You can never get enough behavior strategies articles, in my book. There’s always one or two little things to pick up. I love that this one from DiscoverTraining takes the time to dial into the importance of modeling good behavior for your kids. After all, good behavior is something we all should work on every day, right?
Category: The 5 C’s
the unique approach the drives our app
Techniques Positive Parenting News Challenge Clarity Collaboration Consequence Consistency The 5 C's
Improving Behavior, Building Self Esteem
We love these parenting strategies from vocal.media – and are especially interested in how well they line up with our 5C’s of Success: Clarity, Consistency, Collaboration, Consequence and a sense of Challenge. Remember, the more you can do to help them master good behavior, the better they feel about themselves!
This one from parents.com breaks it all down into the “Three R’s” and how they lead to natural consequences. This might give you some great ideas to think of “natural rewards” that you can easily add onto your Smiles & Frowns behavior board to help guide your children towards the benefits of great behavior.
The second post with practical techniques from greatschools.org. And not just 5 principles, but also 5 strategies for building a stronger connection and deeper relationship with your child through positive discipline. Don’t miss it!
Positive parenting can become a positive family culture, if you stick with it. So I’ll be posting a couple of pieces from greatschools.org that offer clear, practical techniques you can apply with care and consistency to start building that culture today!
Drumroll, Maestro! For fun, you might want to pick your own two words first, then compare them to what American psychiatrist Daniel Amen offers up in this Times of India article. I gotta tell you… they’re two pretty good words:)
This is a link back to an older collection, but 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!
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!
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 premium feature 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 go to Settings > Manage Kids View on your device to create a Kids View password and login code and set permissions for each child on your board. With Kids Requests enabled, your kids can now submit Smiles and Frowns 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
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.