I thought I would give an update on our ticket system that we started a few months ago. As a quick recap, Jackson earns tickets through doing jobs in our house or things I think he needs to do for himself as he gets older. Each ticket is worth 5 minutes, and he can redeem them for any type of ’screen time’ - TV, computer games, movies, playing Gavin’s iPod, etc.
The system has really worked well for him, and has not gotten old. He will save his tickets for a certain goal (although sometimes they burn a hole in his pocket!). And it has totally grown with him as I had hoped from the beginning. He no longer earns tickets for getting himself dressed or wiping himself on the toilet, as those are things I now expect him to do. Here are the things he does get tickets for now:
- when he buckles himself in the car both ways, he will get 1 ticket (I was hoping to ‘retire’ this reward as well, but this is something we still have to push him to do)
- he is learning to take a shower on his own, so when he does he gets 3 tickets (we still have to help him rinse his hair, but he’s only done it 2 times so far, so I’m sure he’ll get the hang of it.)
- unloading the silverware in the dishwasher (usually every other day)
- matching all the socks for me on my laundry days (twice a week)
- clearing and wiping the table after each meal
He still gets a ticket when he cleans up his whole room which is often littered with legos, lite brite pegs, jenga blocks and all of his little cars. He does a great job cleaning, usually. Sometimes he will ask for extra things to do, but I will only allow this if he has actually done all of his chores for the day up to that point. If he whines and complains about clearing the table and sacrifices a ticket, I won’t find an extra job for him to do to earn a different one. But when he has earned all he can, I’ll have him wipe down my kitchen cabinets, dust the base boards, or something like that to earn more.
So, all that to say is that this system has worked great for us so far. He has not watched a TV program since before Christmas, as he much prefers to redeem his tickets for an iPhone game or computer game. But today he has saved up 18 tickets and will watch a movie he got for Christmas that he has only seen once so far, “Cars.” Very exciting!
on 02 Feb 2010 at 3:32 pm 1.Kara Myers said …
Amanda, we are getting ready to impliment a ticket type reward system for Claire too as the attitude and arguing about getting dressed and doing hair, etc each day have just about reached my limit in patience. (And now that Jeremy has gotten to be home more over the last month, we’ve reached his limit too so he’s finally on board.) The disagreement we’ve had so far in our discussion is I think we should start out with giving her a ticket (or whatever we come up with) for each thing on her AM or PM routine list and then as she has success with not whining and complaining and dragging feet consistantly, move to it being an all or nothing thing w/ maybe a little bigger reward (or not). Anyways, my question to you is: how has the “retiring” of chores gone with you guys. Did Jackson just kinda get to a point that even he didn’t expect a tix for such an “easy/baby” task or did you guys have to sit him down and say “you are doing this very well now and you are older so we expect it out of you w/o reward” then end of story or would then you add, “but now we want you to earn a tix for this new task”? I just want to make sure we aren’t setting ourselves up for failure in a few months when we expect more from her but at the same time, I think she’d get very frustrated very quickly if we demanded the whole routine with no attitude from the get-go (especially the AM routine, she is NOT a morning person).
Oh and I LOVE the file folder ideas. I’m getting ready to make some of those myself for when preschool’s out this summer or if we get sent overseas again (becoming a bigger possibility for this spring/summer). I’m trying to see if my mom can laminate everything for me for free at her school or at least I’ll have her use her teacher discount at School Box for me….I totally agree on all that work lasting through more than one kid!!
Thanks, Kara