Another positive parenting method I’ve tried was the rubber band method. You might wonder just exactly what this is because I know I did. Don’t worry no children were harmed in the testing of this method in our home.
Well let’s say you have one child. You would place 3 rubber bands around one of your wrist. Your goal is to give at least 3 positive affirmations to your child every day.
So if you catch Johnny picking up his toys without being told. You acknowledge that with a ‘Great job, you are being such a great helper!’ or something similar. Then you move the rubber band to the other wrist.
The rubber bands serve as a reminder. It’s pretty simple, right?
Let’s say you have 2 or 3 kids. You might want to use different colored rubber bands. The only problems I had were:
- I couldn’t find enough different colors to work with my color coding system.
- My wrists are only so big so having 15+ colored rubber bands on them was a big challenge.
My solution was to use one rubber band per child. Then I would move them over as usual. I would try to make sure I found some way to get to each child before starting on my second round.
Again the bands just serve as reminders and once you get in the habit of doing this you may not need them anymore. I haven’t used my rubber bands in a while but I just found them last night so I may pull them out again.
It seems that we’ve kind of hit a brick wall with one child. Not sure if it’s 100% behavior or partly due to this wonderful phase of life called puberty. All I know is that this child has had me at wits end some days and something has to change.
Children thrive on attention and positive attention is so much better than negative. The theory of focus on the good comes into play here. If we want to see more of the positive behavior then we will focus on the good behaviors and try to encourage these.
I’m not saying that the bad behaviors will be ignored because they won’t. Every choice has a consequence whether it is good or bad depends on the choice made. We are just trying to encourage the good choices and help each child to make better choices.
Happy parenting!
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