The Lazy Organizer

I had to sneak out of bed at 5 a.m. to get this written because it wasn’t happening otherwise.  Up late to read, up early to write.  I should do ok on five hours of sleep right?

I am currently in the mode of writing about my parenting struggles and successes. This is where it started.

1. This Boy That I Adore – Houston we have a problem.
2. Talk About Parenting – Finding inspiration and guidance.
3. Dream the Impossible Dream – Creating a vision.

I wrote down a goal several months ago that I never thought I would be able to make happen.  I was right.  I never did.  Then luckily God stepped in and made it happen for me.  He directed me to set up a system that would work exactly for my son.

Let me just say right now that I receive direct revelation from God.  We are buddies and talk all the time.  If you have a hard time believing that then when I say God you could insert “the Universe”.  Same thing.

Because of the downward spiral that my son and I were in I felt like I was always correcting him and he felt like he couldn’t do anything right.  My goal was to go one day without criticizing him.  Yes, I have read all the parenting books that say we need to ignore the negative things our children do and focus on the positive things but some days I couldn’t even see anything positive because there was always this huge elephant of negativity in the way.  How do you ignore an elephant? Well after the first disscusion I had about parenting God finally showed me how.

Like I said, I knew I had to learn to see the positive in my son but better yet, he needed to see the positive in himself and  I was too tired and broken to do it for him.  Let me just use bullets points here so I stop rambling.  Don’t you love bullet points?  They help me focus.

• My son has a tiny notebook.
• Every time he does something that he should be doing he writes it down and gets one point.
• He does these things without being asked or reminded.
• I don’t tell him what to do.  He decides that for himself.
• I do decide what deserves a point and what doesn’t.
• Which is a good thing because he would be giving himself points for eating breakfast.
• Basically he gets points for doing everything that I was tired of reminding him to do.
• Things like his daily jobs, cleaning his room, school work, writing in his journal, showering, laundry, modeling for my blog, etc.
• Short term goal – If he gets 15 points in one day then the next day he gets privileges like riding his bike, snacks, doing fun activities, etc.
• Long term goal – When he gets 100 points he gets to play with a friend.   If all goes well then he should get to play with a friend once a week.*
• If we are gone most of the day then he only has to get 9 points.
• He has to pass off his points with me every night before 8 p.m.
• I don’t have to do anything but check points.
• This teaches him responsibility and keeps me from nagging.
• He is so busy working on getting points that he has less time to cause trouble.
• He is happy and feels accomplished.
• His mother and the rest of the family are happy.

*That might sound crazy if your kids are playing with friends every day but we live in a tiny community and my kids don’t have any friends here.  It is a 5-30 minute drive every time they get together with someone.

One thing that all of us decided in discussion #3 is that almost any system will work with kids if you stick with it.  That is the problem right there.  When I had this fabulous idea and implemented it, it worked perfectly for two whole days.  And then it didn’t.  It didn’t work because it wasn’t set up exactly right and instead of tweaking it I gave up on it as one more failure.  Thankfully I decided to give it one more try.

When I leave it up to my brilliant children to figure things out and I implement them we make a great team.  Originally the consequence for not getting enough points was that my son couldn’t use his Ripstick (kind of like a skateboard.)  I thought that would motivate him because he loves that thing and was spending every minute of his free time on it.  As it turns out he didn’t love it enough.  After two days he stopped earning points and just resigned himself and the rest of the family to misery because when he’s not happy nobody is happy.

When we sat down and talked about it he told me the system might work better if he had to earn points to use his Ripstick, his Heely’s and his bike.    I said that was a great idea and in fact he would need to earn his points to get any privileges at all.  You should have seen the look of terror on his face.  But I thought it was a good plan so we tried it.

It’s a good plan.  It is such a good plan that he told me we should raise his point requirement from 12 to 15 so that he would have to do more school work.  Fabulous!!!  In the two weeks we have been doing this he has only lost his privileges twice.  He lost them the very first day when he didn’t think I was really serious about the whole thing and from my history why would he?  He found out I was serious this time.  Then he lost his privileges again today.  He had all his points but he was having too much fun last night to get them checked off before bed time.  That’s part of the plan.  Not only does he have to do what he is supposed to be doing but also he has to return and report.

We can learn a lot from the way God parents us.  We all want to be productive and He wants us to succeed.  He knows that we grow and flourish when we are given order and laws and consequences.

Maybe you are having trouble with one of your adorable children like I was.  Maybe you have been praying to find answers.  Maybe it is time for you to take action.  Between you and God, you know exactly what your child needs.  Now get to it!

I’ll leave you with one more story.  One morning when Sailor was home and I was off in the back room doing laundry I heard arguing.  I came out to find Muscles upset (he had been causing trouble again) and Sailor so frustrated with him that he was giving him all kinds of jobs to do as a consequence.  I stopped everyone.  I said Muscles didn’t need consequences.  He needed to start earning his points.  I reminded both of them that Muscles knew what he needed to do and he would be much happier if he was doing it.  It wasn’t even five minutes later that he walked by me with a big smile on his face, “You’re right Mom!  I AM happier when I am earning points!”

And we all lived happily ever after.

May 4th, 2009 Lara Gallagher Posted in Parenting Is Hard! | 8 Comments »

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