Yeah, this is also the part of the story I’m not clear on. “Three chances until I count to ten” is going to sound to a kid like, “I’m telling you to do this, but you can disobey me the first time, and you can disobey me the second time, and you can even disobey me the third time as long as you obey me before I reach ten after the third time.” How often will a kid, given this message, obey right away? Most kids will get themselves three good practice disobeying, and then they MIGHT break this newly-formed habit by the time you get to 10, but more likely they’ll continue down the path they’ve started on. Once you’ve told them what they need to do, they must learn that disobedience will have immediate consequences.
As a teacher, this is really hard for me. If I ask students to be quiet, I have to force myself to follow through on consequences for misbehavior. It’s really tempting to say, “You need to be at voice volume zero…please work quietly so I can hear Jimmy reading to me…folks, please lower your voices…I’m reminding you that you’re at voice volume zero…” and so on. The more I remind them, the louder they get.
But there’s something else I can do. “Please be at voice volume zero,” I’ll say, and then I’ll stop whatever I’m doing and listen for about ten seconds. If anyone speaks during this time, I say, “Michael, please go move your clip down: I said to be at voice volume zero.” The immediate consequence shows them that I mean business, and suddenly the room is silent.
Too often I resort to the pleading and multiple reminders with students: I don’t feel like such a nasty bear when I plead as I do when I enact a zero-tolerance to misbehavior. But when I can set my feelings aside and act like a professional, the difference in results is amazing.
Tripolar, I seriously can’t figure out if your tongue is in your cheek. If it isn’t, I’ll just say that you’re amazingly off-base.
moejoe, I don’t suppose you remember what those rhymes were, do you? I’d love to hear (and steal) them.
And Mama Zappa, after hearing this and many other stories about Moon Unit, I wish I could meet her. And the parents I was talking to tend to look at things more in terms of short-term efficiency than anything else. I don’t really understand it.
In case it matters, what made the whole experience surprising to me was my son has never gotten grabby before this. I mean, I’ve had to carry him out of public places, but the other couple of times were for other reasons, like running off without me. The bookstore is one of his favorite places to go if we have to be inside, but he’s previously been excellent about putting things away and leaving when it was time. That made the whole thing that much more sucky and unexpected.
I think I explained the chances thing poorly, but I’m not sure it’d help to clarify. Suffice to say it was too convoluted - especially if it’s confusing to Dopers - so it’s time to change my tactics.
Yeah, I totally may have misunderstood it. My experience with kids is that if I’m asking them to do something, I either have an immediate consequence for failing to do it immediately, or else they’re going to get curious about how serious I am and experiment with it. If there are chances, there still needs to be some differentiation between the chances, e.g.,
Put it down, please. (If the child obeys, then praise: “Thanks for doing that right away–you’re so helpful!”
I said put it down, now. (Said with steel in voice and eye: kid gets some negative feedback for not complying. If the kid complies at this point, then a steely, “Thank you” suffices)
You’re disobeying me, and that means we can’t stay in the store. I’ll just take that and put it back on the shelf.
The chances don’t need to be laid out ahead of time: all the kid needs to know is that immediate compliance is expected.
I do believe explanations are important, especially when a kid asks for one. With students, if they have a punishment for some behavior, I’ll always ask them, “Do you know why that rule is important?” and if they say they don’t, I’m happy to explain it before the consequence begins. If they say yes, then the consequence begins immediately without the lecture. But I don’t generally explain to a disobedient child why they need to do something in the heat of the moment: it’s both impractical and unwise, inasmuch as it encourages argument and encourages them in the future to demand an explanation before following a direction. There will be times where immediate compliance is vital (e.g., “Everyone get out of the road, NOW!”), and I don’t want kids to think that they can force an explanation out of me before deciding whether to obey.
I hope I’m not coming across as attacking you: this is the kind of stuff I spend a lot of time thinking about, and I’m far from perfect with it.
The Small One has never been given “chances,” or a countdown, when it comes to this sort of thing in stores. If she asks for something and I don’t want to buy it, I say no, every time. “No, sweetie, not today” or something similarly nice, but no.
It’s always been this way, and, consequently, she never fusses about this sort of thing because “no” has always, always been the final word.
TriPolar, you can’t have been serious, but the thing is, the joke didn’t work because you didn’t even get the facts in the OP right.
If it’s, say, ice-cream: ‘I said no. If you keep asking, you will get no ice-cream of any sort for the rest of the weekend.’
