Is this fair? Will it work? (discipline/incentive plan for my kids)

In My Humble Opinion
41

What I stated above: if they don’t have assigned chores, give them assigned chores and then help them with those chores a little when they are good. Say “Since you’ve been so nice and good to Mommy and Daddy today, Mommy and Daddy have the energy to help you with your chores.” Note that this is NOT punishing them by giving them chores, nor letting them get out of anything: they still have to do their jobs, just with you working along side of them. Plus, at htat age, the whole idea that Daddy’s helping ME is a thrill: you can even let the older one supervise: “OK, you earned two pig points today so daddy is gonna help you for two minutes. What do you want me to do?” Use a stopwatch, and at the end of hte two minutes, stop and let her finish the rest.

This depends on the situation and on your kids, of course, but is it possible to just ask them? Senario:

You walk in on Lil’ George with his hands full of daffodils. “Uhoh” you say “Somebody gets a pig point! Go put a sticker on th board!”

Then, you turn to the Little Rasberry: 'Did you get him to pick those berries?"

And you go from there. Only you know if your kids are the type to lie to get out of trouble: some kids are and some kids aren’t, and I tend to think they come out of the womb one way or the other. That said, if your kids are basically truthful, a system that shows that you trust them even when they are, for the momment, bad, seems like a good thing.

But again, trust your gut. It sounds tome like oyu are especially worried that the little girl enjoys egging her brother on, and if that’s the case, then by all means make her responsible. I would, however, sit hre down and explain that the reason you are doing this is because of this pattern of behavoir and that if you see that she stops doing it, things will change: make it clear to hre that the two aren’t linked together forever.

42

One last thing:

Have you ever been in the position where something of great importance to you–in this case, Mom and Dad’s approval–was totally in the hands of someone else, and you tried and tried and tried and could not change them? It’s frustrating to the point of agony. People that have been in that situation remember it very clearly, which is why they are having such a strong reaction to this idea.

43

If you wanted to know how to make children behave well, you shouldn’t have had any.:wink:

As everyone knows, the only way to know for a fact what the right way to raise a child is, is to not have any yourself, be watching a parent discipline their child in a toy store or similar place of commerce, and be an old lady who uses very stong perfume.

44

First, I’m not a parent and never will be, but congratulations to you and everyone else who is at least trying to raise your kids well. It must be a never-ending, often very tough, and often thankless task! Good on you.

Although I’m not very qualified to contribute to the thread, can I beg you, plead with you, to reconsider this issue of ‘shared’ points. Yes, I can imagine that very often it is hard to resolve an ‘It was him’ ‘It was her’ dispute. But please try looking at this not from your point of view, as the parent with a difficult exercise in due blame allocation, but from the point of view of the child who really is the more innocent, or less guilty, of the two.

When I was a youngster, I regularly suffered unfairly just because I wasn’t as good at lying, cheating and fabricating stories as my siblings or other kids, and was also less willing to do so. I know it can probably be as tough as hell, but if there is a right and a wrong then it may matter intensely to the (relatively) ‘good’ party to be validated as such. Yes, it’s easier for you to simply say ‘You’re both as bad as each other’ and dish out equal punishment, but you know this often is not going to be true, and it can really disturb a kid to be disbelieved like this and treated unfairly. I know, it happened to me.

Genuinely impossible to sort out the truth? Really? You’re an adult, they’re just kids. They can be crafty, but you can be better. Try asking for more and more detailed specifics. Childrens’ lies usually break down beyond a certain superficial point. Try the same ruse the police do. Separate rooms, separate accounts of events… you should soon be able to sort out the fibber.

And if you genuinely cannot sort out the blame, say so and allocate no blame at all. I wept a thousand times when I was little because I had done the ‘good’ thing, or had told the truth, and was treated just the same as whoever was really to blame or had told lies. It really can scar for a long time. I know life isn’t fair, but that’s no reason to make it even more unfair that it is anyway!

Just my two cents, but please give it a think.

45

That is a great suggestion; I’ll think about doing that; promising to split it into ‘personal points’ once they have demonstrated an improvement in the mutual/social responsibility areas.

