following through your threats!!

A friend once advised me to be very careful what you threaten to do if a child continues a certain behaviour, because you need to be fully prepared to follow it through. For example, if having driven for three hours to get to a friend’s house where you are staying for the night, then unpacked all your stuff and sorted everyone sleeping arrangements and settled down for a chat with your friends, you then say to your child (who is being a bit of a pain, having been stuck in the car for three hours previously) “If you do that again, then we’ll have to go home!” Just be aware, that if they do it again, you either need to pack everything back up and drive the three hours back home, or you need to not follow through your threat, therefore giving the child the idea that it doesn’t matter if they continue doing something because you don’t mean what you say anyway. In this situation, it might be prudent to use a threat such as “if you do that again, you’ll have to go and sit on the step, or in another room for X amount of minutes” I think this has caught me out on a couple of occasions in the past, so I do try to think carefully before I issue an ultimatum, although sometimes I can feel myself regretting the words as they are coming out of my mouth in a cross moment!

This happened to me on Friday. Abbie was due to go to a friend’s house to play in the morning. However, before she went I wanted all the girls to have a bath, as Rob and I were going away for the night at the weekend, and I wanted to get the usual Sunday night bath out of the way on Friday so we wouldn’t have to come back to it on Sunday (not sure if that actually works, as they were grubby again by Sunday, but still) So anyway, Abbie is adamant that she is not going to go in the bath, and I hear the threat “If you don’t go in the bath and have your hair washed then you’re not going to your friends house” coming out of my mouth before I can stop it (I really want the visit to the friend’s to go ahead, as it would be so much easier to get beds ready and things sorted for the weekend if she does go). So now it’s out there.....she’s still refusing to go in the bath and I am faced with the prospect of phoning my friend to say that she can’t come (and therefore disappointed her little friend in the process and making my morning harder). All the others have now been in the bath, so now it’s just Abbie, who is hiding behind the sofa in a strop. I decided to go for one last tack, before I cancel the play date. I act like I don’t know that she is behind the sofa and I make a ‘pretend’ phone call (that I know she can hear) to her friend’s Mum, saying something like, “Oh Hi, I’m not sure if Abbie will be able to come today as she won’t go in the bath, listen... I’ll get back to you in a minute, if she goes in, then I’ll bring her round in a bit, but if she doesn’t then I afraid she won’t be coming,...okay, thanks, bye” (I am frantically hoping the ‘phone call’ was enough to clinch it!) Fortunately for all involved, she is up like a shot after I’ve ‘hung-up’ the phone and gone back upstairs, and she has a bath without a single murmur of fuss! (I breathe a huge sigh of relief!) When I drop her at her friend’s house, I find the same battle has been raging there too, her friends Mum had threatened that if her little girl didn’t go in the shower and have her hair washed, then Abbie wouldn’t have been allowed to go and play!! It seems we all have these constant battles and play these mind games to achieve what we need to!