New Start

It's the day before school starts and Alicia and I are anxious about how it will go. Last year we blissfully sent Michael off to his first day of full day kindergarten not really knowing what was in store. Oh what we didn't know.

Michael is a great kid; super smart, athletic and loving. He is also, extremely competitive, has a hard time controlling his emotions if things go off plan even a little and his mood is highly regulated by diet. The first part of the kindergarten year was really, really hard for him. He was struggling and we didn't know how to handle it.

We knew he had the mental skills for his class and then some, but we didn't know how we would get past the emotional hurdles. We talked to the teacher and tried to come up with a plan, but she was rigid in her one size fits all approach, so we were on our own.

We started making more protein dense breakfasts, we would take him to school early to run around the track in the hopes of settling him down enough for a good day. Largely these things worked and he had mostly good days, but it was a struggle. He was / is still prone to too many emotional meltdowns and we felt there had to be a better way.

On and off for the last couple of years we have been using a token rewards system, but there were a couple problems with it; one we were not consistent with it.. what actions earned tokens? what actions lost tokens? Sometimes we gave them, sometimes we forgot. Not very good or effective. The second problem with the system was internal to me. I don't want my kids to equate good behavior with getting stuff. I want to teach them why something is important to do and then have do it just because. I don't know at what age that is possible, or if I am just bad at teaching, but it wasn't working, sooo.....

In the last few days Alicia and I decided to double down on the token program. We listed everything out that could earn tokens and we listed everything that would lose tokens, we kept the list relatively short so as to not be confusing and we wanted to be generous with them. Then we assigned a value to the tokens and to other non-material rewards. Finally we sat down with Michael and Jacob and went over the program in detail, really pumping it up. They are excited!

Lastly we decided that I would have a quick meeting every night with the boys right before bedtime where we count how many tokens each boy has, how many they earned that day, how many they lost and what they are saving for. Really want the program to be top of mind for them. After that conversation I will have a short "life lesson" talk to make sure and reinforce that the "getting stuff" is not the most important thing in the world... far from it.

In the next post I will outline exactly how our token system works and in the ones that follow I will chronicle how it is going. I don't pretend to know exactly how things will turn out, but hopefully this diary will provide learning lessons for us.