Somewhere along the road of learning to discipline our kids, we've stumbled across the 3 count warning. The child is given a directive...the child (of course) ignores the directive...the parent starts counting to three...the child kicks into gear before three is reached...or a time out/appropriate consequence is given. This is simple. It's proven to be very useful in our household, and I'm so glad for the times when Mia obeys accordingly.
However, I worry about what her counting skills will be like. Since I hate hate having to punish the girl, I've started drawing out the counting process. ONE, TWO, TWO AND A HALF...
That's right - in order to prolong the space before I actually reach three, I've added a stalling fraction. This happens now nearly every time I count out her warning. On occasion, I've been known to throw in some random quarters too. Those are usually the times when her sister has just fallen asleep, and I'm scrambling to avoid a screaming fit in time out.
The sane, logical part of me wonders why I don't just up the cut-off number to four. Since that's basically the number of seconds she has before it's T-O time.
But that feels like surrender. That feels like wimpiness. That feels like...
A lame, passive attempt at discipline.
And lame pacifism just isn't me. No sir. I'm one tough mother.
Sometimes I might count to two and a half a million times a day, but since I'm tough about it and keep my word at the end of the..............
Oh, never mind.
I'm just a lame pacifist, trying to keep my boat afloat on these choppy waters of discipline.
And two and a half is my flotation device. But I think it has a hole, leaking valuable air during the middle of the storm.
(By the way, spell check had to correct the word discipline for me every single time in this post. If I can't even SPELL the stupid word, how can I implement it? Deep questions....)
We do the 1 - 2 - 3 all the time. For a while it worked WONDERS. Now we tend to do the same thing as you do. We want them to do what we want, but we don't REALLY want to have to punish them. So very true.
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