Frog sitting

I’ve discovered a new parenting tactic. Like many of my favorite tactics it happened on the spur of the moment. I came home from the trip to my brother’s house with a sense that I need to be doing a better job of making my kids accountable for their own choices. I also need to be doing a better job of requiring them to help make our home a nice place to be.

So Sunday night after our three hour car trip, the kids were showing me brownian motion in action and I needed a way to quell them enough for them to pay attention to me. If you can control the hands and feet of kids it is very difficult for them to move the rest, so I said in a loud voice. “Sit down and put your hands on your feet.” The novelty of this command was such that they did it instantly. Quiet. Motionless. It was amazing. I then informed them that this position was called the frog sit. (I’ve no idea where I pulled the name from) And if they didn’t follow my next instructions or got distracted, they would have to frog sit for 3 minutes to think about not getting distracted. I then ordered them into their pajamas. They ran upstairs and did it.

It works really really well on Kiki and Link. Kiki has yet to have to frog sit. Link has had two sessions because of distractions. It doesn’t work so well on Gleek. I have to stand right over her to keep her frog sitting which is time consuming. The true art of parenting is applying consequences to your kids which don’t punish you even worse than the kids. Patches is too young for frog sitting to even begin to work.

I figure the consequences of frog sitting only apply during the brief periods of the day when I’m giving multiple instructions to multiple kids and I need them to keep themselves on task. Times like bedtime or chore time. Hopefully it’ll keep on working. If it doesn’t I’ll have to get creative AGAIN.