Last night I had an errand to run. I drove a few minutes to a house in town and knocked on the door. A little girl answered and a scowl appeared on her face. She demanded, “Why are you here?”
You can imagine that was not the greeting I was expecting — especially since I was at my friend, Michele’s, and the child was my daughter.
I said, “Dimples, that is not a respectful or kind way to greet me. Let’s shut the door and you can try that again.”
I pulled the door shut, stepped back on the porch, paused, and then knocked again.
This time I was greeted with a cool, “Hello,” but it was a big improvement. I’m not opposed to setting the bar low when I know that striving for more may make a small situation develop into a big, ugly scene.
I put a big smile on my face and playfully said, “Hi Dimples! How was your day? Did you have a good dinner?”
Later as I talked with Michele, I relayed the incident to her and she shook her head. As we were grabbing our things to go, she cheerfully said, “Hey Dimples, let’s practice giving your Mom a really good greeting.” Dimples looked up in surprise — even Aunt Michele knew and now she wanted a re-do too! But Michele playfully encouraged her and I stepped out the door again. This time when I knocked, Dimples met me with a big, silly smile and an exaggerated greeting. We all laughed.
It’s important not to come down with a sledge hammer on small incidents, but it is just as important that we don’t ignore them either. Let’s set the standard we expect, especially when it comes to respect. The bar may need to be low, but we can slowly move it up and keep believing our children are capable of more.
This is what Dr. Purvis has to say about re-do’s,
By actively replacing misbehavior with correct behavior in your child’s memory banks, you can help the child encode competency. A re-do “erases” the muscle memory of the failed behavior and gives the child the physcial and emotional experience of substituting a successsful one in its place.
And this quote is extremely appropriate,
A re-do can be as simple or complex as needed. As many doors as it took your child to go off course, that’s how many you have to revisit and correct each false step. The Connected Child p. 98
1 comment:
We do this with out kids ALL THE TIME. It's a great way to reinforce the expected behavior without dishing out discipline or dragging out consequences (both still done when necessary). You can apply these principles in so many ways! We do it most often with how they address each other, or even in more practical forms like how you shut a door.
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