Punishment vs. Consequences
Who doesn’t like a roundup of advice, and The Week has a nice selection for you. We especially love #3, which explains the difference between punishment, natural consquences and logical consequences. Read it up!
End the Day in a Positive Way
We love this article from HuffPo, and the whole idea of ending the night, the week, the month… all of it… on a positive note. It’s a huge part of why our review section of the app is there… so you can replay their good behaviors to create your own rituals built around positive feelings. Thanks for the good advice, HuffPo!
Introducing Kids Requests: Now Kids Can Give Themselves Smiles and Frowns!
Are you ready? Are you set? Because this one has been a long time coming…
Now your kids can submit their own Smiles and Frowns to their boards – for your approval, of course – from their own devices with new Kids Requests on our Smiles & Frowns: Kids View app!
Kids Requests is a new premium feature (just $.99 a month or $9.99 a year for your whole family!) that Moms and Pops have long been asking for. And why not? Parents know a game changer when they see one. Giving kids a little more control is a great way to engage them more, and it gets them one step closer to truly owning their own behavior. So let’s do it!
Getting started with Kids Requests is easy. Just install Smiles & Frowns on your adult devices and Smiles & Frowns: Kids View on each of your children’s devices. Then just swipe left on any child’s row on a parent device, tap on Kids View and follow the prompts to link the two. Once you’ve enabled Kids Requests, the Smiles and Frowns they can now submit on their devices will show up for approval on yours. (For detailed directions, click here.)
With Smiles & Frowns: Kids View, your kids can always follow their progress and see their behavior lists for free. And we think that Kids Requests is a great new feature can really help your family in some big, big ways.
If you’re a parent, the advantage is obvious:
Your kids can now help shoulder the load! Once they start lending their motivated little hands to tracking their own behavior, it’ll help improve the Consistency of your plan without making it even harder on parents.
At a time when the pandemic and homeschooling issues are making adults feel doubly overstressed, this can be a big help. It only takes a few seconds to approve, change, or sometimes even deny the Smile and Frown requests they submit. And it also gives a new way to talk about – and Collaborate on – good behavior. Nice!
If you’re a kid, the advantage is also obvious:
You’re finally in control! When you do something good, you can mark it right down. No asking. No waiting. No mom or dad forgetting to give you credit. You just do that good thing and submit your Smile (or Frown) for approval, and you know you’re getting credit for your behavior.
Which means it’s time to really dive into your behavior board, hunt around all the different ways you can earn Smiles and avoid Frowns, and start racking them up and get to earning some rewards! Again, nice. That touches on Clarity, Consequence and Challenge, rounding out our all-important 5C’s.
But there’s also something that’s less obvious.
My neighbor is a teacher, and she has talked with me several times about the idea of self-reflection. The ability to hold a mirror up to yourself, follow your own progress and learn from what you see is a core skill that helps kids build self esteem and critical thinking. Kind of a holy grail. Enter Kids Requests…
Now that your kids can immediately “reward” themselves by submitting their own Smiles & Frowns, they get a little more control over their own behavior. Which we parents can lean into. Praise them for engaging in the process. Encourage them to explore all of the Smiles on their board to find new ways to be good. We hope that Smiles & Frowns Kids Requests gives you a powerful new way to help your kids learn to recognize and reflect on their own behavior in a more active way.
The Dads over here… we’ve always said that ultimately, Smiles & Frowns is simply a tool to help your family turn good behavior into a great conversation. We hope this new feature gives you a great new way to make that happen.
Good luck out there!
Tommy G, one of the Smiles & Frowns Dads
More Positive Parenting Tips
Positive Parenting – 8 Tips to Discipline The Happy Way – Parenting For Brain
Positive parenting a parenting and disciplinary philosophy that emphasizes mutual respect and utilizes positive instructions
As we’ve mentioned, we want Smiles & Frowns to be more that just another rewards chart. We want it to be the best tool out there for making good behavior a great conversation and collaboration between you and your kids. That’s why we talk about the 5Cs of Positive Behavior, and why we also thought you might be interested in some of these positive parenting tips from Parenting for Brain.
Introducing Our SPREE™ Distance Learning Board. Because We’re Dads.
Like a lot of parents out there, the Dads here at Smiles & Frowns have been heading towards the new school year with a real dose of distance learning anxiety. When we searched distance learning to help our own kids, we saw a tidal wave of ideas – 22 Tips! 12 Tips! 9 Tips! – but nothing really simple or actionable. Yeah, it’s super stressful.
