Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Hello--I have been absent for quite some time. I am back and want to make a change. I hope that any readers I have will find this change to be positive.

I would like to focus on child rearing, positive forms of discipline, and general parenting advice. I will continue to put inspirational bits and pieces into the blog. But I am finding a lot of young parents that really want practical parenting advice and I feel that I can give some valuable tips to parent, grandparents, caregivers, preschool teachers, etc...

I will take questions from readers and attempt to research and answer specific questions. Until I get some questions I will be posing questions or situations myself and attempt to address a concern that I have observed. I am hoping to get a lot of feed back from readers.

The first situation I would like to address is:

"What do I do when my 3 year old child screams in the house?"

My advice to parents or caregivers of a 3 or 4 year old child that screams a indoors would be the following:
  • first and foremost--model the behavior you want--check yourself and your family members--are you using your "indoor voice"?
  • next, calmly remind the child to use an indoor voice--model the behavior and try to get the child to imitate you
  • the next time the child screams, gently but firmly take the child by the hand--take him/her to the nearest outside door--go outside and ask the child to "make that noise again"
  • say, "good, that is an outdoor noise, please do it again"--continue this until it is not so much fun any more--at least 5 or 6 times
  • then return indoors and say, "We use an inside voice when we are inside the house and an outdoor voice when we are outside the house"
  • repeat each time the child screams--the outdoor experience does not need to be like a punishment--but it is not meant to be "recess" time either--it is just a way of emphasising to the child that you need the loud voice to be used outside only

This usually works very well--especially if it is a bit cold outside and the child is missing out of something he/she wants to do inside. Give this a try and let me know if it works for you.

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