Agreements

The Agreements tool card this week helped me realize how often my husband and I make the agreements and then willingly or unwillingly have our boys “agree.” I then will follow up by saying, “What was our agreement?” Although, it was never their idea to begin with. What I should have said was, “that wasn’t what I told you, or if you don’t listen/obey then___________.”

It’s embarrassing how often I can forget that the most important concept/tool of Positive Discipline is to have your children involved. The more you have your children involved with the PD tools, the more likely they will follow through—especially when it comes to agreements.

The agreements tools card is yet another reminder of how important Family Meetings are. This provides the perfect opportunity to practice Agreements.

This week I had my boys practicing coming up with agreements/solutions.

Anytime they had a “disagreement” I would kindly say, “I have faith in you both that you are great communicators and you both are great at negotiating, therefore, I encourage you to work it out through a mutual agreement.”

A valuable lesson that I learned is that nobody is able or willing to come up with an agreement during the time of conflict—duh!

Naturally, it was my job to step in and validate their feelings, and then mostly do a lot of distracting and redirecting. Once everyone was calm and out of the situation, that was the time to sit down and focus on agreements that were respectful and mutual for everyone.