So, Dads being Dads, we went into fix-it mode. We read articles, talked to teachers and just looked for a way to give parents a good place to start. And that’s how our SPREE™ Distance Learning board was born. It’s available now with our latest update.
What is SPREE? It’s simply a plan to help kids build good habits for managing Space, Preparation, Routine, Engagement and Excellence – the five common threads we saw for distance learning success.
Ready for us to break this new behavior chart down for you, Dad Style? Maybe it’ll give you a good place to start!
SPACE: A dedicated learning space isn’t a luxury… it’s a necessity. Even if it’s just a seat at the end of a table that your student can turn into a positive, personal destination for success. So the Smiles and Frowns here help kids create a dedicated SPACE specifically built for learning.
PREPARATION: Class time is much shorter and less frequent online. It’s hard to catch up if you don’t show up ready to go. So these Smiles and Frowns are meant to help strengthen their PREPARATION skills, so they log in ready to learn each day.
ROUTINE: One of the biggest downsides of home learning is that kids start to lose the daily patterns – from waking to dressing to eating – that keep them going. So these Smiles and Frowns help kids stick with a ROUTINE that will keep them on a dependable road to results
ENGAGEMENT: When you’re not physically there to ask a question or join a discussion, it’s natural for participation to slide. It really takes active work on this one, so the Smile and Frowns here are support active ENGAGEMENT so kids lean into their studies instead of laying back.
EXCELLENCE: Finally, it’s important that kids still set goals and keep their expectations high. It’ll be easy for lose focus and treat distance learning like some strange vacation. But while we’re here, these Smiles and Frowns help encourage a mindset of EXCELLENCE every day.
And, like all Smiles & Frowns boards, you’re free to start here and customize things however you like. Whatever works, works:)
Sol, ready or not, it’s time to take this year on. To all the parents everywhere, we wish you the best this school year. Even if you don’t use Smiles & Frowns, we hope that building some strength around these key areas might help your family in 2020 – and beyond.
Please take care of each other and stay safe out there!
Kindly,
Brad and Tommy G
The Smiles & Frowns Dads
And Now… the News!
Improve Your Child’s Behavior Problems With Positive Reinforcement
Positive reinforcement, in the form of praise or rewards, can be the most effective way to change kids’ behavior.
While we’re putting the finishing touches on our next release – which will make customizing your boards even easier – we thought we’d start sharing articles that are in sync with Smiles & Frowns and our 5Cs of Positive Behavior: Clarity, Consistency, Consequence and a sense of Challenge. So without further ado, this one from verywellfamily.com is a great place to start. Stay tuned for more, and please sign up for our monthly round-up to get articles emailed to you!
Can You Download A Little Sanity? Sure You Can!
Hello world, and welcome to Smiles & Frowns! What started off as a real Mom and Pop and Three Crazy Kids story has lead to a super easy-to-use new app – loaded with unique features – that we hope can restore a little more peace and quiet to the lives of parents everywhere.
If you are parent, you’ve been here before. On some fridge, on some wall, at some time, you’ve put together some kind of rewards chart to help get your kids on the road to better behavior.
We put ours front and center, right by the front door where it couldn’t be missed. Made a big old frame. Nailed it to the wall. So when ours started losing steam, which we found out they all do at some point, we had no choice but to tinker, toy and try to figure out why.
So we just kept working it, in full view of everyone who came in through our door. That’s how we came up with our Smiles – Frowns = Spending Power formula. How we got to the 5 Cs approach. How we created new features we didn’t see anywhere else. And how it all started working long-term.
Over the years, people seemed to love the little board we called Smiles & Frowns. Other parents definitely wanted to use it. Teachers we knew wanted to try it. And more than a few thought we should turn it into an app, which seems to have found you now.
Is Smiles & Frowns the tool you’ve been looking for? We certainly hope so. And if you do like it, please point other parents you know in our direction. They more people that join in, the better we can make Smiles & Frowns work for you!
Thanks, and good luck out there…
Tommy G
An Economy of Behavior, A Formula for Success
At the heart of Smiles & Frowns is a simple formula that matters a lot: Smiles – Frowns = Reward-buying power. To tell you why it matters, I have to back up a bit.
When it was time for us to start working on behavior with our kids, we instinctively wanted to take a “positive” approach. Most parents do, right? So we started out by simply trying to encourage the good behaviors, givingSmiles that could earn rewards.
