Ahhh, sweet inspiration and support -- I've had these products and ideas recommended to me before, but it took a mini-crisis to sniff 'em out and follow up. Those of you familiar with the technique will know where it's coming from :
At dinnertime: "I'm leaving in 10 minutes. You can go with me hungry, or not hungry. Your choice."
At bedtime: "You can stay up quietly in your room if you like. Remember, we get up at 6 a.m. and leave by 7 a.m. I suggest you set your alarm. *pause* Don't know where the alarm is? That's too bad. That'll make it hard to get up on time. What are you going to do?"
At teethbrushing time: "I trust that you have brushed and flossed your teeth, because I know you don't want to pay for a cavity to be filled at the dentist on your next visit."
Wow -- and my evening is being quiet . . . what a delight. *happy sigh*
On the academic side of things, my wonderful young teen took part in his first ever science fair and earned third place! He was so excited! What a positive payoff for his efforts!
Posted by vwiggin (Member # 926) on :
Congratulations Shan. Nathan is lucky to have a great mom like you. Posted by Launchywiggin (Member # 9116) on :
Shan, I WISH my mother could learn from you. My little brother is 13 and she has to bribe him to do anything. He never listens, skips school, and fights her every step of the way. He's also extremely smart--despite C's in some classes. He reads like a machine, but I can't instill in my mother that she needs to give him discipline and structure. There's no father figure in the house to crack the whip and she's just too soft and she doesn't have the patience any more. I'm trying to convince her that if she does things right it will get easier, but she doesn't follow through. Please--any words of support you can give to me to give to my mom would be appreciated. And what's the 100$ you spent?
Posted by rivka (Member # 4859) on :
Hooray for Love & Logic. Posted by Teshi (Member # 5024) on :
That sounds like my mother's parenting technique when we reached a certain age. "Not clearing up your room to a reasonable? Well, I'll just confiscate everything on the floor."
She did. It mostly consisted of stuffed toys and the like, and she left anything she thought I really cared about, but it certainly worked. A little ashamed then = now.
We didn't really have a discipline problem, though, because there was always the element of responsibility even from when we were children. "Don't want to eat what I've cooked? You can substitute with bread" etc.
Posted by jeniwren (Member # 2002) on :
That's great, Shan!
My big struggle with L&L is with grades, though it appears that I might have finally found my son's currency: time with friends. As I explained to him, "I'd love for you to get to spend time with your friends, but I'd feel like a horrible parent if I let you do that instead of your schoolwork, especially considering that you have an F in one of your classes. If you think of a way to be able to do both, let me know, because I'm all ears. Oh, man, you forgot your worksheets? What a bummer. Yeah, I still can't take you to your friends unless your homework is done. Sorry you can't do it. I guess you're staying home tonight. Unless you can think of another way. Let me know." Empathy with teeth. It's still a struggle, but it looks like it might be working.
Teshi, I did that with my son too, with "Feel free to keep all the toys you put away." Then I went in and took everything off the floor after his deadline passed. Afterward, I put a neatly typed up invoice on his newly made bed for the cleaning services and the pawn cost to get his toys back. Later that night, I found the invoice under my pillow all scribbled up with a note on the back saying "This is dumb Mom, I'm not paying any stupid invoice for my own toys." It took a few weeks, but he did. I never had to do it again.
Posted by Teshi (Member # 5024) on :
Parents are evil. And often right .
Posted by esl (Member # 3143) on :
Wow, that sounds great! I, too, am wondering what the hundred dollars were for..
My girlfriend and I were raised very differently and I find myself wondering what would happen if we were to raise a child. not that it's going to happen anytime soon. Her mom gave her stuff away when she didn't clean up. My mom's more the nagging type. A ransom/pawn costs sounds like a very good compromise.
Posted by Shan (Member # 4550) on :
*giggling at jeniwren* I LOVE the invoice idea.
The $100 was for the CDs and books I got from here:
Maybe we should have a thread for L&L . . . I struggle with the special health needs vs the logical consequences, and how far and when to let go . . . such a puzzle.
