I Caught Logan... Being Good

It shames me to admit this but my son Logan, well, he's bad. Okay, not entirely bad, but he can be a real terror. We recently {to my complete horror} had a 6 week stretch of tantrum filled days. We're talking every day at least one, but usually more, melt down was triggered at seemingly random intervals for equally random reasons {or no reason at all...}. And these melt downs, oh, these melt downs. We're not talking whining and crying while grunting and reaching for a toy. I'm talking about kicking, screaming, throwing, hitting, headbutting extremely hard objects, so on, and such forth for 45 minutes or more. This whole bit had Logan and I completely exhausted. When it seemed like nothing was ever going to make it stop I doubted myself, I doubted his health, and I feared for our sanity.

I can now proudly say that we have been velociraptor incident free for 3 days. (in this metaphor Logan is the velociraptor and his tantrum is the incident, just FYI) I doubt we're in the clear but I finally feel like maybe, possible, I might have perhaps done some little bitty thing right. (But if you have any temper-tantrum stopping tips I'm still all ears).

From the original post at
wolfelicious.blogspot.com

This post isn't supposed to be all about how to dissect your child's actions to find a root cause and redirect an unwelcome behavior. However, I do want to tell you that it took more than looking at how the temper-tantrums themselves were handled. Now, how you react to your child's bad behavior is important, but I had to go beyond that. I evaluated his schedule, his diet, his other caretakers, and ect. There has been more than one change in our lives to get us pointed back in the right direction.

As we enjoyed out first 'good' day in several weeks I wanted to celebrate his good behavior! He was picking up his toys, listening, clearing his plate, and above all not having any fits {yet}!

I went through my board on Pinterest titled "For Logan" looking to get inspired. I was really just looking for a new fun activity we could enjoy that day but instead I got inspired to create this cute little way to incorporate positive reinforcement in our daily routine.

 Every time we catch Logan being good he gets to put a pom-pom in his jar. I let him put one in for the last two nights at bed time for having tantrum-free days. He shouts "Whoa!" and claps for himself, he knows this little action is a reward. I don't think he cares much that we're going to the Zoo when it's full, he's just tickled that he gets to pick his own pom-pom and put it in his jar.

Our ' Logan got caught... being good jar' is an old Yankee candle jar. I used a trick Jamie shared months ago about saving your old candle jars (see that post here). I printed my label on plain copy paper, mod-podged it on, and decorated it with help from my assisstant, Logan.

If any of our readers have any creative tips for encouraging positive behavior and eliminating bad behavior please, please, please share them here! If you want to talk more about how I evaluated Logan's behavior and the changes we made to help alleviate his tantrums I'm open to sharing my experiences. Just shoot me an email or leave a comment :)

Thanks for reading!