The time length is adapted to the item they’re asking for and the age of the child; for really small children, saying things like ‘until Sunday’ would make no sense because they don’t really understand how long ‘until Sunday’ lasts - you pick a timeframe that’s meaningful to them. You also have to stick to your word (and sound like you mean it), but it really works.
Explaining is OK, but only if it’s really brief: ‘No, honey. You already have a toy schoolbus.’ Starting out with ‘not today’ makes it sound like you’re up for bargaining.
Just getting the kid the toy would be rewarding them for whining. That’d just teach the kid that whining gets you treats. The result? More whining! They’re just kids, getting to know their way around the world - their parents are doing them no favours by teaching them that whining pays.
Yeah, the OP didn’t actually mention putting the bus back, but that’s like not mentioning going to the toilet after you get up in the morning - it doesn’t need to be said. Besides, if she hadn’t put the bus back, then this would have been a completely different anecdote about ‘the time my kid got me arrested for shoplifting.’
FWIW, I also do the ‘add this to your Christmas/birthday/etc list’ and it works really well (for making joyful Christmas presents too), but that wouldn’t have worked so well in this instance because it was something that the little boy already had.
And I’ve never had any friends say to me anything like ‘you should just buy him the toy because he was whining’ but I’ve seen them do it.
Glad you’re going back to the same mall, overlyverbose; it was just a tantrum - nobody but you will remember it. Kids have tantrums in those places all the time, but at least you dealt with it.
I haven’t read the thread, just the op. I had the same problem with my daughter repeatedly at that age, but I found a solution. When we were out and she got the gimmies, I would say that this wasn’t a shopping trip for her, but if she wanted that toy we could take a picture of it and maybe get the toy for her birthday. So I would take all these pictures of her holding future landfill and show them to her, and for some reason that seemed to satisfy her. Needless to say when her birthday rolled around she would have forgotten all about the crap in question. Still works now that she’s six.
It was factually correct, as you admit, and I noted that was probably an omission on the part of the OP. That part was not serious though. This isn’t GD. I’m just trying to see which tongue in cheek parts aren’t apparent. I have to do better with the emoticons since people can’t hear the inflection in the words. But using a ‘sarcasm’ symbol comes no where near to the effect of drawn out syllables, nasal tones, varying pitch, hand and eyebrow gestures, etc…
I do think the main message was on target. But not if people can’t seperate the serious parts from the exaggerations.
That’s very clever really, because you can’t really reason with kids under about 6 regarding delaying gratification. Your method achieves the main aim with under 6s - distraction and avoids the tantrum. So my only criticism of the OP is the appropriateness of her user name.
I think it is a very good idea to regularly deny the kids things on outings. It breaks the cycle of expectation and allows you to take the kids places without having to buy them anything and often they don’t even ask.
If somebody asks a serious question, it’s not very helpful to respond with exaggerations. Accusing someone of being a thief is beyond an exaggeration - emoticons weren’t necessary, just rephrasing, but if you’re responding to something serious and you can’t phrase it in a way that doesn’t come across in the jocular tone you’re intending, then why not just omit saying it?
It’s also really not helpful to start out with ‘you aren’t a very good parent,’ because that’s a really horrible thing to say to someone. So is ‘he realized his parent had no concern for his natural and normal feelings.’ Maybe that was another unhelpful exaggeration?
I also find it odd that you’d think that 4-year-olds are never in the intermission where they sometimes need a nap and sometimes don’t, and that all four-year-olds hate bookstores.
It is an excellent method with some things, but not with items the child already has, like in the OP, or with regular purchases, like ice-cream, and I think the OP was asking about more than this one occasion.
I’ll join the chorus and say I think that was an absolutely fine way of handling it, and also your friends are on drugs.
In our household, we just generally don’t buy them toys when we’re out shopping, so that takes care of that (not that they haven’t had public tantrums about other stuff, but toys aren’t really it). I generally buy them a “thing” of some sort when grocery shopping, but it’s usually food - maybe some stickers or craft stuff. Toys are for birthdays and Christmas. Which is also good in that it reduces the amount of plastic crap in the house, which is particularly good in our case since we have enough trouble keeping the stuff we’ve already got under control, let alone get any more on a regular basis.
