Disciplinary Win!

Effective discipline is a challenge for every family, but I live in a very small house with five extremely active, intelligent little girls. This complicates matters greatly, for reasons that should be self-evident. The biggest issue, naturally, is that it is quite literally impossible to isolate more than one of them at a time. If just one of them gets in trouble, it's easy enough to find a place to let her cool down.

But when is it ever just one of them? So we've had to get creative.

To start with, let me make this clear: violence rarely works on little girls. At one point, being out of other ideas, we tried spanking in various scenarios: warning before hand, surprise attack, last resort, etc. Only once did it really work: when #2 was smothering then-infant #3 with a pillow. She's never done that again. Every other time, the bad behavior just escalated.


So we fell back on the time-honored standard of time-out. That worked for a while, but then the girls realized that nothing was actually keeping them from just getting up and goofing off again. There is no such thing as order in a crowd of small females. And how do we avoid a crowd in a house this small?

We improved things for a while by moving time-out from a corner or a bed to a stool. The height kept them in place, and we could put several stools around the room at sufficient distances to avoid aerial battles between warring tribes. The problem with that was, again, small house. The couldn't reach each other from the stools, but they could reach other furniture, walls (with things hanging on them) bookshelves, the alarm system control panel, the water cooler, or the kitchen counter. Any or all of those are easily enough distraction for a hyperactive little girl wanting to avoid an attitude adjustment.

Plus it clogged up our limited walkways, so they were always ambushing unsuspecting passers by in fits of temper.

Well, last night we may have found the answer: Blindfolds!

That's right, blindfolds. We were having a particularly difficult bedtime with a 2 and 4 year old who just wouldn't calm down. I'm sure all you parents know the drill. Misbehavior was rampant: the hunt for breakable rules was in full swing despite repeated warnings and physical relocations to their respective beds.

So out came the stools. Within five seconds one had tipped over on top of not only its occupant, but also an inconveniently located one year old, bruising one and hurting the other. From then it was a banshee screaming contest loud enough to wake the dead.

Just as I was at the point of despair, I had a brainwave and, grabbing a small blanket and a pillowcase, quickly rolled them up and tied one around each little screaming head.

The result: instant behavior modification. True, one changed from shrieking to wailing, but the other went silent. And more miraculous, stayed that way. The wailer also got the point: Daddy was serious about it being way past bedtime. It took her all of a minute with the blindfold on before she was ready to got to bed and stay there quietly until she fell asleep. The other took a little longer to agree, but in the interim she merely sat like a statue, pondering (I can only hope) exactly what she'd done to get into that situation.

Now, it's possible this was only effective because of its shock value, but I'm hoping we can make it work. We don't want to be cruel, but I'm hoping that by removing visual distractions we can once again make time-out a place where your only viable option is to sit, think, and listen.