Parenting tools

Kids are to do what they are told or bedtime is very early

I watched Nigel Latta on television and he was very entertaining and helpful with discipline.

He spoke about setting the microwave timer to get things done and my daughter reacts to that challenge very well. He also spoke about timeout. This involved putting the children in a place they didn’t like or putting a lock on their bedroom door or the laundry and putting them in there. The whole idea is to give you, as the parent, the time to cool down.

However, the idea of Nigel’s that I loved the most, because I had never heard of the idea before, was ‘the ladder of doom and gloom’. This is where a parent draws a ladder and writes times on it. The top rung on the ladder has the normal bedtime, for example 8.00pm. And then each rung under this drops by half-an-hour. The lowest rung on ladder might be 3.00pm. The idea is you say to your child I want your school bag out of the car and your lunchbox emptied and clean. You have five-minutes to do this. This is when the parent sets the timer on the microwave. If the job is done then you praise and the afternoon carries on. However, if the job is not completed in the time the bedtime moves down a rung on the ladder of doom and gloom. Nevertheless, if the child gets so low, he/she is off to bed at 3.00pm. However, on the positive side, the child can do chores to move the bedtime up the ladder again.

I am looking forward to trying ‘the ladder of doom and gloom’ too.

This book is available from MIGHTY APE.

See Nigel in Action in this brief video – you will luv his style!