Another natural consequences question

[Vancouver Mommy]

My dd is 5 and for the most part pretty well behaved. There are times though when she will just outright ignore/disobey despite repeated requests. There were several issues at dinner this evening (eating with her hands, swinging around on her chair) and I told her that if I had to speak to her again about behaviour that she wouldn't get a piece of her Halloween candy for her snack. Now I know that this isn't a natural consequence of bad manners, but it came out of my mouth anyway. In the bath she kept putting bath water in her mouth and spitting it at her brother and making this horrible high-pitched sound that was really making it hard for dh to be in the room with her. Request to stop were ignored so I said OK, no candy. She cried and cried (of course). I really dislike that kind of punitive discipline, especially when it isn't really related to the behaviour, but am unsure of what a more reasonable response would be.

[alegna]

Do you have my dd? Much sympathy....

that said... when I'm doing natural consequences the natural consequences for bad manners and being loud is not having company. So we would leave the table leaving her alone and leave the bathroom (and take the fun brother) and leave her alone.

BUT that's often not productive for everyone else. For us 5 was difficult on that front. She just wasn't yet motivated enough to be nice for the sake of being nice It IS getting better now though and yeah, I've totally done the punitive consequence (often taking sweets for the day...) to get her attention.



-Angela

[dogretro]

A few things that come to mind for those specific incidents: At dinner, you can take her food away and excuse her from the table. If she is still hungry, she can eat it later. She could eat before the rest of you or at a separate little table. You could serve her one bite at a time. You could feed her yourself. At bath, if she splashes/spits, you could wash her up immediately & she has to get out right away. Next time, she bathes alone. She could shower w/ one of you instead next time.

What you are looking for are logical consequences. Natural consequences would be things like she spits at her brother, so he spits back at her, or she spins around in her chair, so she falls down. I agree, I do not like to do things that are unrelated to the behaviour. Since candy is food and may be a dessert, it was not too far removed to say no candy after dinner. If she doesn't eat her food, or eat it properly, then no candy afterwards. She has to eat x bites w/ her fork to get candy, etc. Another more related consequence for rude tub time behaviour could be getting washed up quickly & put into jammies and into bed asap, v little interaction from you. Saying that you would love to play & all that, but you are v irritated by the spitting and screeching, so now she needs to go right to bed.

A good trick is to think of every possible thing you could do for a behaviour, even "crazy" ones, and then pick one. There really are lots and lots of possible actions and I find that we tend to get locked into one or two responses and think that is all there is to choose from. The reality is that you can choose to do anything you want & that includes things like dumping her food on the floor, serving peanut butter sandwiches next time, eating standing up, or getting up from the table and starting a dance party. The more you start to brain storm, the more naturally a variety will come to you. Have some fun w/ it & good luck

[OkiMom]

With DD1 if she is using bad table manners I feed her myself. Which means she has to wait between bites for me to eat as well. After about 5 minutes I offer her the opportunity to eat without my help, its worked so far to improve manners. She doesn't like to see food and not be able to eat if shes hungry (sounds mean but its the only thing I find that works and with her she would chew a mouthful and spit it across the table because she thought it was funny)
Bathtime, if she starts acting up bathtime is over. I drain the tub, take her sister and leave. I do give a warning, Ive only had to drain the tub twice, she loves bathtime.

[alegna]

Feeding dd never occurred to me- she'd love it... wouldn't be a deterrent at all.

-Angela

[Cujobunny]

I agree about finding logical consequences.

For us, if one of the kids starts messing around at the table, it means they're done eating, so their plate can get taken away.

Spitting in the bath is rude and not acceptable, so her bath would be over and she would get taken out.

They always get a warning (at least one) about what will happen if the behaviour continues.

I went through a phase of giving my ds more punitive consequences (not letting him play wii) when he went through a biting stage a few months back but he kept saying to me "What does that have to do with anything?" He totally got it and the punishments didn't work anyway so I reverted back to finding the cause of the behaviours and finding a more logical and stress free way to put a stop to them.