That exercise thing is interesting to me, but it also worries me a tad. I'd worry that, rather than making a pleasant association with exercise, my kids might begin to associate exercise with punishment and not be inclined to exercise for health and relaxation/recreation as they get older. That'd be my personal hesitation with that approach. When I was teaching, one of our districtwide policies was not to force kids to write as punishment. That was a fairly common penance when I was growing up--to have to write "I will not throw dirt balls on the playground" (or whatever) 50 times on paper or the blackboard--and they now know that that sort of punishment quickly begins to make kids associate negative feelings with writing, which schools have enough trouble encouraging students to do anyway. At home, I used time-outs, restriction of freedoms, removal of privileges and, if necessary, possessions like games/electronics, which did the trick with our son. He liked being able to do what he wanted and play with his stuff, so he generally toed the line if his "things" were at risk of being taken away.

The best kid-raising technique I ever learned as a young parent was the use of choices. I heard a wonderful, widely published pediatrician, Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, talk about this on TV when my boy was just an infant, and it worked wonders when he got to the toddler years. When he began to throw a three-year-old fit or refuse to do something (for us, it was the terrible threes, not twos), we presented him with a choice. "OK, son, you can either sit here and refuse to put your shoes on and we can stay home, or you can put your shoes on and we can go to the park after we run errands." Or, "You can either hold my hand as we cross this parking lot, or we can go right back to the car and not go into the store at all." The choices let him feel in control and didn't give him the option to simply refuse since that didn't occur to him when presented with two fairly easy-to-weigh options. I used that technique on him till he was well up into elementary school and finally figured out what I was up to.

(Fengzi, I see you asked the same question I did above. I started this post and then the phone rang, and so I didn't see that you'd posted the same thing. Sorry!)
birdgirl73 Reviewed by birdgirl73 on . some good advice ! anyone with any good input feel free to add.... my lil bit of parental advice is this , if you put your babies or lil kids to sleep early like at 830 every night , when they get older they will stick to that pattern and leave you in peace if you let your kids stay up with you , after some time you will go crazy cuz you need time by yourself Rating: 5