Incentives and discipline

Like I mentioned in an earlier post, we've been trying out various ways to motivate and discipline Tobey, ways that work for him.

I've never been one big on incentives. Consequences? Yes. Like "If you put your toy back, you'll be able to find it tomorrow when you want to play with it." Rules that are logical? Yes. Like no TV unless your homework is done (I guess that's kind of like an inventive too). But I never liked the idea of enticing with what might really be a light bribe. And the taking away of privileges wasn't a tactic that my parents used a lot with me either (although TV after homework kind of was). I guess my parents weren't superhard disciplinarians in that sense -- my mom always played mind tricks on us to get us to behave. But anyway, I'm not sure Tom and I can get through these Tobey toddler/preschool years...better make that childhood and adolescent too...without incentives and privileges.

We hope we're not expecting too much of Tobey to clean up at the end of the evening before bedtime. He's really been fighting it though. We first came up with the system of any toy that he doesn't clean up gets taken away for the next day. The downfall of that is that he has so many toys that he rarely misses the ones that were taken away. He's never asked about the wagonful of duplos that were taken away a couple weeks ago. And Jim, Tom's co-worker, said his kids figured out pretty quickly that they just wait a few days and they'll get the toys back.

Then Tom figured out that Tobey really cared about his basketball hoop, now higher. So not cleaning up meant that he wouldn't get the basketball hoop the next day. The jury is still out on this method. The first day, Tobey kept asking about the missing hoop. Then he got it back the next day and played with it in the morning but not so much later. The next evening, he lost it again and it went "missing" for a couple of days of not cleaning up. This morning it finally appeared again and Tobey noticed it first thing out of bed. Unfortunately, he threw the basketball at Eli right after I said not to and now he has the hoop, but his basketball is confiscated. I think one time when Tobey didn't clean up his toys, Tom cleaned them all up (since the basketball hoop was already gone), put them in a big laundry basket atop the counter and Tobey cried as he saw Tom taking them away. So there's some feeling of loss but we're still at a loss at exactly what it is that will get him to clean up.

When talking with Angela today, she wondered if a reward chart would work at this age. She's a kindergarten teacher so she wasn't sure if our kids at this point would be able to work towards an end goal with a reward chart. Then again, at this point, I think Tobey would like to just put sticker stars up, regardless of a reward at the end. The point is, maybe some positive incentive would work better than our taking away toys. Rewarding the good behavior versus punishing the bad. Tom did a little bit of this, rewarding Tobey with a story at milktime if he cleaned up. It worked once.

I think the key to discipline is sticking to what we threaten (of course all the books say that, easier said than done!). The other day Tobey hit me when I was buckling him into the carseat after Safeway. I said he'd get a naughty corner when we got home. Most of the 3-minute car ride was cordial and when we drove into the garage, I calmly told him it was naughty corner (crib) time and he peacefully went. We've also been using the crib (with no toys within reach) as a sort of "jail" or timeout. I think I've still been treating that as a naughty corner but I'd like to move on to encouraging him to think about what he did wrong.

Needless to say we are struggling in the two's.