Creative Parenting

I have an issue with loud chewing and couldn't figure out how to get my oldest to stop share the noise of every dinner bite. In the van one day I just said "Zoe, I'll give you 5 dollars" and she got excited. "You have the $5, but I won't give it to you until the end of the month. Each time I ask you to stop chewing loudly $.25 will be taken from the $5. You can either end the month with all of it or much less. Sound good?" She happily agreed and her sister wanted in, but we went with nose picking as that was her issue. At the end of the month I was amazed at how well this worked. I would always give Zoe a warning first as I needed her to not lose all the money and make it all useless, but only needed to deduct $.25 once from her and $0.00 from Shiloh. I didn't think it would go so well so I've used it for other things since then. It's like a game to them with a reward. We keep it light and fun and I get to have more peace in my life:)

This is from one of our favorite parenting books (Love and Logic). The basis is that children need to be raised to learn how to make choices for themselves to help set them up for when they don't have parents telling them what to do in every situation. So before bed would look like this... Us: "Do you want to go to bed now or in 2 minutes?" Child: "2 minutes" (always) Us: "ok, we'll go to bed in 2 minutes" After a span that was probably never 2 minutes... Us: "Ok it's time to go to bed" Child after being trained in this: (goes to bed) Child before being trained in this: "No" Us: "Do you want to walk to your bed or have us carry you?" Child after responding with more "no's" Us: (carry them to bed) You get the idea. Obviously while the child is learning this the scenario can go on as they may get out of bed, but I'm not typing out the whole book :) It's a great read for any parent!

Our kids are 6 and 8 so we're not sure how this would work with younger, but we made a deal with our kids. We'll only put on their plate the amount that we know they can eat and they're charged real money based on the amount they aren't willing to finish. Our kids don't have a lot, but usually have at least a few dollars. They'll say "how much is this" if they really aren't liking it and we'll come up with an amount like $.75. Sometimes they'll eat to $.25, but after doing this for a couple of weeks they were eating all of their food without asking how much to not eat it. Because we want to travel the world, we intentionally give them small amounts of food that they don't like and have them eat that as well. We want them to be willing to try new things and to learn to eat what they're given as there'll be times that we don't have a choice.