Consequences

When you have kids they do things you don't want them to do.  They also often do things you specifically tell them not to do.  Eventually they will discover that even though they have done something they've been told not to do that they do not have to tell you about it.  Not long after that they will discover that even if you ask specifically about the thing they weren't supposed to do they can tell you something else and there are pretty good odds you won't check.

Gib5on has arrived at the end of that paragraph.

Although the odds of getting away clean are pretty good they are not a mortal lock and you will eventually catch the kid in a lie.  Last night, when inquiring what he was up to upstairs he responded - maybe too hesitantly - that he was playing with toys in his room.  Not too long after Mrs. TANBI busted him watching a movie with his cousin and his uncle.  The uncle did try to mitigate things by saying he enabled the bad behavior, but like with many transgressions: the offense was forgivable but the coverup was not.

And so Gib5on needed a consequence.

Coming up with consequences as a parent is rough ground.  You definitely need to stay in the world of proportional response - and clocking them in the side of the head is right out (although I really do understand what my parents were feeling even if I can't imagine following through).  It has to be something they will feel, but it can't be something that makes our lives too difficult.

We lean pretty heavy on time outs.  "Go sit on the stairs."  When he was younger his time outs were one minute for each year.  Now sitting there for that long doesn't have much teeth and sitting there long enough to make an impact, say maybe 15 minutes, would be a real disruption in our day.  The utility of the time out is waning.

We've tried taking away toys.  He's got a lot of toys.  We'd have to take away a lot of toys to make an impact.  Sometimes if he is particularly enamored with one thing or another you might find a vulnerable spot for a while, but it doesn't last long.  For a while I would threaten to give away a toy to another kid at school who was a toddler nemesis, but I don't think he ever really believed me.

No dessert has a certain amount of effectiveness.  But it is fairly discreet in its impact.  The idea of losing dessert is horrifying to him, but pretty much just at the moment he is being told it is going to happen and then at the moment after he asks for dessert.  Sometimes this results in a tantrum so energetic that we have to start looking for another consequence.

I miss the days when "give a squeeze and count to four" from Daniel Tiger still had some legs.

The nuclear option here is: NO SCREENS.  It really is a nuclear option though in that it contaminates the entire countryside.  In other words it also makes us miserable.  We rely on that screen time for a moment of respite in the day and when we punish him we are making more work for ourselves.  Plus also it has some fringe the litigator in him can pull on.  Screens are the center of his distance learning right now, and his karate class, and talking to his grandparents.  "I can't do that, it is a screen" is only days away in our discourse I am sure - at which point I will be back to considering how wrong my folks had it after all.

This week we discovered a much better vector: 24 hours without Pokemon.  He's all up into Pokemon right now.  He plays with the cards and engages us in Pokemon card battles (he cheats too - another post for another day), he plays computer Pokemon card games, he has Pokemon toys he plays with, and he watches Pokemon cartoons.  It hits behavior, toys, screens; it is a veritable hydra of consequences.  I even disallowed his Pokemon pajamas.

The penalty phase just ended.  He's off to bed in his prized Pikachu PJs.  At least for the first part of the day he definitely missed the content.  I think it is possible he might have experienced some behavior modification.  But even if he didn't, we got a 24 hour Pokemon vacation.  In this case that's enough all by itself.