Wednesday 19 September 2012

Morning wars

Why is every morning a sodding battle?
Eat your breakfast
Get dressed
Pick up your dirty washing and put it in the wash basket
Put your lunchbox in your bag

Tips, give me tips please as I'm losing the plot and I suffer from "Have a large family, kids must look neat, clean and be organised otherwise it looks like I'm not coping' syndrome!

I'm not shouting at them but the nagging is getting to me.  There must be a better way than this!

DH wants to implement a reward
/consequences system (remember, he grew up in China) but I don't like this style of parenting as I dislike the "I'll do something only because I get something out of it" response.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I remember those days L and I only had two lol.

I'm sort of with you about doing everything for reward, but I am also aware that as adults in society we only get places in life by doing something for a result.

I had my children do 2 things "just to help Mum" each day and 3 things for pocket money.

Funnily enough, the things to
help me seem to always get done as that resulted in lots of cuddles, the paid jobs often forgotten and the risk of lost pocket money didn't seem to bother them too much!

For me it felt like a good way of teaching about altruism and the world outside our door.

belinda said...

If you are not willing to go the artificial rewards/consequences route the only way that they can possibly understand that you are not just talking to hear yourself talk is to experience the life consequences. This will of course not be comfortable for you as letting them walk out the door without breakfast, having them have no choice but to put on dirty clothes because there was nothing of their's in the basket when you washed and having them leave the house in wrinkled clothes because they threw them on the floor rather than put them away will well and truly hit that button you mentioned but shielding them from the consequences of their choices (either by nagging them into resentful action or doing it yourself cause it's all too hard) isn't real either.

Kind Regards
Belinda