hi everyone.


pelase don;t anyone who responded to Moonica here take my remarks as an attack on your parenting style = we'e talking about ideas here.I will do my best not to say anything that could be taken as an attack on anyone;s parenting style in ideologial grou

.I personally don't beieve in reward systems for young children, just as I don';t believe in "time outs" and a formalized system of consequences...and withholding of some reward such as cutesy "big boy" sheets is really jsut a form of pnbishment though we won't like to admit that the carrot is really jsut a sweetened form of the stick. ALfie Kohn, who sometimes goes a bit too far into this for me but who I find brilliant in exposing soem underlying ideas behind our educational and family behaviors as adults dealing with children, says that rewards are basically a form of bribery that doesn;t change the inner experience, and actually research psychology on motivation ahs shown that the more you give a person f any age a reward for any activisty or behavo=ior, the more you decrease whatever intrinsic pleasure or sense of accompl;isjment a child gets from the activity. for example, by telling a child, "you wree o good about eating all your broccoli that you can have ice cram!" you are basically teaching that a) broccoli i o yucky that a peron mut be paid/bribed into eating it and b) ice cream or other wet are o valuable and important that they can be used a currency to pay children off for eating their yucky vegetable.

and so with Uperman heet, I feel...you are edmoting YOURELF by saying that cartoon characters are so great that they are currency for giving up omething else you really like...don;t be urprised if a child treated like that gets really fixated 0on wanting material thing, like cartoon character toy, since you ahve said that they are way valuable by paying him with thi. thi i what my favorite ocial workeer/dietician, Rllyn Dayyer, would call "Paying a very crewy form of blackmail."

alo, Moonica' on i not a prechooler, he i nearly eight (por maybe jut turned eight?) this is definitely old enough for reasoning and a growing understanding that other people, including your wonderfulmall-giving mother, have needs and feelings too.

so one approach is to be honest with your chld, rather than bribing him with toys and treats. I would say, "I am feeling really tierd and it is a hot night...I need for you to sleep in a special place enarby but where I can move around in the bed without ewaking you up by accident or rolling into you, so I can be rested and feel gpood and do some fun things with you tomorrow."

I really believe it;s never too early to start teaching empathy, the ideq that other people ahve feelings, though like a lot of concepts, chidlren incorporate it into their psyches at different times.

I had to do this with extended rbeastfeeding - my wonderful bedsharing preschooler was waking me up too much at night to nurse. I didn;t want to quit co-sleeping but I did need to say, "hey, I need my sleep at night and you may NOT wake me up unles it's an emergency." itl;s a judgment call - I felt she needed the continued breastfeeding as a bonding and comfort thing but she didn;t need it as a round-the-clock thing as she had when she was a baby.

basically I;ve found that if you really impress on a child that you care about their feelings and ideas and respect them as the eople they aer, and that you also have your own feelingsthat they should also respect, you get a much more thoughtful. considerate child than one who expects to be paid off for being cooperative or helpful or :grown-up." also, when getting paid to be a "nig kid" makes growing up look like something that demands bribes, well, the child tends to get alienated about whether:"growing up" is a good thing, a la Peter Pan.

just a few thoughts froma mama who's BTDT a few times over...

low $$= thrift shopping!!!! woo hoo and fun for you!