I should probably mention at this point that they are great kids; no, they really are, I’m not just saying that because… wel, you get the idea. Individually, they are mostly as good as gold - Stephanie went to a party the other day, so I took David to McDonalds and we had a great time, sitting there chatting about stuff - I sometimes forget he is only 4 years old.
It’s the same with Stephanie; she is really good and thoughtful when it is just her.
Even when they are together, they are usually great and they play together well, but there are just days where one of them will wait to see what the other wants before resolving to clash with it.

46

I think you should rename your point system to:

Atomic Points for good behaviour and;
Badger Racing Points for not so good behaviour.

Yes, you now assign me a personal Pig Point :smiley:

47

I think it’s a great idea. My parents used a similar system on my sister and me when we were growing up, and we’ve got the same age difference. Our system was (boringly, compared to yours!) stars, gold stars, and black marks. There was an unlimited number of each you could rack up, and 10 regular stars equalled a gold star, which equalled a couple bucks towards a toy at the dollar store. This way, we could get a new, little toy each week (if we had earned it) or save up our gold stars for something bigger. I was about 4 when this system started, and I was able to remember my good (and bad) deeds well enough to understand the results, even if it wasn’t immediate.

I like the idea of linking the points. It’s true that each kid will likely have several pigs or sunshines that were earned by the other, but I bet it will even out. They’ll figure out soon enough how to work the system together to the best benefit, and I know my sister and I got along much better when we knew there was something in it for us.

A couple of things that can be used instead of (or in addition to) food are little toys, an extra 15 minutes on the bedtime, fancy smelling bubbles at bathtime, a nifty craft project, an extra 15 minutes computer time, or a trip to someplace fun.

48

My parents used a similar system for a while. It didn’t work. Several reasons:

  1. As already discussed by several others, while shared points may cut down on the he did it/she did it problems, the inherent injustice of collective punishment is very discouraging. Separate systems is better, since you can still punish/reward both for group problems.

  2. Negative behavior is much easier for parents to notice than positive behavior. It takes a lot of vigilance to consistently reward positive behavior as well as negative behavior, especially for things like obedience and attitude. When you’re busy or tired, you won’t notice the kids’ extra efforts or attempts to be nice to siblings. IMO, these systems work better when the actions which earn points are well-defined (e.g. chores), so that kids can report them to you when you don’t notice on your own.

It’s certainly worth trying, though. My advice is to strive for consistency as much as you possibly can – it’s just like training a dog. You want to give the message that being good leads to rewards, not that rewards are arbitrarily handed down whenever you happen to notice and remember the system.

49

And when the one attacks the other and increases the attacks so that the victim is in danger of serious injury or death unless they respond or spend all their time hiding or in the presence of a parent, what then?

When my mother was home my brother would cry out, “Mom! She’s hitting me again!” and then scream as if in mortal agony and again I would get in trouble. Since he did this often enough she believed I regularly attacked him with no provocation. When he did it when I was in her sight, she laughed it off.

When she was not at home he would attack me and do his best to hurt me badly. I had chores, mine as well as his often enough, so I could not spend all my time holed up in my room. I never did run as fast as he did, so that was not much of an option, especially when he used weapons to extend his reach. When someone starts a fight by hitting you across the back with a baseball bat, not responding is not an option if you want to live. I learned early on that even if I lay still when he knocked me down he would keep attacking–kicking me while I was down, or thinking some other torture to get me to respond, or damaging something so that I would get into trouble for that as well. When I reacted he fought all the harder. When I ran, he pursued.

All of this continued because he enjoyed getting me in trouble. No matter how much I did not want to fight, no matter how much I refused to respond to his hurtful words and lies, he still attacked. I had no way of discouraging him and no one to help me. All the while, and even now, my mother thinks it is more my fault than his. I was older, I could have done something. I must have done something that egged him on. Every punishment I got for fighting ensured another beating from him.

Again Mangetout, I hope you have better luck and your children hold more love for you and each other than I can find for my brother and mother.

