Punishment and Chores

New rules have been instigated at the Jacobson house recently. Due to the dramatic increase in injury inducing physical encounters between my children, I decided that the timeouts I was administering before were in effective, and new tactics were needed. Recognizing that my children have been better able to retain lessons in general when they are of a more physical nature, I decided to give a chore to the person who did the hurting. As a result, my house has been much cleaner. :) At first I was worried that this would have a negative impact on their view of doing chores in general, (as in associating chores as a punishment) but this has not been the case as of yet. We'll check back in 20 years when they start blaming me for my bad parenting. I haven given up on chore charts and incentives because I can't keep up with them and the chores become all about the reward ("I don't really want the money/candy/activity that much so I'm choosing not to do the chores" is not acceptable behavior to me. Chores get done because they need to get done, so get off your bum and do the work!) and I often would see chore charts incomplete for days and my positive reinforcement would go down the drain and I would resort back to yelling, crying, throwing tantrums etc. As a result we've kind of moved into doing chores on a need basis, such as "Your room needs cleaning, go do it. The living room needs to be picked up, everyone help. The dishwasher needs unloading, go do it." I want to start Saturday chores soon, where there are expected weekly chores, but that would require us to not have to go anywhere on Saturdays more often....which has been the case way to often lately. It's not a perfect system, but it's working fairly well now. But the punishment with chores has had an unexpected side effect. They KNOW the punishment is a chore when they hurt someone, and so when I assign the chore they stomp off and go do it, almost always with no whining! The other benefit is that when I assign chores for them to do when things need to get done, they are starting to pull together faster, work together a bit better, and the work gets done sooner. This is not every time, but the trend is on the rise. So a cleaner house, less whining, and a faster start to finish time means a win, win, win situation for me! .........knock on wood.

He doesn't have to do chores, and rarely gets punished, so I thought I would add some pictures of his cute fatness.