An interesting thing has happened since I started to blog 6 weeks ago. Our supper conversations have changed. Let me explain.
We eat together around the supper table as often as we can. Normally, it is only Tuesday, Saturday and Sunday evenings since our youngest teenager is a gymnast and practices the other days; CHALK UP! [sorry about the yell] Our supper conversations are usually entertaining as we dig into our teenagers’ lives. We would discuss especially intriguing behaviors from our ever-wise duo.
These entertaining exchanges sometimes yield great material for a blog. They’ve caught on. I’m busted. It wasn’t really that hard for them to catch on to my method since my wife would say “that would make great blog” material.
The result was an immediate change in behavior. Now, we both use the threat of the blog to invoke behavior modification. The threat of public embarrassment is a very efficient tool in behavior management for teens. It is truly amazing.
“Do you really want to sleep past your alarm and get the bulldozer treatment? That would be a funny blog post.” - result: teenager is out of bed before the second snooze.
“You seem to be avoiding your writing. Your dad might write about that in his blog.” - result: teenager completes his paper on time.
I wrote about incentives and unintended outcomes in a previous blog. This was another great example. I had no idea that my writing could be an effective discipline tool. Just another club in the golf bag of parenting.
Proverbs 22:6 “Start children off on the way they should go, and even when they are old they will not turn from it.”
- What is your plan? -
No comments:
Post a Comment