If you are tired of the bickering about whose turn it is, or who gets to sit in the preferred spot on the sofa- here is your solution!
Liz, mom of 3, a client of mine and a member of my Facebook group, shared the best parenting hack ever: The Kid of the Day.
(watch my interview with Liz in my Peaceful Parenting Facebook group)
When her children were little, they all wanted to sit in a particular chair at the table. Liz thought back to her childhood and how her mom managed the issue of who got to sit in the front seat (remember those days?!): “My mom said, ‘you guys will have certain days and that’ll be the end of it.’” It worked.
Liz wondered if she “could take that and make certain days that the kids sit in the chair but expand on it and make it so that they felt special on that day. So that became The Kid of the Day.” Each of her 3 children has 2 days (and her husband has the seventh day!)
What privileges does Liz’s Kid of the Day get? They get to sit wherever they want, run errands with mom, help with dinner (a treat in Liz’s house!), and make all the decisions for the day. The KOTD hack even solves toy arguments:
“If somebody said ‘I want to play with that toy first,’ and the other one said ‘I want to play with the toy!’- I would say, ‘Who’s The Kid of the Day?’ And they would say, ‘Oh, you’re the kid of the day, I’ll go after you.'”
What else could The Kid of the Day decide?
I’m imagining in my house the KOTD doesn’t have to walk the dog, and maybe the KOTD gets to decide the movie for family movie night. Maybe the KOTD gets to use the computer in my office instead of the Chromebook for homework. In your house maybe it’s who gets (or doesn’t have to take) first bath. So many possibilities!
How amazing is The Kid of the Day? Do you have any great hacks? Share them in the comments or hop on over to my Peaceful Parenting Facebook group. We need all the help we can get!
Sarah Rosensweet is a certified peaceful parenting coach, speaker, and educator. She lives in Toronto with her husband and three big kids (ages 15, 18, and 21). Peaceful parenting is a non-punitive, connection-based approach that uses firm limits with lots of empathy. Sarah works one-on-one virtually with parents all over the world to help them go from frustrated and overwhelmed to, “We’ve got this!”
Read more at: www.sarahrosensweet.com
![As parents, we all face challenges, but what happens when traditional parenting approaches don’t work?
That’s why my client during this call, Samantha, is actively transitioning to a Peaceful Parenting approach.
We’re talking through how those challenges can feel even more intense when your child is more sensitive and needs additional attention and understanding.
Join us to discover major tips for a more peaceful parenting journey.
Go to https://link.chtbl.com/Z_YOP4jb to listen to this episode now, and share it with a friend you know needs to hear it too.
[ID: Photo of child and parent arguing on a blue background. Audiogram reads, “Yeah. The fact that he brought it up again tells me that he’s got some shame around it and feeling bad about it. So we don’t need to bring it up in a corrective way. I’m going to exaggerate for the purposes here, but, you know, yesterday when you bit me, biting is not okay. We don’t bite in our house. We don’t want to do any of that. He already knows that, right? There’s no information gap where he thinks biting is okay. So the healing that has to happen is around he needs to feel like, back to the beginning when we started talking, he needs to feel like you still think he’s a good person and that’s why he brought it up, because he feels bad about it. So you can say to him and he says, oh, what did he say again? Remember yesterday when I bit you? Yeah. And he said, I’m a bad boy. So you can say there’s no such thing as bad boys. Mhmm, that is, yeah. They’re only boys who sometimes are having a hard time.”]
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