Positive Reinforcement!

One thing that I wanted to do for my kids is to start rewarding their good behavior, rather than always trying to pick out the negative ones and always talking about what they shouldn't do. I always tell my kids that bad choices have bad consequences or bad behavior reaps bad consequences, but I believe that good choices should also reap good consequences, mainstream calls it "positive reinforcement". Being able to focus on the good and the continue encouragements makes them want to do better, they see the benefits and rewards from the good that they're doing, and they like it.

I believe that is something that we should continue to do to help our kids. We need to build them up and encourage them! One thing that I found in my research on how to reinforce positive behavior is something called the Goodtimer. The Goodtimer is a really cool device, it comes with a nice storyline, and a couple printables that you can use to help get you set up.

The Goodtimer comes with tokens to use as "currency" to pay for the reward that they have earned. The way that we use it is after the girls have completed their morning routine, they are able to "flip over" their GoodTimers. Once that happens it gives them some encouragement like "Here we go!" and it will start to glow green, tracking their good behavior. As the girls follow the house rules throughout the day, depending on the level set, one glowing bar will light up periodically throughout the day. Once they get to twelve bars a sound will play and they get to push to button to take a token that they have earned. They can see how well they are doing as the bar continue to light up. The Goodtimer has 10 levels, at level 1 you earn a token ever 40 mins and at level 10 you earn a token every hour. So, it can work for very young impatient toddlers to older kids.

The Goodtimer also comes with a cute little kid's book. It tells the story of a clockmaker wanted to make a clock to help encourage kids to make good choices. In a clever way it also tells you how to use the tool in a way that kids can also understand. The story also walks you through making house rules, with respective consequences. If you want to see how we made our house rules check them out here. Make sure that your rules are clear, sit down and discuss them with everyone, make sure that your expectations are known and understood. Your consequences should be logical consequences, it should be help reinforce the rule that was broken. Sending your child to their room and/or popping them is not teaching them anything but fear. You want them to be accountable for their actions and have respect for your and the house that they live in.

For instance, if you, have a house rule of no slamming doors and your kid slams a door, then the logical consequence to me is that they need to learn how to close the door more quietly. Therefore, the logical consequence should be that they need to close the door quietly 10 times. That can start to create muscle memory for them, and helps them practice how to properly close a door. If they end up slamming the door again then, guess what? They need more practice… So, instead of 10 times you can go to 15 times or 20 times and so on. At some point they're going to get tired of, closing the door quietly and it's going to register that they need to stop slamming the door. I think that is a better method than, yelling, sending them to timeout, or hitting. It works for my 5- and 7-year-old!

The fun part is once they earn tokens and gets to use them for rewards. We do our token trade-in as a part of our family meetings on Sunday evenings. When you read the story you also walk through setting up your "rewards menu". You can set it up to have 1 token equal 15 minutes of screen time or you can teach them how to save by making more appealing rewards equaling a larger number of tokens. For instance, 7 tokens can be a trip to Sweet Frog for some frozen yogurt. Just make sure that your kids pick out the rewards that they want so that they will be excited to get their tokens to use them. We also limit sweets and candy to tokens, if they have a token then they can get a sweet!

So, there you have the Goodtimer. We all love it and I hope you will too! Check it out and let me know what you think!