Posted by Sharpie (Member # 482) on :
Funny, this is one of those things that has been in discussion for the last little while in my household. I've always been a consequence-based parent, and it's worked REALLY well. If you oversleep, you go to school late, you don't get a tardy excuse from your mom, you have to go to bed early that night so that you can catch up. If you break something, you replace it. It's logical and it works, and it is so much better than getting worked up about every little thing. The responsibility is where it belongs, and the older they get, the more responsibility they take on.
Then my daughter slowly became more and more ill (she has bipolar disorder), and the lines got blurry. What kinds of consequences are there when your kid is out of her mind for a period of time? What is FAIR? Do you hold her responsible for what she does in those periods of time? Should you? She is sixteen, btw, and when she is ill, her behavior is abysmal.
My sister has helped us start down a good road by saying to me: "Marsh, when you are sick, people take care of you. THAT is the consequence." Because consequences are not punishments, they are consequences. And she is right. If my girl is in one of her bad phases, we (her dad and I and her two stepparents) take care of her. We make sure she gets enough sleep, we keep her in our back pockets (she has to be with a parent at all times on sick days), we monitor her mealtimes and her medicine intake with much more care. It's not being grounded. It's definitely not a punishment. It helps her get back on track. And the long-term goal is that she will take this over, that she will have a mental checklist of sorts that she and her support system and her doctor can refer to. "Okay, I didn't get more than 3 hours sleep again last night. Time to go back to the "sick" protocol."
(I know it is slightly off-topic, but Shan mentioned special health needs, and I think this counts )
[ May 27, 2007, 11:57 AM: Message edited by: Sharpie ]
Posted by martha (Member # 141) on :
My mom used to make toys go on vacation. If we didn't put a toy away, it went on vacation (probably in a box on a high shelf in the basement, I don't know). A few months later it would come out again -- if we were excited to see it, we got it back; if we'd outgrown it, it went into the yardsale box.
Posted by porcelain girl (Member # 1080) on :
quote:My mom used to make toys go on vacation. If we didn't put a toy away, it went on vacation
I like that. It also seems like a good way to make sure your kids don't have more toys than they really need (the yardsale bit). Much less ominous than the Gunni-Bag. I can still hear my mom and her friend Susie singing in their funny deep voices "Here comes the Gunni-Bag, he's gonna get your toy-oys..."
I was honestly a little afraid that the Gunni-Bag was gonna get me if I was left on the floor. But then again we seemed to like that scary stuff-- Puffy Treat may recall playing Doctor Doom with our uncles and The Alien with our mom and dad.
Posted by breyerchic04 (Member # 6423) on :
wait, Puffy Treat and Porcelain Girl are related and I didn't know this?
Posted by rivka (Member # 4859) on :
And if breyer didn't know . . . ! Posted by breyerchic04 (Member # 6423) on :
Exactly.
Posted by Amanecer (Member # 4068) on :
quote:What is FAIR? Do you hold her responsible for what she does in those periods of time? Should you? She is sixteen, btw, and when she is ill, her behavior is abysmal.
My older sister is severely bipolar. When we were kids, my parents made it very clear that behavior done while she was ill wasn't something for which she was truly responsible. They made it so that her illness was an acceptable excuse to get out of anything difficult. She's now an unemployed college drop out with no real friends who is living off of disability/ welfare and believes that she isn't capable of a real job or a real relationship or much of anything.
My thoughts on the subject are that your kid is not benefited by receiving different consequences. People with emotional disabilities live in this reality and I think are best helped by learning how to deal with the natural consequences of this reality.
Posted by Sharpie (Member # 482) on :
Amanecer, I didn't grow up in your family so I have no way to judge whether your parents did it "right" or "wrong", but I would hesitate to blame them for how she turned out as an adult. You said, "She's now an unemployed college drop out with no real friends who is living off of disability/ welfare and believes that she isn't capable of a real job or a real relationship or much of anything." There is a really good chance that she would have turned out this way no matter what your parents did. Those are, unfortunately, descriptive words for a whole lot of severely bipolar adults.