50

I agree, Lee, which is why I said:

Surely you can agree that (thank god) your situation was not normal? Yes, there are psychotic kids out there, and parents need to spend time and attention listening to their kids and making sure that no such abuse is occuring. But I don’t think that your experiences can be used to set the standards for all children: frankly, if we were to use your experiences as a guide, it would be criminally negligent to ever leave two siblings alone together, period. I don’t think that, provided parents have been paying attention, it is to the benefit of children to excersise that level of caution when there is no evidence that it is called for.

I am one of six. We fought and bickered and needled each other: if a disagrement escalated into name calling or (when we were young) fighting, whoever was involved got into trouble. And we learned to disagree in ways that didn’t result in name calling or fighting. We learned to tell when someone slapped you, it didn’t mean that you had a blank check to bust their ass since they started it. I

51

I seriously doubt that my brother was psychotic at age three, which is about the time my mother began this campaign to link our rewards and punishments. I think she did it for many of the reasons that Mangetout wants to do this. That was about the age she could no longer easily see who did what and for whatever reason I was the age she decided I needed to show responsibility for my little brother. My brother learned his odious behavior, and her system helped teach it to him.

I do think that my brother’s negative behavior was reinforced by my mother’s system of linking our punishments and rewards. I think if she had bothered to try to get past her preconceptions what the role of the oldest child is and figured out early on that he was twisting her little system and was not a little angel she believed him to be, then he and I would have both been better off. His behavior did not escalate until she started punishing me along with him for everything that was done wrong. Her punishing me was a reward to him and nothing checked that. Reward any creature for a behavior and that behavior is reinforced; people are no different.

I am sure that she thought she was being fair, as she always made a great show of being so, making christmas presents equal in number and cost and other such things. She believed that she could tell when he was lying. She also believed that throughout I egged him on even though early on, I tried my best to get him to behave so I would not get in trouble. She certainly believed that she was paying attention to us and was reasonably vigilant. All the while, life became worse for me and my brother learned that he needn’t face up to anything he did.

52

First off, kids are not BAD, they display bad BEHAVIOR. Learn it, know it, say it. Really, do you want to tell your children that they’re bad? No, because they’re good kids and you love them, it’s just their behavior that is not up to par.

Second, as a mother of a four year old myself, I think that’s too complicated. The rewards, benefits and consequences are too far off. Additionally, I don’t think you should reward good behavior…good behavior is something that is expected at all times. That’s like saying men are “good guys” when they pay child support. Sorry, you shouldn’t get kudos for that, it’s something you should do, period.

I’ll tell you what has had success with my daughter, who one day realized that she didn’t have to sit in the timout chair just because I said so. I’m not saying it’ll work for you but maybe it will or may just give you some ideas. YMMV

Kiddo gets three bedtime books. That’s three chances to lose those books plus an additional big time loss of her dessert. I start with the books. She dreads losing them and the consequences of her behavior get reinforced later that night when she can only pick out one book, or none. It only took one time of losing all books and her ice cream before she really got it and it nearly broke my heart…she was so sad. These days, she rarely loses more than one book.

Good luck, I know how hard it can be to find a system that works. Thankfully, I stumbled on a good one.

53

Lee your story makes me sad. I didn’t mention in my earlier post that my very negative reaction to the shared blame part of this is because of something similar to your story; my parents didn’t have a formal system but if we fought we both were in trouble, no matter who started it. My brother and I get along fine now but up until he was 11… You wouldn’t think that it’d be bad given our age difference (6 years) but I was very small for my age, and you don’t have to be bigger to hurt someone if they won’t fight back.

He wasn’t as violent as your brother, but I was not allowed to hit him back, ever. So what would happen all the time would be that I would not pay attention to him- doing homework, reading, or what have you - and he’d retaliate by hitting me. I wouldn’t defend myself, since I knew I’d be in for it if I hit my baby brother (“you’re older, you should know better…” sound familiar?) but, being human, I’d get feed up with kicks and punches, and say something mean to get his attention, to make him stop. Then we’d both get screamed at, or spend an hour in the corner. He didn’t care if we got punished since negative reactions were better than none at all. Despite being bruised pretty much all the time, there are only two instances of him hurting me that I can recall resulting in only him being punished: when he bit my back and broke the skin with every tooth, and when he threw a metal pipe at my head and bruised my temple. That’s it.