But something was definitely missing. What about those things – like burping the alphabet at 110 decibels at the dinner table night after night – that you just can’t ignore? You want to do something to recognize that moment, but you still don’t want to be negative.
Well, that’s when we decided to make it so kids could earn both Smiles and Frowns, and we’d let the difference between the two become their reward-buying power. Suddenly, something clicked. Suddenly, the kids really started wanting those Smiles and worked hard to get them.
Why? Because we had unknowingly created an economy of behavior, which really changed everything.
Now, Smiles and Frowns were working together to create an actual, predictable value across all of their behavior. A real consequence was now being tied to their all of their actions in a way that added up, so they started owning them more.
(We’ll take more about Consequence, which is one of our 5 Cs, in later posts.)
Smiles & Frowns also became a game kids could easily understand. They realized that their behavior could make spending power that can go up or down, and quickly started maximizing their Smiles and minimizing Frowns to get more rewards.
And now, we had a way to mark bad behaviors, but still keep everything in the land of positive reinforcement. Nothing was ever taken from them (a negative reinforcement thing) unless they took it from themselves. The power was all theirs.
And so they set to it. They simply began to do more of the good things and less of the bad things, so they could earn more rewards, which then positively reinforced… doing more of the good things and less of the bad things. How about it?
Smiles – Frowns = Reward-buying power. It’s a simple formula that means a lot.
Install Smiles & Frowns and see what you think.
Six Ways Smiles & Frowns is (Possibly) Reinventing Rewards Charts
If you’re a parent, you’ve been here before. On some fridge, on some wall, at some time, you’ve put together some kind of rewards chart to help get your kids on the road to good behavior.
Everybody does it so, a few years back, we did, too. But we never imagined that our little system – which we called Smiles & Frowns – would keep evolving through our three kids. Or that so many friends would ask to “borrow” it. Or that we’d eventually turn it into an app for iPhones and iPads.
Welcome to Smiles & Frowns! The app is new, but the reaction has already been great. People are finding it. Parents around the world have installed it. Some even think it’s a game changer.
We’re certainly not ready to make that last claim ourselves yet, but we can tell you that Smiles & Frowns is different. It’s loaded with features that no other apps have. Things we hope parents and teachers will love.
Here are the six biggies:
Potential game-changer #1: The 5Cs of Positive Reinforcement
As our original board evolved, we started to see that a good system had to support five key things to succeed: clarity, consistency, collaboration, consequence and a sense of challenge for the kids. We even started calling these the “5Cs “ of success.
No other app is built around an approach like this. They’re not features, but the 5Cs absolutely told us what features to make. More importantly, they give parents a bit of a roadmap for success. (read more here)
Possible game-changer #2: Powerful Preset Boards
Most rewards chart apps start with the child and move out. You have to manually attach behaviors, one after another, to kid after kid. It can take forever.
We start with the board and move on. Pick a focus, add your people and get going in seconds. Our pre-set boards include the all-purpose Around the House, deep dive boards like Study Time, Manners Please and Chores & More, and even a board for the classroom called “Teacher’s Helper”.
Every board can be tweaked as you like, and you can always start from scratch. You can even switch between different boards to focus on different behaviors.
Probable game-changer #3: Easy Collaboration with Automatic Sync
With other apps, you put your kids on the board and that it. With ours, it’s just the beginning. After adding your kids, you can also invite a spouse, the nanny, your granny or anyone else to your board, making collaboration easy.
Everyone is linked and automatically synched to your board. No Dropbox, no iCloud. Every Smile, Frown or Reward is marked by who gave it and when. This gives your kids one set of rules and ones set of expectations. Good behavior becomes a team effort.
Promising game-changer #4: A Unique Formula for Success.
Early on, we realized that just rewarding good behavior was only looking at half of the picture. So we let kids earn both smiles and frowns, and made the difference between the two their rewards buying power.
That’s the formula: Smiles – Frowns = rewards-buying power.
It’s a simple game that kids get easily – and start playing right away. They realize that their rewards-buying power can go up or down, so consequence takes over. Soon, they start owning their behavior, trying to do more of the good behavior and less of the bad, to earn as many rewards as they can.
Conceivable game-changer #5: Rewards Made Easy
With rewards, there’s an old rule of thumb: whatever works, works. But you still have to organize things so expectations are clear. So we’ve boiled rewards down into four simple categories: Money, Time, Treats and Goals. Every reward has its own value, so an “economy of behavior” quickly starts to form.
We’ve included a preset value for each kind of reward, but creating your own can be done in seconds. A Nerf gun for 80 Smiles? Extra screen time for 20? A handful of Skittles for 10? Hey, whatever works, works…
Hopeful game-changer #6: A Clear View of Results
Lastly, we spent a lot of time building out a simple, clear way for you to review performance with your kids. You can review everything by day, by behavior or across all your boards. You can export reports, save them and share them.
You can really see what is going on.
Why did we do this? Partly, so kids could see the Consequence of their behavior. Partly, to give results a little Clarity. Partly, to help you stay on top of it all Consistently. Partly, to keep kids revved up on the Challenge.
But mostly, it all goes back to Collaboration.
If Smiles & Frowns ever does become a game changer, it’ll be because it changes the game for you. The app itself is just a tool on a phone or a tablet. The real goal is to go beyond the device by supporting personal engagements and regular conversations with your kids about their behavior in a fun and positive way.
Now that would be worth a Smile or two.
For Best Results: Review, Reset and Repeat
As I’ve mentioned before, we’re trying to make Smiles & Frowns the best tool to help busy parents and teachers create great behavior plans. If you’ve already tried the app, it’s easy to see how the features are built to support Clarity, Consistency and Collaboration, which are three of our 5 Cs of success.
With this post, let’s focus on the importance of reviewing progress regularly with your kids. Regular reviews are essential because they give you the space to focus on the Consequence of their behavior. They also give you a chance to reset the scoreboard so the Challenge of earning rewards can start all over again. Hello, Cs 4 and 5!
So what makes for a great review? What might you think about, and how can Smiles & Frowns help you? Here are some tips that we think could make all the difference for you and your kids.
- Be Consistent.
In the “game” of Smiles & Frowns, kids need to see the results and enjoy the rewards that they’ve earned. This is truly a key to success. If you’re not consistent with rewards and reviews, Smiles and Frowns will start to lose their value fast.
So setting a consistent time and place to review progress – whether it’s every Friday after dinner, the first Sunday of every month, or whatever works best for you – helps assure that they’ll connect their behavior with their rewards. It helps keep the “economy of behavior” strong. And having these reviews at regular intervals also helps them see how they’re progressing over time.
- Be Specific.
When you tap on your child’s icon on a board, you’ll see their recent history of every Smile and Frown. The main view simply goes back in time, while the other views group behaviors together so you can see trends. You can even export a report as a PDF and print it out to review, if you like.
Use this view to play back their behavior to them specifically. Focus on any particular Smiles or Frowns that really stand out and discuss them.
If you’ve added any notes to a Smile or Frown – a feature we think you’ll love – you’ll see them here. Weeks later, it may be hard to remember what a “great homework” Smile was about. But if added a note like “you rocked the baking soda volcano” to that Smile, you’ll have a specific success story to relive with your child. Try not to miss those opportunities to help your child feel specifically happy and proud.
- Be Encouraging.
Remember, a review is really just a conversation about behavior, with lots of real moments you can you can look back on and discuss. Looking back at Smiles is a great way to encourage your kids. Help them feel proud of their good behavior.
But also remember that Frowns shouldn’t be seen as downers. Looking back at the less successful behaviors is a chance to find areas they can work on. You might even talk about how they could turn those Frowns into Smiles next time, for instance. By the next review, you might have some great new success stories to talk about.
- Be Inclusive.
If you’ve got more than one child on a board, don’t be afraid to make it a family affair. We would often review all three of our kids at the same time, so they got a sense of how their behavior affected the whole family. This may not work every time, or might not even work for you at all. But it’s something you can try to see how it changes the conversation.
- Be Ready to Reset.
There’s no doubt that Smiles & Frowns is meant to be a bit of a game for your child. It’s that sense of Challenge that will keep them coming back for more.
So we’ve made it easy to reset the smile and frown count right after a review. (Don’t’ worry, they won’t lose any of their hard-earned spending power!) Just swipe to the left on a child’s row in the board detail view, and you’ll see the option to reset Smiles and Frowns.
We did this so your kids could start with a clean slate of 0 Smiles and 0 Frowns as they begin working towards the next review. It’s just a better game that way, because it gives them a fresh new chance to “win” by working to earn more Smiles and less Frowns every time..
As we continue to work on Smiles & Frowns, we are going to work hard to make the reviewing features even stronger. We want to help make regular reviews a snap. We’ve got plenty of ideas on this front, but we’d certainly love to hear what you think. If you’ve got any thoughts, please pass them along to heydad@smilesandfrowns.com.
Good luck out there!
Tommy G