In the (now very OLD) movie The American President, there is some discussion of a "proportionate response" when some terrorists bomb an American embassy overseas.
I am trying to learn the value of a proportionate response when it comes to parenting. I tend to be one of those parents that ground their kids until they're fifty or for the rest of their lives, which doesn't do any good because they know I don't mean it, and I can't enforce it.
So yesterday we were at church, and my daughter was bored (which happens a lot), so she decided to alleviate the boredom by picking on her sister (as usual) and she wouldn't stop (as usual). I gave her three "strikes" and told her that if she got to strike three she would be grounded. She blew through the strikes and I grounded her. At which point she turned her wrath to me.
The good news was she was no longer bugging her sister. The bad news was she was now arguing and fussing at me. As it carried on, I added a day for each time she sassed, argued, hit, or kicked me. (Keep in mind we were at church!) We got up to thirty days.
After we got home, and I cooled off, I started thinking...Is grounding her from TV for a month a proportionate response for being disruptive in church? I decided it was not. So we had a talk and put together some solutions for next week. We figured out a new seating arrangement, put together her quiet bag, and agreed on a more reasonable length of time for her to be grounded.
Considering that most of the time I feel like the villain in a gothic novel when it comes to discipline issues, I'm considering this one a victory.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment