Incentives and Disincetives

With Sam we're continuing to tinker with incentives and disincentives. He has a star board (we draw stars on a small white board Emily has) and after he gets six stars he gets a special reward, usually a Kinder Egg. These are German eggs where there's a small toy inside and the egg has a kind of chocolate coating. He doesn't get totally sugared out and they aren't expensive, but he really likes them. This works pretty well. The two things we're working on now are hand-washing and tooth-brushing.

We're also doing time-outs, which work fairly well. Usually it's just for a few minutes, and we now are as likely to give the offending toy a time out as we are to give Sam a time out. So if he throws a stuffed animal too close to a sibling, the animal gets a time out. Typically, Sam gets them in the morning or evening when he's tired and needs a little alone time.

We're also working on some of the bigger life lessons. Sam left a beloved new motorcycle at church on Sunday and it just disappeared at some point. The rest of the day, about every hour or two he would cry and say "motorcycle," and then would be back to normal in a few minutes. Not a fun lesson, but a basic problem in life: things don't last.

The harder areas are where an infraction is suspected but not seen. Usually this comes when we hear a "thump" and then a baby cry and come out to see Sam sitting by the baby. Did he push the baby? Did the baby fall? Unfortunately, none of our children are great expert witnesses at this point. Today I gave Sam a time out because all signs pointed to play that was too rough. Then, his teacher told Emily that today whenever he fell down at school he would say "s/he pushed me!" in local language even if no one pushed him. It's hard to be a social being. Sam's really coming along, but it takes a while.

On a related note, he's especially snuggly lately. He tells us he loves us about a hundred times a day. I know it's something I say to him a lot, but I think he also gets it at school and it's started to stick. It's very endearing. He's a fun kid.