After mentioning this system to my neighbor (who has a 5 and 3 year old) and getting her response of "Why haven't you told me about this before???" coupled with reading my friend, Molly's, blog post about this same subject I figured I might as well write a post about our system. Below are "Charlie's Chores" or a better term might be "Expectations". My friend brought up a good question- Should kids get rewarded for things that you expect them to do? My thought is, yes- at first. Expectations need to be taught (and modeled) at first and after a while you can fade out the reward for said expectation.
The above chores, I think, are appropriate for 3 year olds. Some of these things I know with 100% certainty that Charlie will do no matter what, such as using the toilet to potty. Unfortunately, we are still struggling to teach the expectations of flushing the toilet and washing hands. So, these 3 things are listed separately. I also think it's important to include things on the list that your child will do 100% of the time... they will get a reward for these therefor increasing the chances that they will want a reward for the other things listed.
Below is our $$$ system, ie. beans. I really didn't want to bother with real-life money yet. Seems complicated for a 3 year old to pick up. He sees the beans as his money and that is really what I was aiming for. We use Melissa and Doug paint cups to store our money. (It was something we had lying around that wasn't being used.) The green cup stores the beans, blue is to SAVE, red is to SPEND, and yellow is to GIVE.
The rewards. Occasionally I take Charlie to the Dollar Store and he gets to chose what rewards he will be working towards. By letting it be his choice, I know he actually wants these things and will work to get them. Judging on his enthusiasm for these objects I place a dollar amount on them. All dollar amounts are in 10's. Easier counting, Charlie learns math skills in that he is learning to count by 10's.
Each week he starts off with 5 beans... think of it as his allowance... he gets them no matter what. Every day we go through his chores and we decide as a family how we think he did overall on his chores. (His opinion counts too!) At the end of the week he can decide where his money goes... to spend, to save, or to give. The giving is tricky. I usually require him to put a couple of beans in that cup. But, he seems to have picked up the spending vs. saving. If he want a toy that is 40 beans, but he has 30 then he really will wait to get the toy he really wants. Oh, and also- no taking beans away! Not even for bad behavior.
So, what do we do for good/bad behavior on an everyday basis? We have "Happy Sticks" and "Sad Sticks". If I noticed that Charlie actually flushed the toilet or washed his hands after pottying then he might get a reward stick for this. The best part is, you as the parent, can pick out as many or as few sticks that he can pick from. All sticks being appropriate rewards for that action.
Same goes for Sad Sticks. Sometimes, there just isn't a logical consequence for something that Charlie has done. Such as- yesterday Charlie intentionally peed on a friend at school. (WTH??) We had a discussion about how it's not nice to tee tee on friends, but to drive the point home Charlie had to draw a Sad Stick. (Which happened to be that he didn't get a popsicle... which was the sad stick that I wanted him to get.)
Please share- what's your system??
