Kids. Can’t live with’em, can’t hook them up to a car battery and yell ‘FOR THE THOUSANTH TIME, CLEAN YOUR ROOM!’
Yep, as much as we love our kids they can frustrate us, especially when they show the same behaviours every day no matter what we say or what we try to teach them.
Having a 5 and 3 year old at home, dinner times could be very stressful in our household. You spend an hour in the kitchen preparing a meal that is both nutritious and tastes great, only for one of your kids to sit there with a look of pure revulsion on their face and go ‘Yuck! I hate this!’ before they have even tasted it! Meanwhile your other child has stripped off to just their underwear and is running laps around the table trying to catch the cat! It can drive you barmy!
We got tired of nagging our kids about some of their behaviours, and realised that everything we were doing was negative and reactive. So we decided to change tack and go proactive and my word it has made a world of difference!
How have we done this? Something very simple – The Star Chart System.
The concept is very simple. We assign each of our children 3 goals – one for the daytime, one for dinnertime and one for bedtime. These are printed out and stuck on the wall. Whenever one of our kids achieves one of these goals they get a star sticker that they put up on their chart. When they have gotten 7 stars for that particular goal then they get a prize!
Now I know that sounds somewhat like bribery and perhaps at a basic level it is. But it is more about changing your child’s mindset. Instead of it being about the negatives associated with doing the wrong thing, its focusing on the positive’s associated with doing the right thing.
As for prizes, it needn’t be anything lavish, especially if you are giving them out reasonably often. For kids it can be mainly about the excitement of getting the prize rather than having it. Each of our kids has a prize bag full of stuff and none of it cost more than $2 or $3. A quick trip down the toy and stationary isles of discount stores like The Reject Shop and you will find plenty of pencils packs, sticker sheets, fairy wings, army men, bubble wands and other assorted tat that will keep your kids occupied for an hour or two before they break it or lose interest.
The beauty of The Star Chart System is that you can adjust it to the every changing needs of your child. For instance with our 3 year old daughter we found that achieving 7 stars meant that she would lose interest as it was too long a timescale between tangible rewards. So we shortened her chart to she only needed to achieve 5. By doing so she was getting more prizes and thus became far more interested in the whole process. Admittedly she still struggles with her bedtime goal so we have reduced that to she only needs to get 1 star for a prize in the vain hope we can get a decent nights sleep. And of course, when they achieve their goal you put a line through all the existing stars and begin all over again until the desired behaviour becomes ingrained.
We also found that by having special stickers for the final square on their charts, they worked harder towards getting that last one done so that they could put up a frog or bear sticker instead of a star. Tweak the system as needed.
When it came to dinnertime, after only a month both our kids were achieving their goal on a daily basis, the chart working where months of nagging had not. But again, the beauty is you can change the chart. So instead of our son having to ‘Try all the food on my plate’ and our daughter ‘Stay in my seat and use my fork‘ we changed both to ‘I will eat all the food on my plate’. And I’m pleased to say that most nights both our kids are now achieving this! It has made perhaps the most stressful part of our evening as parents into something so much more positive and relaxed for the whole family.
So if you are sick of nagging your kids, and your kids are sick of getting nagged, give The Star Chart System a whirl – you will be glad you did!
Got any comments about the above? Would love to read it in the comments section below!
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