Behavior Plan

We've been having some struggles here at our house with listening.  And it's really hard for me to deal with having a child who doesn't listen.  As a teacher one of the things that I think is a relative strength for me is classroom management.  For the most part I've been pretty lucky with the students I've had, but you give me a group of 9 and 10 year olds and I feel like I do a pretty good job with behavior.  So the fact that I've been struggling with my own kid really is hard.  Now I know that kids are always better behaved for other people, but my child does need to listen to me, too!

Last summer I tried a sticker chart with Evelyn, but she really didn't understand the purpose and just wanted to pull the sticker back off as soon as she stuck it on.  Perhaps it was the wrong plan, but I let go of any plan for a while with that failure.  It wasn't until my friend The Control Freak posted an article about a behavior plan that it dawned on me that maybe it was time to try again.

I decided to employ a behavior jar to be filled with pompoms.  According to the plan, you picked a few key behaviors that needed to be changed and focused on those to be rewarded.  I decided we would have two jars, one for getting ready in the morning quickly and getting ready for bed without fussing, and the other just for general good listening since really that is our big problem.  As I said to a friend, we needed to fix the morning and evening because it just ruins both the start and end of our day!  And with the not listening in between our whole day just sucks!

From teaching I knew that the key to a good behavior plan is that the child needs to "buy in" and that requires a reward that is going to be meaningful.  Enter the Dum Dum.  Recently at the bank the teller offered a lollipop, and I said okay for the first time.  Evelyn was hooked.  Now I know that many people are not a fan of using food as a reward, and in general I am not either, but I knew it was going to work for my kid and that is what matters!

I gathered my materials and got to work...

Very quick and easy to put together!  And when Evelyn woke up from her nap I explained the Good Listener Jar and promptly started putting pompoms in.  We spent the rest of the afternoon adding pompoms for pretty much everything in order to get that jar filled fast because instant gratification is important when you're three!  

And, as with any good behavior plan, you have to be ready to make adjustments as needed.  I quickly got rid of the second jar for morning and bedtime because it is just as easy to include those times as good listening, and it helps get the jar filled up faster to only have one.  And if we're talking about filling up the jar fast, my kid quickly caught on to the fact that I had different sized pompoms and she always goes for the bigger ones when selecting what she's going to put in.  

It took about 2 days for her to get her first lollipop, and she's very close to her second.  I am getting a lot more, "Okay Mommy!" responses when she is asked to do something than I've ever known possible.  I've been able to back off a little on rewarding every little thing while still getting the desired result, which is exactly what a behavior plan is meant to do, and everyone is a little happier!