Friday, May 13, 2016

Firstborn, and the Quest for the Lost Essay

So, Firstborn created a situation in his after-school program... and then proceeded to make a bad choice that exacerbated (I'll have to teach him that word) the situation. On the way to pick up Secondborn, I asked him to explain the situation...

Yeah, it went down almost exactly as the counselor described it. So, Firstborn was set to have no videos and no video games this weekend.

After a certain amount of sobbing (read: a good thirty minutes) and two slices of pizza for dinner, I offered him an alternative: he could write me a ten-sentence essay about what went wrong, what he did wrong, and why it was a problem. If he did that, he could watch videos or play video games this weekend. If you're thinking that I really just wanted him to consider the situation and his own behavior, you'd be entirely right.

He wrote the essay. I specified a minimum of ten lines; he wrote eleven. I required that he explain why his behavior had been a problem (up to and including "now I have to write an essay if I want to play video games") and he did. So he's cleared for video games. But I'm still going to print out his brief essay, and hand it off to the counselor at his after-school program when I pick him up tomorrow.

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