An Ignoble Experiment: [Parent Hacks] 2 new posts in Parent Hacks

2008/09/05

[Parent Hacks] 2 new posts in Parent Hacks

Hello, ignoble.experiment@arconati.us, and thank you for subscribing to Parent Hacks. Got a hack you'd like to share? Send it to hacks@parenthacks.com, along with your name and Web address (if you'd like us to link to you).

Getting past "no" with a game

I'm in awe of those parents and teachers who manage and motivate kids at the same time -- the ones who have them scrubbing the floors and loving every minute of it because they somehow make it fun. Am I the only one who's too tired to think of yet another way to make chores fun? I like to think I'm a pretty mellow mom, and that I have a decent sense of humor. But when it comes to getting the kids to do stuff, I want them just to do it because I say so. Sometimes, thinking about it more creatively than that is one detail more than I want to manage.

I'm obviously shooting myself in the foot on this one, because we'd all have more fun if we were playing rather than arguing. I really like Regina from Maryland's take on this:

Reading about the reverse psychology hack got me thinking about using what motivates each child. My oldest daughter who is super-competitive can't pass up on any sort of competition. "Go get dressed, please." "No, I don't want to." "It's a race to see which one of us gets dressed first. Ready, set, go!" If I can start the race before she has time to object, she simply cannot resist the urge to compete. This one doesn't work for my youngest daughter, but for whatever reason, she can't resist a conga line. So, whenever she's in the mood to run in the opposite direction from a bath, getting dressed, etc., we simply start singing our conga line music and doing the conga line dance (two sideways steps and two forward steps) and again, like a magnet, she just can't resist. The beauty is that it changes the dynamics from what could have been a battle to a much more enjoyable experience.

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Let potty training kids wash their hands with the bathtub faucet

Leah has saved thousands of parents from back strain with her simple hack:

My 2 year old recently potty trained and is doing great. But she goes so many times during the day and I was getting really tired of lifting her up to wash her hands in the sink (she's still too small for the stepstool to make much of a difference). Then yesterday I realized that she can reach the bathtub faucet pretty easily. So I've started turning that on for her instead so I don't have to break my back quite as many times per day. I still have to lift her up in public bathrooms of course, but it helps a lot for when we're just in our house.