The play kitchen/being good for one month bribe - while bribes are great (I use them) if you make it too unattainable, it could backfire.
I posted at length on someone else's thread on what rules you need to follow, with Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) kids and discipline. I'm not saying your daughter has Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD), but one feature I suspect she hasin common is her need to control her environment, perhaps because her past abuse is related to her NOT having control, having someone else force their control over her.
So a couple of important discipline rules -
1) Don't try to discipline behaviour that is outside her control. THis also relates to behaviour that can be maintained for short intervals only; don't try to force long-term compliance of new social skills. For example, some kids can hold it together at school (it's a strian, but they are highly motivated to do it) but know that when they come home, they can relax. And when they relax, everything goes to pieces. Even easy child kids do this when they first start school - they come home really tired, often so tired they are easily upset. And if you then try to enrofce too tight discipline on a tired kid, you're likely to have fights. So we modificed how we handled our kids when they were likely to be tired, and kept our expectations higher for times when they were able to maintain their focus. A kid starting school - I'd have dinner available early, often I'd feed the kid with dinner-like food as soon as he/she got home from school, because often the child was likely to be too sleepy to eat, if we waited until family dinner time. We didn't need to do this for too long, it depended on the child and how they coped.
2) Discipline with positive motivation, not negative. This also means to try to express things in a positive way, avoiding "don't". For example, avoid saying, "Donna, don't hit Bobby on the head with your shoe, it's not kind." Instead, say, "Donna, please put your shoe back on and come over here to me." You give an instruction that is a positive instruction that also stops the undesirable activity. You then remove the child (under his/her own steam if possible) and if you still need to, you say, "I'm glad you came over to me. I want you to do X for me. And I want you to be kind to Bobby."
3) Break up tasks. This also means that for a BIG reward, break up the required behaviour into manageable steps. Give her a voucher for a certain period of good behaviour. Vouchers once given, may not be taken away. If you ask her to behave for an hour for a voucher, and she beahves, and you give her a voucher, and she then (once given the voucher) turns into a hissing, spitting banshee, DO NOT TAKE AWAY THE VOUCHER. While she is misbehaving, she is not earning any more vouchers.
You can also escalate rewards, if she is smart enough to understand this. it is asclose as you can get, to taking away vouchers. What you do is say, "you get one voucher for one hour's good behaviour, but for a second consecutive hour, you get another TWO vouchers. If you misbehave, the closk resets and goes back to one voucher for the first hour again." A very young child still not good at this level of maths, perhaps shouldn't use such a more complex reward system. But if she misbehaves, simply say, "When you start behaving again, the clock canstart again on you earning another voucher. You can cash in vouchers for different things (have a reward chart, if you can try to reward with non-material things such as reading a book together of her choice, or playing a caerd game with her - her choice again). If you want to use the expensive toy routine, especially if it's one you know she wants, then work out how much you want each voucher to be worth, then divide the cost of the toy by that value to give her the number of vouchers she must earn before she can get the toy. DO NOT DEVALUE THE VOUCHERS so you do need to get it right to begin with.
We use a similar point system in our house, but I'm about to modify the reward system (I use it for schoolwork with difficult child 3) to include half-points. We're not diluting it in any way, simply halving the requirement and at the same time halving the points needed. It still must balance, but lately he's not been able to achieve his previous standard, so I'm trying to make it attainable again.
As for your husband browsing the site - mine does this, at first he was just lurking to see what I was writing because we would then talk about it when he got home. But increasingly, he checks out a lot more and has joined the site in his own name.
Something to watch, it's the way the site works - if your husband uses your long-in to browse, then anything he reads that you haven't, will register as 'read' and you might miss out on an update. For example I might start a thread and be on the lookout for any further replies; but if husband were also lurking using my log-in, I might open it up, not see the link highlighted as having a new reply, and when I found I was missing out like this I asked husband to log in as himself. It's a little thing, it all depends on how you will want to use the site.
Also, husband & I have a good relationship with great communication. Despite this, we found our communication has improved even more, yet we hadn't thought it possible. All because he lurks here often.
Marg
