Family Meeting

OH my kids...I love them dearly, but lately they are pushing every single one of my buttons. Owen is at that three and a half to four year old stage where they test every boundary. Olivia, oh my dear Olivia. She is fabulous for everyone else, but at home she pushes the limits and fights constantly with her brother. Individually I can handle them, but the two of them fighting all the time was getting to be too much. I love to read so I picked up a book for some advice. I read, The Secrets of Happy Families by Bruce Feiler.

I liked the book. It was informative and humorous at the same time. There were some tips I will definitely be using and some that won't work for our family, but overall I found it helpful. One tip from the book that I was anxious to get in place was the "family meeting." He talks about using a family meeting to talk about what has gone well in your week, not well, and what you will work on for the next week.

Sunday we had our first family meeting. It could have gone worse...it could also have gone a bit better. Owen has the attention span of an ant is still a little on the young side to sit for an extended period of time and listen to things he doesn't care about. Olivia did great I thought, but even she seemed to be spacing off a bit at the end. I guess I need to make it shorter and I think that it will be as their was some explaining this time to start the meeting.

We came up with a loooong list of things that we needed to work on, but in the end you choose two things for the week. You make the list, choose the two things and come up with consequences all as a family. So they essentially choose their own punishment which was kind of fun! I think they are harder on themselves than we would be on them!

This week they chose to work on screaming, Olivia has a piercing scream that she likes to let out sometimes just to annoy us and it works, so hopefully we are going to curb that this week along with yelling at each other. Secondly they are working on using their words when arguing instead of their hands. If they do one of these things during the day, Olivia gets an extra chore (and not a fun one. Wait, are there fun chores??) and Owen gets a timeout (as opposed to the spankings they wanted?? pretty sure they weren't thinking that through! haha!). If they go all day without doing either of those things, they will get to pick from the prize bucket. The prize bucket is simply a bin filled with stuff from the dollar store.

Can you guess who's is who's?

 

Results from day 1...Olivia rocked this day. Amazingly! I had no high hopes because they are super overtired from our weekend and that usually means terrible behavior, but she did awesome! Owen, did not get to choose from the prize bucket, but overall didn't have a terrible day. With her making good choices it made him do a lot better too. But one time he got upset with her and hit her while yelling at her...double whammy...I think he learned a good lesson tonight though when she got to pick from the bin and he didn't, so we shall see how tomorrow goes. I will keep you updated on how this family meeting and the consequences and reward system works out for us.