Eventually he grew up enough, and got bigger than me, and realized that he was doing a bad thing by treating me the way he did. Now he feels guilty nearly any time we talk about when we were young, despite my assurances that I don’t hold a grudge, but… It hurt me then, and hurts him now. I wouldn’t wish that on any pair of siblings.

54

Lee, I’m filled with empathy for your situation. However, I still feel that it is atypical enough that it ought not be used to unilaterally state that children’s punishments should never be linked.

Note, for the record, that I have been gently encouraging Mangetout to not link the reward system, or that if he does link it, to do so for a brief period in time and only after explaining to his children that the linkage is a direct response to behavoir they have demonstrated, not because of what they have failed to do. This is a critical point: he has seen them encouraging misbehavoir, which is a very differnet thing than failing to discourage it.

That said, I do think that there are times and places in which it is appropriate to punish the child who perpetuated a squable/fight as well as the one who started it. The fact is that we are all born with paper thin skin, and one of the most important lessons that we can help a child to learn is that when someone stops on your buttons, it’s possible, and often desireable, to walk away, or to simply be amused instead of lashing out. To not play into the hands of people who get our number.

If Suzie pushes Jenny, and Jenny pushes back, and pretty soon the two are in a shoving match, and finally Jenny pulls out a chunk of Suzie’s hair and Suzie knocks Jenny on her ass and finally Mom runs in(since this took 15 seconds, are you suggesting that there should be no punnishment for Jenny, since Suzie started it?

If Suzie’s push was started by the fact aht Jenny had taken Suzie’s favorite stuffed animal and cut its eyes off, should Jenny be the only one who is punnished, since she started it?

If Jenny cut the eyes off only because Lucy, the third sister, dared her to, should she be the only one punished, since SHE started it?

You were the victim of abuse, and it’s a terrible, terrible thing that the adults around you missed the signs. But, in addition to being vigilant, parents have to have faith that,having excersied due diligence, they aren’t missing anything that major. Otherwise, we couldn’t let our kids do anything: piano teachers can be pediophiles, sweet little playmates can be sadists, kindly old teachers can be teaching bigotry and hate. If a parent, having taken resonable precautions and having built a solid tradition of communication with their child, can’t trust their own judgement over things like this, the only moral choice they can make is to never leave their child’s side, and that is detrimental to everyone involved.

55

I’ll second that. I tried for quite a while to come up with suggestions for rewards, but I couldn’t think of any. That’s probably because I don’t reward good behaviour either, and I’d never thought of it in those terms. It’s something I actively discourage from their grandmothers, who have both been expressly forbidden to offer “bribes”.

56

After much thought on this, I think I may switch to ‘personal points’, although probably not until the start of next week; on reflection, the linked points system is needlessly complex; if there is a fight and they are both responsible (one for starting it, the other for escalating it), then they both get a pig point; if one of them encourages the other to tidy up their mess, then they both get a sunshine point (one for doing it, the other for helping); if one of them tries to start a fight and the other walks away, one gets a pig point and the other gets a sunshine point, if one makes a kind gesture and the other deliberately thwarts it, one gets a sunshine point, the other gets a pig point; linked when it needs to be, personal when it doesn’t

57

I think that rewards for good behaviour can exist without being bribes; just one example in the adult world, you may be rewarded for your hard work by promotion or pay increase.

58

Not to labor the point, Mange, but 4 year olds don’t think like adults.

Not that I’m an expert on raising children, I’m just a parent muddling through as best I can, same as you.

And don’t think that motivation of adults is easily done, either.

59

Sure, but they will (hopefully) grow up into adults; understanding the whole cause and effect thing is part of that process.

60

Good luck with it, whatever you decide to do. :slight_smile: