One of the joys of my job is reading the letters I receive from readers. Here’s a sample of communications I’ve received.
Siblings learn to resolve their own problems. A mother stopped her children from coming to her to resolve disputes by cheerfully telling them, “Oh, I can fix this problem very easily. In fact, I can fix it right now for the rest of the day. Would you like that?”
Mom says she rarely gets past “easily” before her kids have vanished and are working the problem out themselves.
Toddler learns to behave himself in preschool. A three-year-old boy was being disobedient and disrespectful toward his preschool teachers. The parents told the teachers to isolate him at the first incident of the day, call home, and one of them would come get him. At home, he was confined him to his room for the remainder of the day and put to bed early.
The parents report that after a week of spending almost full days in his room, he finally got the message. It goes without saying that the earlier this lesson is learned, the better.
Child learns to control her fears. A five-year-old girl would not go upstairs unless one of her parents accompanied her. Since her bedroom was on the second level, these requests averaged ten a day. In her room, she checked her closet and under the bed, and then Mom or Dad could leave. Needless to say, this was a bit of an inconvenience.
The parents tried in vain to reassure their daughter that there was nothing to fear. However, these attempts only tended to make the problem worse.
Modifying a strategy they had read about in one of my books, the parents began giving their fearful child three “tickets,” small rectangles of colored poster board, at the start of every day. For a parent to accompany her upstairs, the girl had to give up a ticket. No ticket, no escort, at which point she had to resign herself to either staying downstairs until bedtime or making the dreaded trip alone.
The first few days, her tickets were gone by lunchtime. She persisted in her requests for a bodyguard, begging, crying, and acting generally psychotic, but her parents remained firm.
On day four, she used her third ticket at five o’clock in the afternoon, and every day for the next week, she used her third ticket close to bedtime. Then, quite suddenly, she announced to her parents, “I’m not afraid anymore,” and began going up and down the stairs multiple times a day on her own. The wild things have yet to capture her.
Child learns to eat vegetables. Four-year-old Rodney would not eat veggies, no matter the color. He said they tasted bad and made him want to cry and throw up. To prove the point, he began crying.
One day, his parents read a column of mine and got an idea. They told Rodney, “Your doctor says that if you don’t eat vegetables, then you have to go to bed right after dinner.” When he pressed them for an explanation, they shrugged their shoulders and said, “Doctors know lots of things. That’s why they’re doctors. So we have to follow the doctor’s orders.” Three early bedtime days later, Rodney’s vegetable aversion had been cured. His doctor is a genius!
Family psychologist John Rosemond: john rosemond.com, parentguru.com.
