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Have you noticed how kids behave differently at school than at home?

As an early education teacher, one of the most common questions I get from parents when they see their kids voluntarily cleaning up the classroom or sharing happily with other kids is:

How do you do that? My son always throws his stuff around at home and doesn’t like sharing toys with his brother! How do you get him to cleanup and share here without grumbling and drama?

I am also a mother of four. Over the years, I’ve taken some of the effective classroom discipline techniques and applied them at home. And they’re as effective at home as they are in the classroom.

Today, I’d like to share with you the 6 secrets of highly effective discipline. [Read more…]

Don’t you sometimes wish you had a remote control to stop your child’s behavior with the click of a button before things start to spiral out of control?

I remember thumbing through the Parents Magazine a while back and reading about a kid who told his pesky little sister — “I wish you were a toy that required batteries so I can take them out.“ 

I sometimes wish my kids had removable batteries in them too!

Then again, forget about a remote control or batteries… I’ll settle for a simple pause, just one tiny moment, to collect my wits and figure out the best way to deal with a situation without blowing my top off.

Sigh!

Since none of these fantasies have a chance of coming true any time soon, I’d like to propose a modification to a strategy Sumitha suggested some time back to keep ourselves from yelling at kids even when we are hopping mad –

Assuming you are not angry at the moment, now is the time to decide how you will respond at a later time when you are indeed angry. Making a list of possible responses and then reaching out to your pre-committed choices when you are angry, substantially increases your chances of success [at not yelling at kids]. There is a whole body of research to support this.

Here’s my suggestion. Let’s make a list of all the positive discipline techniques that we know of, and spend a few minutes looking at some example scenarios where they work well. This way, when the time comes for us to react (and sooner or later, it will), hopefully we’ll come up with an appropriate gentle response without having to think too hard. Or blowing our fuse. Sort of. Maybe.

Anyway, I’ll start out with 8 of the positive discipline techniques that I’m familiar with. How about you help grow this list by sharing your favorite techniques in the comments?  [Read more…]

Do you ever feel that you made the wrong decision as a parent?

Maybe your decision had unintended consequences. Maybe you made a decision based on the best information that you had available, but it just didn’t work out like you planned.

My wife and I experienced one of these situations last year, when we gave our daughter, Sarah, an iPhone for her 13th birthday.

We thought that it was the perfect gift. She’d been wanting one for a while and it would allow us to keep in touch with her by phone and text, and even keep track of her whereabouts.

We soon found out that children and technology don’t always mix quite the way we anticipate. You know where this is going…

The Shocking Unintended Consequences

Almost immediately her grades dropped from A’s and B’s to C’s, D’s, and F’s.

A little research into our Verizon account showed that she had sent and received over 4000 text messages in less than a month!

My jaw hit the floor when I first saw the sheer number of text messages, but soon learned that this wasn’t as ludicrous as it first seemed to me. A Pew Internet Survey indicates that 1 in 3 teens sends more than 100 text messages a day, or 3000 texts a month.

My daughter had also used about 3 GB of data, (75%) of our total data plan, in less than a month. Again, this is apparently not very surprising since the same survey indicates that 1 in 4 teens go online with cell phones.

How Could This Have Happened?

[Read more…]