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!
Category: Consequence
because the results should be predictable
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.
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!
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.