Category: The 5 C’s

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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.

https://goo.gl/CnkB40

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.

(Install it for free here!)

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

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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

PresetBoards      BoardDetail   

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

addpeople

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.

Lucinda row

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

Rewards

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

Reviews

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.

To install Smiles & Frowns for free, just click here!

 FB-you&teacher

One of the preset boards in Smiles & Frowns is called “Teacher’s Helper”, and it’s meant to do exactly that. But what it can really do to make a teacher’s life easier may surprise you.

Let me explain, because it may give you a chance to help a teacher out.

First of all, I’m sure we all are familiar with star charts in the classroom. Teachers used them when we were kids, and they still use them today. It’s one of the most important places to work on behavior, in fact.

So when we were putting together Smiles & Frowns, we created a board built for the classroom, too, focused on completing assignments, following rules, good classroom and hallway behavior and those sorts of things. You download the app and can see it right here:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/smiles-frowns/id1058499314

TeacherGiveSmilesI thought it could help teachers replace those big old boards with the marvels of modern technology. And maybe it could. But then I showed it to my sister.

My sister is a teacher in the midwest. She’s kind of a Super Teacher, actually. She’s well-respected, has been honored with awards, is incredibly experienced, and is completely unafraid to tell me what I don’t know. And what I didn’t know was this…

On top of everything else they do, many teachers also have to put together two or three individual behavior plans for individual students in every single classroom. These plans are meant to help particular kids overcome particular challenges with their behavior, and their progress is something that needs to be regularly reviewed with parents and counselors.

It’s an awesome thing that they do for our kids, but it also can become an incredibly time-consuming part of their already overloaded day. Can you imagine?

IMG_6891

My sister told me that this is where Smiles & Frowns could really help.  A teacher could very easily create a custom a board for every student that needs an individual behavior plan. Then all the best features of Smiles & Frowns – all the easy ways to mark behaviors, manage rewards, review progress, and even invites parents to sync with their child’s board – could really come through to save that teacher some time

The big board in from of the class stays, but Smiles & Frowns still can help that teacher in a whole different way. Now there’s the marvels of modern technology for you.

So, on behalf of my Super Teacher Sister, I’d like to hand out this little assignment today.

Please tell the busy teachers in your life about the Smiles & Frowns app. Present it like a shiny red apple. Maybe it’s exactly what they’ve been looking for.

Maybe you’ll be the Teacher’s Helper today.

Good luck out there, and hurray for teachers!

– Tommy G from Smiles & Frowns

To install Smiles & Frowns for free, just click here!