So Joshua is a generally well-behaved kid. He’s prone to have either full-blown or miniature tantrums on a sort of regular basis, but that’s almost always either because he needs more sleep or is having something he expected changed on him (probably more on that in another post). But, he had a spate where we would hear he was having “rough” days at school. Essentially, he was having trouble keeping his hands to himself. We never got the impression that it was something malicious from the teachers, but just that he was being handsy. Maybe he’d give hugs that were not wanted, or he’d try to start a wrestle play session with someone that didn’t want to, or he would think that someone wasn’t listening to the teacher and go over to play enforcer and clean a toy up or something. They were things that may have had a noble beginning more than slapping fools in the face because “Where my chicken nuggets?”
We tried just talking to Joshua about it, but that didn’t work. Academically, he got it. We’d ask him what kind of hands he should be using at school and he’d say “Keep them to myself” or “Nice hands”. And if he had a rough day, he wouldn’t try and hide it. We’d ask how his day went and he’d tell us “I didn’t listen today”. But talking about it and working through why it may not be appreciated and reminding him and all that didn’t seem to help anything at all. We’d get the same reports the next day and the same responses from him. He understood, but either couldn’t help himself or wasn’t sufficiently motivated to overcome whatever little impulses crossed his mind.
You’ll hear from a lot of people who think that individuals who refer to their pets as their “kids” are super obnoxious because kids are totally different and blah blah blah. I maintain, and I say this to people all the time, that if you can raise a dog well, you can raise a child well. I don’t think the analogy is as far off as some people seem to think. For example, it is a tenet of training a dog that negative feedback isn’t the way to go. If you yell at a dog for pooping on your carpet, that dog is just more likely to try and hide their pooping somewhere even worse because you yelled and that’s scary and they don’t want you to yell so if you can’t find their poop then it will be cool because you won’t yell because you didn’t find the poop. But if you praise the dog for pooping outside and give him treats and belly rubs and free airline miles or whatever else it is that dogs want then he is more likely to want to poop on the lawn because who doesn’t love free miles?
Janelle and I made the decision that we need to be less stingy about rewards. Joshua has a metric shit-ton of toys. We basically never buy him toys, but he gets a TON from family and friends at birthdays and Christmas. (In fact, going places like Target is super easy for us and makes for a great time-waster outing because Joshua has yet to connect the idea that the toys in the store are things he could ask us to buy for him right then and there. We just straight up almost never buy him things that aren’t tied to some life event like a birthday or Christmas.) We also like to try and keep him away from too much electronic entertainment because despite my turning out just fine thankyouverymuch there is just a deluge of reports that too much exposure can be harmful to your child. And these are the logical rewards to give because they are what he wants. I can’t really entice him with “Congratulations, you have built character today”.
We went with a tried and true positive reinforcement option: the sticker chart. Joshua has the chance to earn two stickers each day, for a good morning and a good afternoon. This is determined by his teacher. If he gets 10 stickers, he gets a surprise. And we have not advertised this openly to him, but we’ll do a small reward like getting some ice cream or some other treat at 5 stickers. We made the charts with him (Janelle made a Mickey Mouse Club House, a pirate ship and Joshua made a crazy toddler drawing) so that he would feel involved and we talk to him all the time about how he needs to remember to work hard on being good so he can get his stickers.
Two stickers is full kudos. We go over the top towards him about it. One sticker is okay, he was still good and we give him his standard “fun things” at home – like watching an episode of some show he likes. No stickers is no TV and a discussion about what happened.
We’ve been doing this for awhile now. Joshua has 3 fully completed sticker charts proudly displayed at home. But… it’s actually pretty hard to tell if they’re working. I don’t think we’ve had more than one or two no-sticker days since we started, and that’s pretty good – but I’m not sure we would have had very many prior to this either. We have a fair amount of one-sticker days, but that also seems to be pretty par for the course. All of his little friends seem to have rough times and he is certainly not one of the troublemakers (I’m not just putting on blinders, I know which kids are the troublemakers. They are adorable, but you can spot them from 50 yards out). But I think we are planting the seed that work and practice have their benefits and that we are ready and willing to reward him for good behavior. Just tonight we went out to Chuck E. Cheese for his 3rd reward and he was pretty into it (he likes to announce, “Mommy, I’m jumping up and down because I’m excited”). I figure the more excited he is about the rewards he gets, the easier it is to stoke that fire each day by saying “Remember how much fun the last reward was? Let’s try super hard today to get more stickers!”
But either way, it’s also helping to train Mommy and Daddy a bit. Another important part of raising a kid/dog (that’s a slash for kid or dog, not a mutant kid-dog) is consistency and that’s something that I think we were failing at. Before this, a good day sometimes got Joshua what he wanted, and sometimes it didn’t. We tried to really limit TV to a maybe 2-3 times a week thing for about 15 minutes a pop. But that meant that some days when Good Boy Joshua asked to watch something when we were at home we’d say yes and sometimes we would say “Not today, kiddo”. I imagine that got a little confusing for him. So now we are more consistent and less concerned about withholding rewards. If he asks to watch and has a good day, we plop on the couch together and watch a show and then he’s happy to help us turn off the TV and go do other things when the show is done. We’re not hoarding the things he wants, but now rather we are using them as means to an end, which has the added benefit of making it easier on us to keep him entertained.
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