Latest / The Family Teams Podcast / Ep. 344 | Why You Need a Correction System For 4-10 Year Olds

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Ep. 344 | Why You Need a Correction System For 4-10 Year Olds · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:04
  What's up, guys? Welcome back to the 5-Minute Fatherhood segment of the Family Teams podcast. Jeff and Eric want to chat to you guys a little bit about why you need a correction system for kids, especially around the ages of 4 to 10. And I wanted, Jeff, you to tease out a little bit of what you guys do, but I wanted just from a big-picture perspective, most of us when we are in the process of training our children, we tend to have a discipline system.
• 0:30
  system. Like in other words, we will create a sort of certain things that will cause us to discipline our kids, and there's different obviously ways of doing that, but many parents have thought through that. And then another system that a lot of us also have is a reward system, which is also really helpful.
• 0:48
  something that we do for the children when they're in the midst of being trained and they are achieving something. We want to reward that as a way of really helping them, just stretching them, not in a way to create a performance culture in the family, but to really try to understand and help our kids. And this is especially in these younger ages, like I said, four, five, six, seven.
• 1:08
  when they are really trying to figure out why should I try to be trained in this area or sort of listen to you and get kind of in a good habit going, rewards are helpful. But what we always find is that people rarely have a correction system.
• 1:27
  And these typically require you to really have thought through what is something really small that you can either give or take away that isn't going to create a big conversation or a massive emotional breakdown, right? But it's something that would be like, oh, yeah, that...
• 1:44
  That sort of pinged them in a way that they could really receive that, hey, that's not what we're looking for. Oh, no, that's it. That's what we look for. So we do a thing called the marble system. We've tried that. And, you know, giving a marble when they've done something that is we're in the midst of training them around, taking a marble away if they fail to do that, try to do that in a way that's really simple and easy and not emotional or massive, like a discipline. But that's one way to think about it is something small you can take away. How have you guys thought about this one?
• 2:14
  Yeah, exactly the same thing. I mean, I think it's just a ton of repetition. You know what I mean? You kind of have to always have your game face on every day, I think, to be prepared for it. But it's better in the long term to correct rather than only discipline. Yeah, we've done things like Alyssa does a good job with like stickers. And again, you have to pay attention to who is incentivized by it and what are they incentivized by, right? Because we almost have to learn a little bit of a new one for each kid.
• 2:36
  because you want it to be like, again, the thing that they kind of are longing for, delay gratification on that front. And then on the more like, you know, not painful, but just like the prick of like, oh, we don't love that. One thing that's worked for us is we kind of just have them – I mean we don't call it a timeout and it's really not a timeout because we don't have them go in the room, but just kind of like, hey, just –
• 2:53
  sit down for a second because because when it's something more combative that we're trying to correct but it's not super aggressive you know i mean just energy or whatever we should kind of like just take a pause like sit on the stair for like one minute you know i mean and they don't love that but it's also nothing really dramatic or anything like that and i like it because it actually gets gets an emotional reset and a lot of those corrections for us are in that space so yeah again you just have to find like what's something that's very small not dramatic but um just enough where they go like oh i don't enjoy this you know
• 3:19
  Yes. Yeah. And this comes up a lot because I don't know if you guys, if you've seen this, Jeff, but I would say the number one question we get from dads about like behavior is whining. Yeah. It's like, how do I stop my kids from whining? They're like, I get when they're like in totally open rebellion, they're lying or, you know, I've got, I've got things for that.
• 3:37
  But it's really these little annoying habits that kids have that if you don't have a correction system, you don't really feel like dealing with it because they're whining. You're like, do I really want to discipline them? Do I really want to go through that? They whine like all the time. And so if you have a correction system, you could curb that. Like you can really signal to your child. But yeah, how would you think about using it for something like whining? Yeah.
• 4:00
  That's exactly what I would use it for. I think for exactly that reason, you want it to be things where it's exactly what you said, where you don't feel like you want like this head on battle, you know what I mean? Or where you know that it's going to maybe with a kid with a stronger personality going to ratchet it up more. And so, yeah, I think it's exactly that. And we're honestly going to that right now where it's like one of our kids is just like, oh man, like every, every two seconds, you know what I mean? And so there's a part of it that's just like be consistent and then you, it'll actually kind of, you know, tends to go away if you're consistent after six months or whatever, but it still takes some, some effort.
• 4:28
  Yeah. These can be some of the really hard parts of parenting. One of the things I really think is important is that fathers need to love being fathers. And so it's really good to have things that you can really consistently apply that'll help train your kids out of annoying habits so that you can engage with them more. So obviously we want to have resilience as dads. We want to give grace to our kids, but also we need to have some tools to help them get out of bad habits so
• 4:52
  feel more and more free to do that in ways that aren't, isn't going to drive us crazy, their siblings crazy, their mom crazy. So, uh, so these are all things that could be super helpful in, in that effort.