WWJFD

To all those Love and Logic fans out there, I have a story for you. I have only heard bits and pieces about Jim Faye’s parenting methods, but so far, his methods seem to make sense. He’s all about natural consequences for kids’ actions and helping kids be more responsible by handling their own problems. I recently read his first book cover to cover. I’m not such a good reader and I rarely finish books, but I couldn’t put it down. It was so interesting to hear how he handles all sorts of situations with kids.

So, here it is: With all of that new information rattling around in my head, Joe found an old bag of baked chips, opened them and flung them all across the floor in the babies’ room and the hall. I walked into the room to see Joe squishing the chips into Patrick and Luke’s hair while they happily munched.

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At first, I got annoyed, but then I remembered – Ah ha! This isn’t my problem. Joe will have to clean it up. I explained the situation to him, gave him a trash bag and shut the door behind me. I checked on him every 10 minutes or so and found him doing everything but cleaning up the chips. For two hours he rolled around in the chips, ate them, played in the babies’ beds, and goofed off with their CD player (turned it up, then to AM fuzz and couldn’t figure out how to turn it off again, poor guy). He had to take his nap without lunch (he had eaten PLENTY of chips and seemed like he might have felt a little icky because of it – another natural consequence.)

When he got up, he was ushered back into the babies’ room. I then realized that the chips were getting smaller and smaller (because of being stepped on and rolled in) and harder for his little fingers to pick up. Joe was offered the vacuum (which he was previously afraid of) with a little instruction on how to use it, and was left alone in the room again – by now he had been in there for almost 3 hours, with no result. He finally decided that he had had enough when I announced that the babies and I were going to watch a video and that he was welcome to join us after the chips were off of the floor. It took a little more prodding, but he started vacuuming and did a pretty good job.

The final result – 3 hours of time to hopefully keep myself from having to clean up frivolous messes again. Maybe he will learn the lesson, maybe not, but besides the checking in on him, it wasn’t much harder on me than cleaning up the chips myself. In addition, Joe was very proud of himself for learning to vacuum and announced to Scott, “I picked up the chips, Daddy!” He failed to mention that he was the one who flung them in the first place.
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