Speaking of which - I LOVE the “birthday list”. I used it on the Taller Girl for a whole year before she realised that I wasn’t actually writing anything down. “Sure you can have that on your birthday list. Yes, and that. That too. Ok, I’ll remember, everything in this shop on your birthday list.” And of course, however much stuff goes on the birthday list, the same number of things get bought for the actual birthday. Which means I can say yes to absolutely everything, secure in the knowledge that I’ve generally already picked out a thing that is currently on the list that I approve of, rendering all the plastic junk she’s currently lusting after absolutely irrelevant. She STILL hasn’t twigged to that one.
Thanks for your comments. I actually chose not to respond to TriPolar for a few reasons:
Anytime someone starts off a post with something like, “You’re not a very good parent,” I’m not quite sure how to respond. If some guy online thinks I’m a bad parent, I can’t do much about it. If that was meant as tongue in cheek, there wasn’t an indication of that. Plus, I wasn’t asking, “Am I a bad parent?” but “Did I do this right, and what would you have done?” I have no experience with this, my son being my firstborn, and sometimes I need a little help in the form of suggestions from experienced parents. I received some extremely helpful responses and determined, “Hmmm, I guess I did somewhat ok, but could’ve done much better.”
As noted above, of course I put the bus back. That’s like saying that I wiped my butt after pooping. I don’t feel like it’s necessary to say, especially because taking it would be illegal and the problem my son had was that I wouldn’t give him the bus.
And my son is in that stage where he sometimes does, sometimes doesn’t need a nap. And I can’t force him to sleep, though I did make sure he had quiet time and put him to bed early that evening. Given the length of my post, it seemed silly to put in qualifiers like that, or that he had said he wasn’t hungry before we went in or that he loves the bookstore and it’s not like taking him to watch paint dry.
There were some interesting points in the post (mainly that Calvin & Hobbes were named after such intelligent philosophers/scientists - I had no idea), but most were couched in somewhat insulting language.
And, no, Left Hand of Dorkness - you don’t sound like you’re attacking me. Your comments were very useful.
He’s reaching the age where you can’t believe him. He might very well have been hungry, but more tempted by the book store (which I loved as a kid, too!) and so decided to lie to you so he didn’t “miss” the bookstore. (Four year olds don’t really delay gratification well, you might have noticed!)
He *did *say he was hungry while you were in the store - part of your job for the next year or so is to anticipate his hunger before he admits to it under questioning. Just like with potty training… they can’t be trusted to be honest about when they kinda sorta have to go, but boy will they let you know when they have to go RIGHT NOW!
First, I’ll add to the chorus of ‘thank you for removing him from the store!’
I have literally approached mothers who were in the process of doing this very thing and thanked them!
It is imperative that children learn, early and incontrovertibly, that negative behavior will not be rewarded. Ever. Any parent who ever gives in to a temper tantrum is teaching a child one thing: sometimes tantrums work. Children figure out cause and effect at a startlingly early age!
If you did anything wrong here, it was giving him too many chances/too long to correct his behavior. I had a therapist who used to say “If you tell a child ‘I’m going to count to ten’, all you’re telling that child is that they have ten more seconds to misbehave”. I believe that.
All in all, though, you handled it very well, and removing him from the store was absolutely the right thing to do, for the sake of all involved.
I agree, also, with the ‘reward, don’t bribe’ school of thought. For example, my sister is a cancer patient, and I’m her caregiver. Many days, the only thing she can think of ‘eating’ for dinner is a Slurpee from 7-11. I’ve made it clear to my 10YO that she does not get a Slurpee just because Aunt Bonnie is getting one. If my 10YO wants one, she may ask for one. I may say yes, or I may say no, but my answer is my answer. However, if she doesn’t ask for one at all, I’m more likely to call her from the 7-11 and say “Would you like me to bring you home a Slurpee?” And you can believe she has learned that if she asks and I say ‘no’, begging is not only not going to change my mind, but there will be no Slurpees for her for a week.
And the idea that we need to buy a child something every time we go on errands? Uh, I don’t even know what to say to that.
Also, I’m curious to know how many children TriPolar has.
Remember that intermittent rewards are a better conditioning option than constant ones. If you get the kiddo something every time you go out, even as a reward for good behavior, then the very first time you don’t get something (say, time gets away from you, you come up short of money, or you just forget), then the good behavior quickly extinguishes. If you get something sometimes, but not always, and unpredictably, then every single time you go out, even with no reward, the kid is more likely to behave, thinking that maybe this time the reward will come.
Hey, it works to train pigeons and rats and it works at slot machines!
You should’ve purchased the bus. Then when you are handing it to him, you pull it back and proceed to spike the bus to the concrete floor, yelling, “What now, punk?!”
