February 22, 2011

And Sometimes They Just Don't Get It at All

The day after I wrote my glowing post about how wonderful my daughters were during our first outing to the mall, I found myself dealing with another first: The first grounding. What a terrible day it turned out to be.
The day started off normal and nice. The sun was shining. We took a long walk around the neighborhood. When Hubby came home, we decided to take another short walk to enjoy the short-lived "heat wave." Soon after that walk, things went south.
I would love to say my daughters were "over-tired." No. They had energy galore. They were in rare form and an outsider might think we had hopped them up on sugar. They were little terrors.
We started with warnings. Ignored. We started removing privileges. Ignored. We sent them to their rooms. They went and turned it into a game. There were giggles, squeals... clearly not the punishment we intended. Eventually we took away any fun privilege they had anticipated for the following day, including a trip to grandma and grandpa's to ride bikes. That did the trick. Suddenly everyone was sullen, sulky, repenting.
We followed through on the "grounding" and when they asked to do fun things the next day, we had to remind them what it means to be grounded.... and what you should do to make sure it never happens again. 
OK. Let's be realistic. I KNOW it's going to happen again, but hopefully not any time in the near future!

3 comments:

MaryAnne said...

Hopefully they'll remember this lesson for next time!

Unknown said...

Never threaten them with something you couldn't do in a minute. They can figure out what punishment is. Simply separating one child from the others for a set time can be a punishment.

Good for you for following through.

Renae said...

Buba sometimes gets caught up in whatever naughty behavior he just has to do. It's so frustrating when they typical time-out punishment or loss of privilege just doesn't work. One time when I'd completely run out of options, I let Tiny eat a handful of M&Ms and told Buba it was because she was being so good. He flipped out when he realized he wasn't getting any. I felt a little bad, but mostly I was just relieved that he finally put an end to all his shenanigans.

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