Gentle parenting is often misunderstood – and even a little hard to wrap your head around sometimes. Here’s a post from parenting.com that takes another run at explaining the approach. It includes ideas for embraces the pros and minimizing the potential cons that come along with gentle parenting.
Category: Successful Behavior Plans
both expert and parent perspectives of successful behavior plans
Well, 2026 is still pretty new-ish for us all, so here’s a 52-week challenge from positivediscipline.com to master a ton of new parenting ideas. That’s right, one a week, all the way through 2027. Ready, set, hit the link!
Helping kids build a strong inner voice means choosing our own words carefully. This one from Parents.com has some suggestions for speaking in ways that build their “emotional abundance”. My favorite line: “These moments don’t cost a thing, but they feed something much deeper: trust, resilience, and connection.”
Many parents intuitively see positive parenting as a good thing. Now here’s a little brain science via Newsweek to back up those instincts. While it doesn’t share positive parenting techniques, it does talk about HOW a positive parenting approach can lead to very positive changes in developing young brains. It’s another piece to the puzzle that may help on your parenting journey.
We’re kind of introducing the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) to you and ourselves at the same time here. So check it out this deep link and see what they offer. Some great thinking from an association of professionals focused on promoting high-quality early learning for all young children, birth through age 8. Could be a great new resource for us all.
We’re all aware of the stress social media is causing for our kids, including making them feel that they are missing out or are less than others. This nice one from parents.com suggests that encouraging hobbies and interests can build their self-esteem. The result? Replacing the Fear Of Missing Out with the Joy Of Missing Out. Try creating some new Smiles and Rewards in our app help motivate their mojo:)
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
www.parentingforbrain.com
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.
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.
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
I 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?
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