Behavior Chart

Hey, y'all, you know what's hard?  Parenting!  Lol, not a news flash, I know, but still... I feel like in some ways, it gets easier as A gets older (like having a helper with his little brother, or letting him get his own yogurt so I can rest 10 extra minutes) but in others, it's getting harder & harder!  At almost-5-years old, he has developed quite an attitude, and my DH & I are struggling to help him learn to control his tantrums & express his feelings in acceptable ways.

The majority of the time, A is a sweet, loving, intelligent, funny little guy.  He feels his emotions deeply, which is awesome when he's telling us how much he loves us, or how excited he is to visit his cousins... but it's intense when he's frustrated, mad, or hurt.  He tends to go straight to kicking/stomping, whining, and crying, without using his words at all.  In addition, within the last month or so, he's started a bad habit of back-talking us, AND his teachers!  We try to discuss it with him, and that slowly sinks in (I hope), but we definitely decided we needed some tangible consequences to help him learn.

We went with Tablet Time.  A LOVES to watch YouTube videos on the tablet, usually before we tuck him in at night.  So, we landed on a system where he gets 10 minutes if he's had a great day, 5 minutes if it was a good day, and he gets no Tablet Time if he made too many bad choices.  Let's be honest, we certainly did not make this up, and there's no reason to reinvent the wheel, so we went with the standard stop light colors to make a chart for A to monitor his behavior with: green being great, yellow being ok, and red signifying a bad day.

I designed the circles on my computer, making the faces reflect the levels, and adding messages about what each level means - most importantly, we made the red face ask how A can make tomorrow a better day, since that's really the whole focus here.

I wanted A to feel invested in the chart, and identify with it as HIS, so I printed out a picture of him and attached it to a clothespin.  Now, he has ownership - when he makes a bad choice, he has to move his clip down, and if he makes a good choice, he gets to enjoy moving it back up :)

So far, the chart has been working.  When A has to move down, he even starts the conversation of how he can make better choices to move back up!  Hopefully, he'll continue to ask those questions, and be receptive to those conversations, so he can begin to use his words rather than tantrums.