I do understand what you are saying. Em has 3 siblings and 2 stepsiblings, and most of them at one time or another have said she "gets away with stuff" because of her illness. It is extraordinarily hard to parent a mentally ill child and when you have healthy ones too, the equations get more complicated than you can imagine. I just go one hour at a time. A day is too long :-).
But what I'm talking about is not punishment, nor is it allowing getting away with stuff. It's a very hard protocol for her, this "taking care of you when you're sick". When you are 16 and you can't stay home for 10 minutes alone, you can't go out with friends or stay up late, you can't have privacy really, I bet it doesn't feel like getting away with stuff. What I hope it feels like is security. (That's nowhere near the word she uses for it .)
Is it fair to the other kids that she has a different consequence? She thinks hers is worse; they think theirs is worse. I do know that it is not fair to HER to have this horrible disease, to never have a day you can count on free of anxiety or mania, to not know if someone out there will love her despite her tics and behavior, to not be able to go to school (she's on homebound learning at the moment.) That's not "fair", whatever that word means.
And the toll on the family is enormous, and not fair to them. I am beginning to hate the word fair.
Posted by rivka (Member # 4859) on :
Sharpie, I think the technique your sister suggested makes a lot of sense. "Fair" is a myth.
Good luck. Posted by Amanecer (Member # 4068) on :
Sharpie, this is a very emotional topic for me, and presumably for you as well. I likely should have worded my last response in a more sensitive manner.
I agree that life is not fair and trying to artificially make it so doesn't make much sense. Having only been the sister and not the parent, I'm sure I don't appreciate how truly hard it is to be the parent of a bipolar child. From what I have experienced, I know it's insanely hard.
Intellectually, I see it as a possibility that my sister could be who she is even if my parents had done everything "right". Even still though, I do feel my parents made many poor choices that have contributed to who she is. I do not want to go on an angry rant with way too much personal information, but I think that all involved (including my mother) now feel that my sister received rewards for being sick/ acting poorly, i.e. having my mom walk her through her homework if she didn't feel like doing it, and punishments for healthy behavior, i.e. being "able" to do something she didn't want to do. All of us are subject to operant conditioning. We follow the positive rewards and avoid actions with negative results. I think this is an important thing for all parents to remember.
Sharpie, I'm sorry that this is something your family has to endure. I wish your family the best.
Posted by Sharpie (Member # 482) on :
No, no, this is a really helpful conversation for me, Amanecer. You did not word it insensitively at all. It's great for me to hear from somebody who grew up as a sibling. I sometimes feel like I don't give the others nearly enough of me, because her needs are so great right now. She is the youngest, which helps, and she has two really in-synch parental teams who communicate every single day.
But hearing from you reminds me that her brothers of course see this differently than I do, and I refuse to ignore that. It's important. (It's not that I don't know it; it's more that her crises can make me focus REALLY intensely on her stuff.)
At the end of the day, we can gather info, we can think and debate and worry, but then all we have to go on is our instinct and our judgment. In this as in every other thing we do in life. Me, I'm happy for every single opinion I can get, because I am not the sibling or the child of a bipolar person, and every little bit helps me have more to work with when I have decisions to make. Then I'll make decisions which will thrill some and appall some others, and I'll go to sleep until the next day .
Posted by Wendybird (Member # 84) on :
I like the Love and Logic approach but often forget to use it! Somedays are better than others.
Sharpie - my 12 yo son is bipolar also and it is a struggle. I don't want him growing up using his illness as an excuse (he is also 4 years post heart transplant to boot) at the same time finding the line between the illness and the "deliberate" action can be sooooooo hard. Thankfully at the moment he is stable on depakote but we just had to bump it up a bit to regain that stability. It is a never ending struggle. He's heading into those turbulent teen years so I know its going to get worse as those hormones start raging and swirling around....
Posted by Shan (Member # 4550) on :
It looks like L&L has a new book especially for us'n's with kids with special health care needs. Check it out here.
![[Frown]](frown.gif)
Those of you familiar with the technique will know where it's coming from ![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
:![[Wink]](wink.gif)
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
now.![[Evil]](graemlins/evil.gif)
I never had to do it again.
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