6 Tips for Surviving As a Stay at Home Mom By Erin M Fernandez Choosing to stay home with your children when they are young is a decision that many women make. They forgo career advancements or other achievements to nurture and love their small children, who always grow up too quickly. However, staying …
The Homework Worriers: 13 Ideas for Parents to Help Kids Who Stress About Homework By Kirrilie E Smout As a child psychologist, every week, I meet a “homework worrier”: a child who gets very anxious about getting homework done, and getting it right. Homework Worriers do things like: • Spend excessive amounts …
10 Ways to Boost Your Child’s Self-Esteem By Sharon Henderson Why is your Child’s Self-Esteem so Important? Positive self-esteem is fundamental to a child’s emotional and psychological well-being. It significantly affects their ability to form meaningful relationships, and how successful they are academically and, ultimately, in their chosen career. In this article, we look …
It’s the first Barbie ad ever to feature a boy playing with the doll. The commercial touts the limited edition Moschino Barbie, which originally retailed for $150 at Net-a-porter.com. It may not have shocked everyone, since the response this commercial received was not entirely negative. Infact, it has been applauded by a huge proportion …
10 Simple Lifestyle Changes For Raising Healthy Kids By Nilotpal Maity 1. Limit Television, Computer, and Gaming Time. Kids tend to be addicted to playing video games or watching their favorite shows. They can keep doing so for hours. Therefore, it is important to limit the time they use to do these things. …
A lesbian couple in Utah was denied the adoption of a 1-year-old baby girl. It’s particularly shocking since same-sex marriage was legalized across the country, this summer, which marked as a victory for basic civil rights. But it seems that there will be more battles to fight. April Hoagman and Beckie Peirce are a lesbian couple …
A Los Angeles-based mother, Elisha Wilson Beach, shared a photo of herself breastfeeding her 11-month-old daughter in the bathroom. Would you call it ‘gross’? Well, I wouldn’t! If you’re a hands-on mother and are trying to do ten things at one time, especially if you more than one child, then you’d be pkay and smiling away looking at this …
Kristin Cavallari, 28, is preparing for baby number three while she’s already managing two toddlers which is stressful for any couple. So, how are they going to manage a third one? Cavallari has a strategy, she says she and husband Jay Cutler will keep their marriage strong: therapy — and lots of it. According to PEOPLE, …
Parents are concerned after learning that a gun made it into a second-grade classroom Friday at Ray V. Pottorf Elementary School in Fort Myers. Why is this happening and whatever you do to keep guns from coming into our schools? No answers! Parents are fed up after learning a gun was in a Fort Myers elementary …
Meet Wrinkles, he’s a 65-year-old military veteran and retiree, and he is here to help. For a small fee, he’ll show up at your event, but recently he’s stumbled upon a lucrative side business: disciplining your coulrophobic kid until they’re too terrified to be defiant.
As per The Washington Post, Wrinkles said that he was recently hired by a mother who was fed up with her misbehaving 12-year-old:
“He was scared of clowns and I showed up across the street from him at the bus stop and he just started crying in front of his friends and ran home… His mother called back a few days later and said ‘Thank you!’ Now when he acts bad, she just has to ask him: ‘Do you want Wrinkles to come back?’”
Is Wrinkles a really scary? No, Wrinkles is actually a pretty friendly guy, and he mostly just sees clowning as a way to “have a little bit of fun before.” But there’s a creepy look of him, between his weird red onesie, holes-for-eyes mask and stoic wave. That’s why he’s so effective as a disciplinary tool. As an adult, we see Wrinkles is still pretty terrifying, so you can just imagine what it might feel like to see him wave at you standing with balloons across the street from where you live as a child.
But is it the right way to discipline your child – capitalizing on your child’s fears — in this case, clowns — to “fix” their bad behavior? The fact is, negative reinforcement, while it seems like an easy answer and is undeniably a satisfying choice, is typically a temporary fix. Discipline is usually more effective when you don’t inject serious negativity into it. The reality is that most parents don’t have the patience to keep it up for very long.
But being realistic, you will probably have to use the threat of negative consequences to get your kid get disciplined. However, it may be better to just let those consequences be the natural byproduct of their poor choices. That way, it’s not even really threatening; it’s just a life lesson. If your child refuses to do their homework, they’ll get bad grades. If they get bad grades, they lose their privileges.
Sometimes the threat of that alone is enough to get your kids to self-correct. Sometimes they actually have to experience the horror of not being allowed to use their phone for a week before they get the picture.
However, when that doesn’t work, different time-outs may work, and when those doesn’t work either, Wrinkles may work!
