Fertilizer

This is week one. Do Nothing, Say Nothing. The purpose of this is to see what your kids can do, and how they handle you not doing what you always do. It is also to see how you interfere. And boy do I interfere all. the. time.

This has been a rough week. At first it was met with, "hurray, it a free week!" Free week? What's that? Free as in I can do whatever I want. I can stay up as late as I want. I reminded Sweetie Heart that also meant that I wasn't going to be reminding her of all the things she needed to do. Then she just got scared and discouraged. I had to reminder her that I wasn't going to stop helping or talking to her. I was just going to stop interfering. I theory that is.

Vicki says, " Our children consistently do what works. Parents consistently do what does not work." I, for one, completely agree. She says the way we react to our children's "bad" behavior is fertilizer. And that fertilizer feeds the weed.

For example, let's say you have a child who whines, theoretically of course. Whenever your daughter, I mean child, whines you say, "I can't understand whining" or "Let's use our big girl voices." That all is fertilizer to the weeds. They continue to do what works. They know that when they whine they will get attention. So we need to stop talking and making any contact when our children do those things so as to get them to stop. That is what we want anyway right? That is why we stop and talk to them, so they will stop or start doing something.

Let me just say, I am full of fertilizer. Just plain full of it. I cannot. stop. taking. Needless to say I had a hard time. So did the girls. What did happen is that they went to all ends to get our attention. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn't. I saw somethings that had been gone for awhile. I saw things that have never happened before. Sometimes I held my ground and sometimes I spilled fertilizer everywhere!

I learned that I am getting in the way of my children's learning. I have interfered so much they think they need to come to me for everything. And I mean everything. It gets tiring, but it's my own fault.

Now how to fix it. Watch to Monday night at 9pm Eastern or the replay whenever on momTV.
Here's the link to the blog from last week. If you look down at the comments you'll see my really long one, followed by Vicki telling me to shut my trap, in a kind way of course. But we're BFF's so she can tell me to shut my trap and I won't go cry in the corner.

See you tomorrow night in the momTV chat!