Talking to Daddy
Posted by Daddy Peter | mid-morning | 11 March 10
Haven’t been writing for so long, getting a bit rusty. Well, just wanted to make an update about something we talked about yesterday.
Lately, your behaviour hasn’t been the best. Your school work is unfinished, test results getting worse, notes from teachers about your sloppy work, from student care about you not finishing work and refusing to listen… What is happening? One of the things when we ask you what happen in school, your answer is either, “I can’t remember” or “Don’t know”. If we do get something out of you, it seems so unorganized. One moment you are talking about A, then trailed off to B which might be unrelated…
We have tried many ways to encourage you and it might work for a while, but your interests soon fade off. Recently, I got an app for the iPhone iRewardChart It lists and tracks all the good behaviour we want to encourage and offer a way to redeem the stars as a form of rewards like ice creams, phone time, extra pocket money etc. We have been using it since last week and it has been encouraging with you asking whether another behaviour can be added to earn more stars. There are however still some behaviour that needs improvement upon like not wasting time, no whining… On some days, you seem to take 3 steps forward but 4 steps back as you misbehaved or didn’t work hard on earning the stars.
Yesterday, on the way home, I remembered something I read from the book, “Parking Lot Rules & 75 Other Ideas for Raising Amazing Children”. In it, one of the tip was to encourage your child to tell you 2 things of what happened in school, 1 good news and 1 bad news starting with the bad news first. The idea was simply to get our child into the habit of confiding to us the more important bad “news”, instead of keeping it to himself. So when I saw you when I reached home, I told you about this and said we will put it into the iRewardChart app. It wasn’t until when Jarrett went to sleep and when you were trying to read a book, that you started to tell me the news in school. Surprisingly, the bad news yesterday was you got into a fight… I tried to stay calm and got you to recount what actually happened. From what I gathered, while your friends and you were walking up the stairs to the fourth floor where the student care is, 2 of your friends got into a fight with one of the boys, you decided to help that boy and joined it. I don’t think it was really a fight, maybe some pushing and shoving, but the teacher stopped it and got everyone to write,“I will not make noise and keep quiet while going up the stairs”. I didn’t praise you for your “heroic” act, rather questioned you about whether fighting is right or wrong and cautioned you that school principals can make public punishment to those naughty students. Do you want to be labelled as a naughty child? Will your friends like to play with a naughty child? I hope you got the message of no fighting allowed. To get you to tell the truth about the bad news, I also added that if I got to hear these bad news from the teachers instead of from you directly, we will have to punish you. You got the message.
You had some trouble thinking about the good news, and came up with finding your missing water bottle, which you have left in school for several days. OK, accepted.
Just before you sleep, we went through again about the good and bad news, like what if there was no bad news? or good news? I gave some example of good news like, finishing your homework fast in the student care, getting good grades, getting a compliment from your teacher… If there was no bad news, then it’s fine. It was a nice father and son chat. As it was getting late, I tried to get you to sleep, you had one last bad news for me. You said you didn’t managed to finish your homework in StudentCare because you spend the remaining time talking to your friend. So I asked back, so what should you be doing and your answer is to finish work first. I am so glad that you are showing signs of thinking what the right actions should, hopefully you will follow through. Will continue to monitor your progress…
Happy 7th Birthday Ethan! : Previous
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Haven’t been writing for so long, getting a bit rusty. Well, just wanted to make an update about something we talked about yesterday.
Lately, your behaviour hasn’t been the best. Your school work is unfinished, test results getting worse, notes from teachers about your sloppy work, from student care about you not finishing work and refusing to listen… What is happening? One of the things when we ask you what happen in school, your answer is either, “I can’t remember” or “Don’t know”. If we do get something out of you, it seems so unorganized. One moment you are talking about A, then trailed off to B which might be unrelated…
We have tried many ways to encourage you and it might work for a while, but your interests soon fade off. Recently, I got an app for the iPhone iRewardChart It lists and tracks all the good behaviour we want to encourage and offer a way to redeem the stars as a form of rewards like ice creams, phone time, extra pocket money etc. We have been using it since last week and it has been encouraging with you asking whether another behaviour can be added to earn more stars. There are however still some behaviour that needs improvement upon like not wasting time, no whining… On some days, you seem to take 3 steps forward but 4 steps back as you misbehaved or didn’t work hard on earning the stars.
Yesterday, on the way home, I remembered something I read from the book, “Parking Lot Rules & 75 Other Ideas for Raising Amazing Children”. In it, one of the tip was to encourage your child to tell you 2 things of what happened in school, 1 good news and 1 bad news starting with the bad news first. The idea was simply to get our child into the habit of confiding to us the more important bad “news”, instead of keeping it to himself. So when I saw you when I reached home, I told you about this and said we will put it into the iRewardChart app. It wasn’t until when Jarrett went to sleep and when you were trying to read a book, that you started to tell me the news in school. Surprisingly, the bad news yesterday was you got into a fight… I tried to stay calm and got you to recount what actually happened. From what I gathered, while your friends and you were walking up the stairs to the fourth floor where the student care is, 2 of your friends got into a fight with one of the boys, you decided to help that boy and joined it. I don’t think it was really a fight, maybe some pushing and shoving, but the teacher stopped it and got everyone to write,“I will not make noise and keep quiet while going up the stairs”. I didn’t praise you for your “heroic” act, rather questioned you about whether fighting is right or wrong and cautioned you that school principals can make public punishment to those naughty students. Do you want to be labelled as a naughty child? Will your friends like to play with a naughty child? I hope you got the message of no fighting allowed. To get you to tell the truth about the bad news, I also added that if I got to hear these bad news from the teachers instead of from you directly, we will have to punish you. You got the message.
You had some trouble thinking about the good news, and came up with finding your missing water bottle, which you have left in school for several days. OK, accepted.
Just before you sleep, we went through again about the good and bad news, like what if there was no bad news? or good news? I gave some example of good news like, finishing your homework fast in the student care, getting good grades, getting a compliment from your teacher… If there was no bad news, then it’s fine. It was a nice father and son chat. As it was getting late, I tried to get you to sleep, you had one last bad news for me. You said you didn’t managed to finish your homework in StudentCare because you spend the remaining time talking to your friend. So I asked back, so what should you be doing and your answer is to finish work first. I am so glad that you are showing signs of thinking what the right actions should, hopefully you will follow through. Will continue to monitor your progress…
Happy 7th Birthday Ethan! : Previous