week ending apr 13, 2008:

Week ending April 13, 2008: This week we took the kids to the circus. They’d never been, Casey couldn’t remember going, and I hadn’t been since I was about 10 years old. The kids enjoyed themselves, but given how expensive it was (made Disney World look like a bargain!) we won’t be making this a yearly adventure. Alex’s favorite part was when the people were shot out of the cannon, and Chloe says that she liked all the parts, but afterward she kept asking questions about how to become an acrobat (but she kept forgetting the word and saying that she wants to be an “actress”). Here are the pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/constance.phelps/Circus2008 and some very short videos: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8397594930080219358 (start of circus)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4266210294081595984 (acrobats doing flips)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2457092734240803466 (elephants doing tricks) and http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7064086281281630390&hl=en (cannon).

My social experiment continues this week. Step one is to compliment the kids on good behavior. Step two is to execute proper timeouts (as defined in the book, very similar to the way we actually do timeouts) for violent or dangerous behavior. Step three is to pull the child aside and vividly recount a good-behavior event, and then reward the child with at least 10 minutes of special time with the parent (without telling the child that the special time is a reward). Step one was harder than I thought. What I’d really like each kid to do is to stop being a pain in the ass, but “thank you for not being a pain in the ass” isn’t a compliment at all (because it implies that the person is usually a pain in the ass), so I had to do some work to define what behaviors I was interested in correcting, and I had to watch closely to find behavior that was worth complimenting. I’d really like Chloe to stop hurting her brother, and I’d like her to cooperate with me without a 5 minute argument before following simple instructions. The author stresses that as children gain empathy they realize how their behavior affects others and start behaving better, so I watched for empathetic or selfless behavior. 4 year olds are still pretty self-centered, so examples of empathy weren’t easy to find. I did manage to compliment Chloe several times throughout the week for being “helpful”, and she picked up on the trend. When she’d get in the car and climb into her car seat instead of climbing around the car, she’d say “am I being helpful, Mommy?” And when she offered to help me scrub the potatoes we were going to eat for dinner, she noticed that it was hard work and asked me if I liked having help. Grammy Barb noticed that when Jenny shared some gumballs with Chloe, Chloe asked Jenny to save the blue ones for her brother because that’s his favorite color. I guess we’re making small strides in the right direction which is what I was hoping for.