The Proof Is In The Pudding

I just read an entire article about a woman's attempt to stop yelling at her children -- for a week!

For a week?  That means this is her preferred method of communication when her children don't obey?

If you want someone to listen to you, talk more quietly!  Believe me, it works!

It doesn't always mean the children will jump to cooperate.  Sometimes it is necessary to get up and go over to assist the child in the right direction and sometimes it is necessary to remove other more tantalizing things to clear the way for them.  Once in a while it is even necessary to go through what I call ascending threats.  That goes something like this:

Please pick up your clothes.  If you don't pick up your clothes I am turning the television off.  (And I do that.)  And the game machine is being put away until tomorrow.  (And I do that.)  And now you get to sit on your bed until you pick up the clothes!  I've hardly ever had to go farther than something like that because I can let them sit on the bed all day if they like. (No books, no toys, no nothing, just them and the clothes.)

Parenting is a pro active job.  The object is to pick your battles and make them ones that will benefit your children as human beings.  I'm willing to negotiate some things and even give in on things if there is a good enough reason.  I'm not here to make them, or me, miserable and I am not here to teach sitting on my backside and yelling useless things. 

It is my experience that children act the way they live and they do the things they see done.  It is why we need to raise our own children.  Then they will grow up acting like us.

It isn't rocket science.  It's just simple common sense and I have proof that it works.