinions on how we should celebrate them and I must admit that my husband has made more concessions than I have in this department. A lot of our attitudes stem from our childhood and how our parents treated our birthdays.

  My husband's family is not gift oriented people at all. My mother-in-law thinks that getting flowers is a waste of money because they are just going to die and is much more appreciative of a person weeding her garden than giving her flowers. On top of them not being gift people they also didn't have a lot of money and so their birthdays consisted of cake and ice cream and a small gift. They didn't have a bunch of people over either, it was just his parents and siblings celebrating most of the time. Aunts and uncles didn't give gifts and didn't come over for the birthday celebration. The gifts also were not extravagant, one year his sister received a jar of pickles for her birthday. However, as small as the celebration was and as few as the gifts they received their mom made sure they felt special (or embarrassed?) on their birthday by singing Happy Birthday to them either on the school bus or on the baseball field.

  My family celebrated birthdays very differently. My family is a much more gift oriented family and even though we were also dirt poor my parents made sure we received a nice birthday gift for our birthday. We had friends over for small birthday parties where it was nothing extravagant, mostly us playing around the house and having cake and opening presents. My aunts and uncles and grandparents sent us cards with money for how old we were and we would occasionally get together for cousin's birthdays and have big parties. We went over to our friends houses for slumber parties and other birthday parties. My parties were never as big or as fun as my friends, and often my parents would take my birthday money for gas or groceries and so even though they tried it was more often than not that our birthdays left us feeling unimportant and unloved.

 Now take both of those pasts and you can see why it is such a struggle for my husband and I to come to an agreement on how birthdays should be celebrated. Here is how we have decided to compromise on the issue. We have a set budget for each birthday and if we want to give our kids a birthday party then the cost of the party comes out of that budget. We also do spending money every week where each week we take out a set amount of money and that is the money we use for groceries and clothes and going out to eat and whatever other miscellaneous things we want to buy, so if I have extra spending money I can use that to spend more on the birthday if I want. My husband still thinks it is unnecessary for my kids to have big birthday parties but because they are budgeted for already I get to throw them and make them as big or as small as I want. This past month we didn't have big parties for our kids because I am 8 months pregnant and my husband just had hernia surgery so for the 2 yr old it was just my husband and I and our three kids and we did things that we knew O would like, and it was really nice to have that family time - but he is also 2 and could care less about his birthday and is just ecstatic about the Toy Story book he received. My daughter is older and cares a lot more about her birthday then O does and it was harder for me to not give her party where she received a lot of presents and got to play with friends. We had a few people over for cake and ice cream and gifts and it was a whirlwind of craziness and within an hour everyone had come and gone and I felt like my daughter got screwed on feeling special for her small party. She still had fun and received nice gifts, but it wasn't like her previous birthdays.

My husband and I got into quite a heated discussion after her party about how I felt about the attitudes of the guests and the gifts that she received and it made me curious to know what other people think about their kids birthdays and how they celebrate it. So I am asking you to leave a comment and let me know how you celebrate your kids birthdays and how you handle giving gifts to other kids and other family members!