Tell your students on Monday that your principal must love you because he or she gave you the best class. Watch your students live up to that expectation. It is always amazing to watch the switch. Mindset changes are miracles.
January 13, 2011
Teaching Budget Skills to Pre-teens
This is a personal experience that worked well for my own children:
We quickly became indebted to fast food restaurants, video stores, and the popular teen clothing establishments. We investigated the reason for this loss of money and determined: 1) we let it happen because we kept giving our children more money, and 2) our children didn’t understand the concept of budgeting. We decided to remedy this by creating a budget box. We bought a plastic recipe box and put in envelopes and labeled them:
Each month we put in a certain amount of money in each envelope. If our children wanted to order pizza, they had to check the budget box and pay for it from the appropriate envelope. Suddenly, coupons were very important to them when coupons were a dirty word when mom and dad footed the bill. Suddenly, those extra cokes at the drive through were not quite as important. They considered every purchase and weighed the options. If we had to drive our children somewhere, each child had to pay us one dollar out of the budget box. We wanted our children to understand that when they had their own cars, they would need to budget trips instead of driving all over town wasting gas.
We did not have to say “no” when asked about purchases. All we had to say was “check your envelope.” We allowed no trading from one “account” to the other. The children were responsible for their own box. They quickly realized that decisions regarding the whole month were more important than living for the moment. This created an environment where everyone was happy. Our children learned to think before they acted, and it was good practice for when they became independent young adults.
This method was far superior to ranting and raving about money which was an abstract idea to them. They saw that we had a checkbook, credit cards, and cash and did not understand that we would not have those items if we spent money every time we saw something we wanted. If they wanted something, our children learned to save from one month to next to make major purchases. We did not give them extra money; when we said “no” we meant “no,” and our reason was our budget.
We praised our children:
In the world of Positive Behavior Support, we changed the environment (basically we changed our behavior, we didn’t dole out money any longer). We taught our children a new skill, and we provided positive feedback when they performed their new skills. Our hypothesis was that our children didn’t understand the concept of budgeting. We proved that hypothesis when they learned to budget for themselves.
January 9, 2011
Two Year Old Tantrums
I have frequently said the reason behind two year old tantrums is because the brain is further along than the mouth. Two year olds do not have the vocabulary to put voice to their thoughts. Parents start doing what I call the "kitchen dance", because most tantrums occur in the kitchen at home. "Do you want this?" "Do you want this one?" "Is this what you want?" Eventually, the child's babbles turn into screaming tantrums.
So what's a parent to do? Here's my suggestion: 1) take pictures of everything your child might possibly want from you (the typical things: cup, hug, bear, apple, juice, milk etc.); 2) laminate the pictures and attach to childproof magnets (large); 3) Put the magnets on the lower half of the refrigerator in the kitchen. Teach your child, when they aren't drunk on emotion, how to let you know what they want. When they reach for the picture of cheerios say to them, "I see you want your cheerios" and give them the cheerios.
You can also take a small photo album and put pictures in it of things your child mnight want and use this as a transportable communication device. Another idea is to do PowerPoint relationship narratives with pictures of your child as the star of the story and basically model and role play how to let Mommy and Daddy know what they want. Have your child watch this several times a day. It will really help with communicating through the two year old phase.
According to Claire Vallotton and Jenny Merkin in Psychology Today (February 2011), one of the best ways to help your child allevaite tantrums is to give them more vocabulary by reading to them. PowerPoint stories where the child is the star of the story can be recorded and played over and over again. The words can even be highlighted as the child gets older to help them associated the spoken word with the written word.
All the comments on this page are not meant to replace qualified medical advice. The comments are the opinions of Dr. Laura A. Riffel, Ph.D.