It usually starts with a little shouting or crying and sometimes escalates into an all out brawl. And now we have a new rule when it ends with one kid telling us that the other did something bad. Kids needs to learn how to settle their own disagreements. So when they ask us to get involved we now give them a 5-minute timeout together. If they still want our involvement at the end of the 5-minutes, we become Judge Judy and get to the bottom of it. If one kid is completely innocent, the guilty one gets a consequence. But this is rarely the case, so the other part is that they both get a BIG TIME consequence if we find fault in both of them. It's been about 2 months, and they rarely come to us anymore, and when they do, they always seem to have things worked out at the end of the five minutes.
3 comments:
This is not easy thing to do, because sometimes you're knowingly giving an innocent kid a time-out. But it seems to draw them a little closer to each other. It's a good feeling when you seem them laughing and getting along when just moments earlier they were dukeing it out.
Being a parent is hard work, and I make a lot of mistakes. Just the other night I gave Kurt a time-out for having an eruption (we call it going volcano). I forgot about him, and he was outside on the bench for almost 30 minutes with the mosquitoes having him for dinner. He had a big consequence a few days earlier for leaving his timeout on his own. So it took a lot of courage for him to get up and ring the doorbell (and quickly sit back down). Talking about feeling like a bad dad! I felt guilty even the next morning, and I ended up giving him ice cream for breakfast.
lol! I'm laughing at your second comment you left. I remember when dad forgot me in his version of a time out under the card table. I was under there for at least a half hour and then he left to go outside and I was like, what the heck??? Nice pic - I see Wyatt in Kurt with that face!
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