Sunday, March 3, 2013

Postive Peer Pressure

I'm mainly writing this down so that I'll remember it...

This evening after dinner, while Quinn was taking his bath, Wil instructed Aurora to pick up the Duplo that the kids had played with all day. Aurora promptly threw a fit that it was "too much" and that she couldn't hold the bag AND put duplo into it. She continued in this vein for the next 30 minutes, slowly losing privilege after privilege. Nothing budged her. Typical evening, really...unfortunately.

Towards the end of this, Quinn came out of his bath and was dressed. He ran out and picked up a Duplo car to play with it. I told him we were cleaning up and asked him to instead put it away in the Duplo bag. He burst into tears and even as he wailed piteously, he stood up, walked over to the bag, and--still crying--put the car into the bag.

What happened next was amusingly impressive. I thanked Quinn for obeying even though he was upset about it and asked him to go get another Duplo to put in the bag. He perked up and ran to get more. Aurora, who had been watching quietly, suddenly realized she was going to be shown up by her baby brother. She jumped up and started gathering as many Duplo as she could grab. The room was cleaned by both kids within 5 minutes.

We've seen Aurora respond to Quinn in this way before. His willingness to obey in cleaning up has actually vastly improved her willingness to clean up, too. However, this was a very clear example of it. Oddly enough, this competitive spirit only motivates her when it comes to cleaning up. No where else does she seem to feel the need to keep Quinn from besting her. Obviously, we need to be careful in setting up any situations that would create a competition between the kids, so we aren't sure how or if we're going to "use" this. However, I'm pretty sure we'll be making sure the kids clean up TOGETHER from now on. ;)

~Regina

No comments:

Post a Comment