Wow, that *is *weird. I gotta say, I would have been wondering about some sort of mental problem at that point. Your mother is far more clever than I.
I’ve done quite a few, but the most recent one I’ve done to my kids is the following:
My kids have been absolute slobs at home. They had been constantly getting stuff out and not putting it away… to the point I was literally tripping over stuff in every room in my house (except my bedroom).
The worst room in the house was the family room where their video game system is. They were leaving game disks out, controllers on the floor, the TV on when they were done, and empty food containers and wrappers on the floor. I had tried reminders and made them clean the room several times, but nothing was working.
I finally had enough. Without telling them anything (taking to them about it didn’t seem to work anyways) I started cleaning up after them… but in my own special way! Every time they left out a video game disk, controller, or anything else related to the video game system, I would pick it up and hide it. I was very blatant about it, but I never said a word to them. Very quickly, like within a week, they had lost 2 of their 4 controllers, as well as their “Rock Band” guitar, microphone, and drumsticks. Within 2 weeks they had lost half of their game disks.
By 3 weeks of doing this, they were down to one game controller and just a few games left that they actually liked to play. My oldest boy started noticing that things were missing at this point and asked me where the other controllers and games were. I just looked at him, smiled and said, “Did you put them away?” He answered, “No.” I said, “Well, I don’t know what to say. You didn’t put your stuff away so who knows where it is now?”
By week 5 of my doing this, they had no games and no controllers left. During this entire time, Mrs D thought I was being unreasonable and mean spirited. I told her, “The kids need to know the consequences of their actions.”
At the end of week 5, I gathered all of the stuff they left out and set it on the dining room table. They I gathered all the kids and went through everything one at a time, explaining that THEY left this stuff out. I explained that we are a large family (5 kids plus Mrs D and I) and leaving their stuff out costs us time and money. Leaving their stuff out means that mom and I have to pick it up, costing us time. If their stuff breaks because they left it out we have to replace it which costs us money.
Then I had them put all that stuff away. Mrs. D actually complimented me, saying she didn’t think it would work, but the way I handled it in the end really worked out well.
They’ve not left one video game or controller out. They family room is much cleaner now as is their rooms. We will see how long it lasts.
Nah, biting the kids in your care is not cool.
Anyway, a toothless bite doesn’t hurt and I suspect that it would only lead the child to say, “Ooh, we’re playing a biting game now? Fun!” A bite with teeth does hurt and is inappropriate from a paid caregiver unless for some completely bizarro reason you told them ahead of time that you were OK with that sort of thing.
We must have different definitions of a toothless bite. Mine worked with The Nephew, plus he knew it was not a game…
Me: ok, give me your hand.
Nephew, hiding both hands behind his back: why?
Me: to show you why you shouldn’t bite people.
Nephew: will you hit me?
Me: no, I’ll bite you soft. A lot softer than you’ve bitten me. (I show him my hand, which has teeth marks)
Nephew, after thinking about it: ok. (gives me his right fist)
I bite on it. No teeth, but enough pressure to be unexpected (kids that little aren’t subtle enough to tell the difference between different kinds of “not nice”).
Nephew: OW!
Me: did you like it?
Nephew, shaking his head: nooooo.
Me: so now you understand why people don’t like it when you do it to them?
Nephew: cos it hurts!
Me: exactly!
And then we worked up a few strategies for “stuff he could do when he was angry,” under the caveat that they would have to be vetoed by his parents.
My daughter has a Guinea Pig named Timothy, she is pretty young, so I do a lot of “helping” taking care of it, I don’t mind.
In the summer she takes Timothy outside with her. It’s not an issue because all he does is sit in the backyard eating dandelion leaves, the rule is she has to watch him. If she is not able to watch him, put him back in his cage.
Usually I am much better at monitoring her, but I got busy that day. My husband came in, carrying Timothy who had been left in the yard in a bucket while she wen off to play with her friends. He hadn’t been out there long, but I was angry because she left him and she had been told to never put him in anything like a bucket.
I put him back in his cage (in her room) and went on with what i was doing. She came in a while later and I said, “I noticed Timothy wasn’t in his cage, you should bring him in…”
She went out to gte him out of the bucket.
She came back in. “He’s gone.”
“Gone? Are you sure?” I asked, acting shocked.
“Yes.”
“Holy smoke. I saw a cat hanging around. You don’t think the cat took Timothy do you?”
“I don’t know.” she was starting to tear up.
“Did you leave him in the yard?”
“Yes, in the bucket.” she said.
“Well that’s a terrible place for him.”
“Oh Mommy, do you think he’s dead?”
“I don’t know, but I do know you are not supposed to leave him in the yard alone.”
I let her cry for a few seconds.
“If you are going to cry, you should go to your room. We don’t want to hear it down here…” (sounds heartless, but I needed to get her to go to her room)
A few minutes later…
“Mommy, Timothy is okay, he’s in his cage.”
