Tickets

I'm about half-way through The Well-Behaved Child by John Rosemond. I decided already that this is a method that might work for us, so I started this afternoon. I think I was supposed to start in the morning, but situations arose and we started in the afternoon.

Allyssa and David had spent the morning playing at a friend's house since I had a doctor appointment, so you'd think that we'd have a little bit of good time when we got home and might have made it to tomorrow to start this "Tickets" thing. Nope. We didn't even make it to lunch, and the kids got home 3 minutes before lunch.

I told Allyssa to climb into her chair and buckle herself up. She didn't. A fit was thrown. A girl sent to her room. After I let her out of her room, I told her to buckle herself up. I was told that she couldn't, but then she did. Then, she refused to pray by herself after I told her to. She went back to her room for the fit she threw. In came the Tickets.

After lunch, I told Allyssa to come to the kitchen. David, Sr. and I showed her the paper on the refrigerator that says, "Refusing to do what we tell you to." I read it to her and showed her that she has 5 tickets. Then, I told her the rules. If she refuses to do what we tell her to, she looses a ticket. After she looses all 5 tickets she will spend the remainder of the day in her room and will go to bed after her nebulizer treatment. Since she has a tendency to hit at me (not actually hit me, but at me) when she's throwing a fit, I told her that if she did that at all, all tickets would be taken, and she would go to her room for the rest of the day.

It is called invoking the Agony Principle according to the book. I make disobeying agonizingly horrible for her, so she learns that she would rather obey. There are 5 tickets because she gets a margin of error (grace). She basically gets to mess up 4 times in one day before she gets sent to her room and to bed early. Pretty realistic, in my opinion. After she gets really good at mastering this, we either start off the day with fewer tickets (as few as 3) or we add something else that we would like to work on. Misbehaviors that are not on her list, do not get tickets taken away. We just work on one thing at a time.

We'll see how this works.