Last eye roll ever

If anybody has been at our house in the last few months you might have seen C6 rolling her eyes. Not pretty, not polite. And in the last month Q5 picked it up and started rolling hers.

I figured out how to extinguish C6's eye rolling ... we've used this before. Everytime she rolled her eyes I'd take away a library book (she can take out 6 books at a time because she is 6 years old). First eye roll in a day ... one library book confiscated. The second time, two. The third time, three. That's all the books. They get kept overnight. But then, if she eye rolls again ... they get kept another day.

Now, she didn't actually ever lose all her books. After the second eye roll in a day she stopped, because three library books being confiscated at a time is a lot. Yikes. So I never had to spell out what happens after 4 eye rolls, which is good, because it seems to be going nuclear at that point.

We have utilized this strategy before ... and it works for C6. Behaviors can rapidly be extinguished.

Q5, however, is another story. Take something away from her and she's likely to go to her room and grab them all and toss them out and say "YOU CAN HAVE THEM ALL, I DON'T WANT THEM!" because she wants to punish us.

So. We had these craft sticks, and made up a wall chart for her, 4 sticks in a little paper pocket for each day of the week. Each stick represented a book/story at bedtime (for the first three) and the 4th was a bonus poem at bedtime. Every eyeroll from her would reduce the sticks (and stories) by one.

Sunday she had two eyerolls, so she was limited to two stories at bedtime. Monday (at the TK parade) she had one eyeroll, which she denied (of course) but C41 caught on camera.





That was the last eyeroll of the week. And since then I haven't seen another eyeroll from either girl.