Are you going on a family vacation this summer? Sometimes the thought of traveling with small children can scare the starch out of you, but a little advanced planning can really help everyone have more fun.
So here’s a trick I tried that really worked when my family went to Alaska. I made a pretend passport for each of my children out of old scrapbook paper. Every single page of the passport had a different good behavior or attribute I wanted to encourage:
- Kind
- Appreciative
- Encouraging
- Begins in a friendly way
- Thinks about the other person’s point of view
- Calls people by name
- Gets dressed by yourself
- Chews with your mouth closed
- Puts napkin in your lap
- Plays with your brother/sister nicely
My goal was to “catch my kids being good” as much as possible and reward them with a sticker in their book. Then, if they had ten new stickers by the end of the day, I let them watch a bit of television before bed or play with the Kindle Fire.
The passports were small enough to keep in my purse or pocket. I also brought them with us to dinner every night.
The only real drawback to this system was that I kept getting ladybug stickers all over me and discovering them at inopportune times.
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