“I know…Mommy was saying that so that you would learn to take better care of him…”
It was mean, and I know she is young, but it was a relatively painless way to teach her that it could have had terrible consequences.
And she hasn’t left him out since…
Mine is similar. I have two young daughters who are spoiled beyond belief in the toy, gadget, book, art and DVD department. The have 3 large rooms dedicated to it. I have barely bought them a toy in my life. Other family members do it and I wish I could make them stop buying stuff for them but I can’t really. The biggest problem is that they have flat out refused to clean up gigantic messes that they made even when I stand over them like a drill sergeant and bark out orders on what to do. They may pick up one lego brick and then stare at the TV.
One night, I got sick of it and warned them three times that if they stopped cleaning up for even one second, everything on the floor was going to be thrown away and there was a lot of stuff there. I turned the TV off and waited. They failed miserably so out came two large black Hefty bags. I threw everything in it and walked it out to the curb. If was the night before morning trash pickup so it was gone for good soon. They screamed and cried for a long time and it didn’t even work out as well as I expected because they still don’t pick up stuff without lots of prompting but I can break out the Hefty bags now to make them take it seriously if they resist too much.
Our system, FWIW, is that toys and clutter all get picked up before we sit down to have a meal. If that means that certain of the younger Whatsits don’t get lunch until 4:30 pm because they don’t feel like picking up their Legos, well, so be it.
There was only real trauma over this policy for the first week or two that I enacted it, and now it’s part of the routine and nobody gives me too much flak about it. Mealtime = racing around putting things away so we can sit down to eat.
Shagnasty, I know the frustrating feeling of family members giving way too much stuff. It sounds like your girls are drowning in it. Have you ever put stuff on rotation? I would put 75% of the stuff away in a closet, and periodically change what they have. Easier to clean up, less overwhelming. (I’d also give a lot of it away to Goodwill or something.)
ETA: not that I object to the trash bag method at all, just suggesting a way to make it less necessary.
If I didn’t clean up my stuff, it went in the trash. Gone forever.
Perhaps you should chuck the TV instead of their toys?
Sorry, I don’t have kids, so maybe I shouldn’t play - but my Dad used to kill two birds with one stone on this one. We had a dog when I was growing up. Max was pretty much untrained, but we loved him. We had a large house, though - and Max would go down into the basement and poop on a regular basis. Often right at the bottom of the stairs. It was my brothers’ job to clean up after the dog.
We (all 5 kids) were also pretty bad about leaving shoes all over the house, which was unacceptable. I know we were warned in advance… but if we left shoes out in any room but our own, Dad would just chuck them down the basement stairs. Ewwww. Both the shoe situation and the basement got cleaned up regularly after a while.
I’m liking a lot of these stories. I had a tutoring student who would sleep through class and then learn enough from me to get another D or C-. He was one of the biggest waste of brains I’d met. At no time did his stereo or car keys disappear. There were apparently no consequences for doing only half of what he capable of.
Oh, Cardinal, don’t get me started on stories like that. I’m a middle school teacher, and I’m constantly aghast at how spoiled completely rotten my students are…my low income, on free or reduced lunch students. They have more fancy gadgety shit than I do. Time and again I’ve had conferences with parents of what I call DDS students (students who Don’t Do Shit), and time and again the parents are flabberghasted: “I give you everything! I don’t make you do chores at home! I tell you school is your only work!” Yeeeahhhh. And then YOU don’t do shit when THEY don’t do shit. AUGH.
One parent I called today when I caught her near-failing son blatantly attempting to cheat on a quiz asked, “What should I do?” I don’t know, parent? I told her take the TV out of his room and give him a consequence that will affect him. She said, “Well, we like to take the kids out as a reward. We won’t do that this time.” sigh Yeah, okay. (FTR, kiddo got a 0 on the quiz, of course.)
Now, to address the OP: I haven’t resorted to the trash bag yet, but I did tell my 3yro son that if he doesn’t put his toys away, the Toy Fairy will come at night and take them all and give them to someone who wants them. After about two grocery bags full of toys disappeared, he started picking up. BTW–I got the “fairy” idea from Parents Magazine. I don’t feel bad telling him there’s a Toy Fairy. There is. She’s ME.
I can say just about the hardest thing I’ve had to do as a parent is when we visited San Diego when he was maybe 2 1/2 or so. The travel time and unfamiliar environment had him getting just one 45min nap (as opposed to about 2-3 hours), then not falling asleep until 2+ hours past his bedtime. By naptime the next day, he was a basket case of overtired. He would NOT go down, but it was very obvious he needed to. He was out of his freakin’ mind–he was giggling uncontrollably, and NO discipline would snap him out of it. Time outs? Nope–they were a delirious game of jumping up, laughing, sitting down, laughing, etc… Spanking (which we next to never do)? Nope. He protested a bit, then just giggled after and returned to his wild antics. He was wired he was so exhausted. With nothing else coming to mind, I got in bed with him and held him down. I didn’t hurt him, but I held him forcefully so he couldn’t get up. He went apeshit, screaming and kicking and fighting, before completely collapsing and falling asleep in a late nap that lasted nearly four hours. Afterwards, his mood completely normalized.
It worked, and in hindsight I know it was just one of those things that Had to Be Done for His Good, but good night I felt like a horrible person after. Ay.
IME, the fact that a kid is on free or reduced lunch (and I’ve taught in Compton and Lynwood) GREATLY improves the chances that the parents don’t know what they’re doing, even thought I just complained about a rich kid who could get away with anything.
I had a mother come in about her 4th grade daughter who was totally illiterate. This apparently did not concern the family (she’s just going to have kids, what’s the point?). [We also had trouble getting permissions slips for darling daughters to go on field trips. Something might happen to them. They also were sent toThe mother said she didn’t know what to do with the girl, because instead of doing schoolwork, she just wanted to play in the park. I was too young to stand up and tell her how to be some sort of a parent. I bet that girl is now on her 2nd kid with her 3rd livein boyfriend. It’s sad.
I have done this. It felt horrible at the time, although I was in no way hurting my daughter - but she was certainly better after…
My Dad did this once to me. I was about 2 or 3 years old and didn’t want to go to sleep. So, my Dad took me out of my crib, sat down and held me in his lap. When I got bored I tried to get off to go play but my Dad told me “No. This isn’t the time to go playing. You wanted to be awake, so you may be awake, but no playing”.
Of course, after a short while I started nodding off.
My kids are 7 and 10, and they are utter slobs. Today, I had to clean up the family room in the basement because I couldn’t find a DVD that I have out from the library. I have told them now for several weeks that if they don’t treat their own stuff with respect and put it away properly, I can’t be expected to look after it for them. As I went through the room, I found the stuff I expected to find - markers on the floor, books on the floor, stuff all over the place - but then I found the remote to the VCR in pieces. It looks like it got messy enough down there that it got under the base of the large rocking chair, got crushed and no one noticed. Not that I’ve even found all the pieces to it, so there may be more to the story than that.
So, I found my DVD that was lost, and then I vacuumed. I know I vacuumed a bunch of the small pieces from the game ‘Operation’’ - not intentionally, but if those tiny white plastic pieces are loose with the dust bunnies under the rug instead of put away in the box, that’s the sort of thing that’s going to happen. I also found up a couple of the game cartridges that go with the DS games that Grandma got them (Thanks, Grandma! :rolleyes:); those got put in my pocket before they went up the ShopVac, but then again, how can I be sure? I think they’ll do just fine in the top drawer of the dresser in our room for a couple of weeks, just to make the point - If you can’t treat your stuff with enough respect that I can tell it from the trash, it’s going to get mixed up with the trash and you’ve nobody to blame but yourselves!
I’ll let you all know how it works out…
I did something similar to this, only… Oh, God. I hate to admit it. It was on Christmas Day and I temporarily threw all my son’s gifts in the trash.
The morning started out horribly. He woke up, ready to open his gifts - right now. His pants were soaked because he’d peed in his pull up and it had leaked. He refused to take the pants or his pull up off - he wanted to open gifts immediately. When I said no, he began whining and rolling around on the floor. So I stated that he had a choice: change the pants and pull up and open gifts within two minutes or refuse and stay in his room without gifts. His response was to pull his pants off and throw a urine-soaked pull up directly at my face. He’d never done anything so disgusting and I just wanted to strangle him.
I was so pissed I was shaking, so I left so I could think a minute. Then I came back with a trash bag, took him downstairs and let him watch me toss all his gifts into it, then out into the garage. It took him a good hour to stop screaming. Once he did, he came to me and apologized and asked if we could open gifts. I thought about it for a minute and said yes.
I’m not proud of what I did last Christmas, but he’s never forgotten it and has never even attempted to throw something at me - or anyone else - again in anger (this was after the stuffed animal throwing incident).
overlyverbose, when I read that you threw away your kid’s presents on Christmas, my initial reaction was, “Oh my God, WAY TOO HARSH.”
Then I read your description of the behavior that prompted this action and thought, “Yeah, she handled that better than I would have.”
Making my kids finish out something (e.g., swimming class) when they wanted to quit halfway through. You made a commitment, you stick with it. In my son’s case, he just sat by the side of the pool and refused to go in, but he went and sat every week until the 6 weeks were up.
A friend of mine has a 13-year-old daughter and last summer, the daughter wanted to go to sleep-away camp for a week. I seem to recall that she had been to this same camp before. She called a few days in and wanted to come home because she was homesick, and my friend said no. It was extremely hard to say no to her daughter but, in her mind, being a good parent means helping your kid develop the skills to deal with uncomfortable feelings, not making any uncomfortable feelings go away. I learned a lot from that.