Supernanny @ Work

Have been watching the Supernanny DVDs which a friend at church lent me after hearing about my struggles to discipline Beth.

Just watching the parents in the videos made me emotional. I couldn't believe what terrors some of the little tykes - as young as 2! - were. There were the 24/7 hip-clingers, the parent-beaters, the sibling-stompers, the watch-me-disappear-out-the-door 3 y.o.s...It was incredibly painful, so imagine how desperate the parents themselves must have been to ask Supernanny into their homes.

SN was very consistent about what an effective household needs:

1. A routine that works: Children need structure and variety, so everything must be written down and a time slot assigned - bath, bed, snack, play, meal times.
2. Discipline: holding the child accountable for every instance of unacceptable behaviour by coming down to the child's level, maintaining eye contact and administering the first warning with an explanation of what the child has done wrong, followed by the Naughty Step/Chair/Mat/Room Technique if the child fails to heed the warning.
3. Lavish praise for each time the child obeys you on his own, shows initiative, demonstrates independence.
4. The Roaming Technique for kids with a tendency to run amok in the supermarket/park.
5. The Give-him-some-space Technique for the little one who insists on being stuck to your hip all day.
6. Bedtime technique: how to put your child to bed and get him to stay there. This was a real challenge for some of the parents. One little boy came out of his crib 37 times the first night!

My current issues are lack of STRUCTURE in Beth's day, and lack of consistent ENFORCEMENT of discipline.

So I've been working on those. I did up a roster that starts with Rise&Shine at 7 and ends with Bedtime at 8.30. In between, there are times for Maths, Reading, Chinese, meals, bath, TV, breaks, snacks, play, art&craft.

We started today and right now, we're about 2 hours behind time (:p), but Beth is getting on well with her numbers, and we're both learning patience and perseverance the FUN way. For e.g., her '2' comes out like 'Z', so I told her '2' looks like a swan swimming. She happily produced a line of swans all over the paper. I also made sure to praise her for her efforts and to reward the completion of a page with a Good Work! sticker of her choosing (which the developers of the textbook had kindly provided!).

Just in the last 1/2 hour, she has learnt number sequences, how to join 2 dots with a ruler, how to write tricky numbers like '2', '5', '6', how to count in reverse, how to guess the next number in a double digit sequence by looking at the 2nd digit (e.g. 17 comes before 18 because 7 comes before 8).

This morning, she dragged her feet about washing her face and brushing her teeth. I got down to her level, looked her in the eye and told her she needed to brush her teeth and why. She rolled her eyes, whined, sulked and did everything she could to stall, but after about 4 such attempts she finally nodded when I said she had to brush her teeth NOW, and I walked her to the bathroom. Of course, it would be nice if she'd do the brushing herself (which she's well capable of), but we're working on that too.

This SN stuff WORKS :-)