Points for Grumpy Discipline Idea

I was poking around for fresh new behavior intervention ideas the other day, and I found a few that piqued my interest. I'm sharing them here because I think they could possibly be useful at home too. If you're like me, you're always happy to hear creative ideas when the old ones seem to stop working! :) I could see some of these being especially helpful with sibling bickering or generally disrespectful behavior.

The basic idea behind this first strategy is that you have two coffee cans. One has your child's name on it, and the other says "Grumpy." You have a certain number of tokens (pennies, paper slips, any kind of counter) in your pocket each day. Every time the child is disrespectful, one of those tokens goes in Grumpy's can. At the end of the day, whatever tokens are left go into the child's can. You would have a "menu" of rewards that the child likes and a value assigned to each reward. The child can trade their tokens for rewards, but the ones that go to "Grumpy" are lost. For more details, visit this link:

http://www.interventioncentral.org/behavioral-interventions/challenging-students/points-grumpy

The second idea is a simple lottery, but you need more than one child to use this one. Each child has a certain number of slips of paper or tokens of some sort, but each child's tokens or slips need to be a different color. For example, Bobby has green slips and Suzie has yellow. Both children start the week or day with their full number of slips. Each time they behave negatively, they lose one slip. At the end of the week or the day, the slips they have left all go into a can, and you draw out one winner, who gets a prize. The more slips a child has in the can, the better chance he or she has of winning the prize. (This does pit children against each other, so if you don't want to make it competitive, you could abandon the lottery concept and just have all their slips add up to try to earn a joint reward together- see below. Or, the winner of the lottery could choose the prize for the whole family, so everyone is rewarded, but the lottery winner gets the choice of what everyone will do.) You can read more about this idea here:

http://www.interventioncentral.org/behavioral-interventions/challenging-students/response-cost-lottery

Lastly is a strategy that focuses on positive behavior, which for many kids may be more effective than focusing on negative behavior, or may be helpful in addition to negative consequences. It is called a marble jar. Every time one of your children demonstrates positive behavior that you want to encourage, you put a marble (or coin, token, whatever) in your jar. You can focus on just certain behaviors that you want to improve, or use the tokens for any positive behavior. When the jar is full, the whole family gets to do something fun, or the kids earn a reward. For more information, you can go here:

http://specialed.about.com/od/managementstrategies/a/A-Marble-Jar-Can-Be-A-Powerful-Tool-For-Positive-Behavior-Support.htm

Of course, remember that rewards do not have to cost anything! Doing something fun like building a tent in the family room can be even more motivating than buying a prize.

If you have other discipline ideas that work well in your family, please feel free to share them! I'd love to hear what you've found to be effective!

Thank you for reading. We are glad you are here!