Like most young kids, Theo likes attention...a lot. At times, he tends to interrupt a lot and demand attention when grown-ups are trying to talk. When he does this, we use a discipline strategy called "1-2-3 Magic" (based on a popular parenting book). Basically, when the child is engaging in a negative behavior, you calmly count to three before sending him to his room. If he self-corrects his behavior on number one or two, then he avoids a time out. If he doesn't, he gets sent to his room on three.
No strategy is foolproof (at least for us!), but this one generally works pretty well. So yesterday, Chris got home from work, and we were trying to talk about an insurance issue. Theo was rather hungry and feisty by that time, so he went into full-on "interrupt" mode. Chris calmly said, "One," which signaled Theo that he ought to correct his behavior. Theo scurried off, chattering loudly to himself, and we ignored him and continued our conversation. Until a minute later, when he ran back up, waving a paper upon which he had written a nice, big zero.
"I wrote a zero! I wrote a zero!" he insisted loudly.
"Yes," I said calmly. "And you're interrupting. That's two."
"No!" he exclaimed. "I wrote a zero so we will always be at zero! We will never be at one, two, three! I have a zero!"
I had to hide my laugh. I thought it was a pretty clever solution! Let me put that in writing, people--I'm at zero, not at one, two, or three!!
No comments:
Post a Comment