Rewarding your child for a job well done

When to give an allowance to a young child depends very much on when the child is actually able to understand the value of money and is starting to become responsible. Yet a child in a candy store knows money will buy sweets. A small allowance once a week to your child can start as early as three when you start to negotiate with the child to pick up his slippers or put away his toys. You can buy a money box and let the child start to save. It teaches responsibility and management skills.

Siblings

Children from the age of two understand what you say. If there are other siblings, they learn from one another and soon the sibling will also help pick up things. For an older child of five you can give a dollar a week if he cleans his room and an extra dollar if he washes the dishes and sweeps up the crumbs in the kitchen. Children like to be helpful; it makes them feel good. For a pre teen who helps you with cleaning the yard and vacuuming the carpets, you can give more. He has friends and he does not want to appear different from them.

Rewards and punishment

Rewarding your child does not necessarily mean you give money all the time. You may promise them a movie on Saturday afternoon if they help with small chores, or take them to the library or the park and play ball or Frisbee. Kids need to be outside a good part of the day to run off their steam. They also need Vitamin D from the sun. Time out for bad behavior is becoming old fashioned when a child needs to be reprimanded as they can play computer games in the room and instead of a punishment it will be a luxury.

Incentives to save

To make them save their money for Christmas gifts you can start talking to them in July so they have enough time to build up their funds. Of course if you give fifty cents to one child you cannot give a dollar to the other one if they are all around the same age. You don’t want to be unfair as children hold grudges if there is favoritism.

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Telling your four year old child that daddy is going to war

Every child will react differently to the news that his father is going to war, and while he does not really understand what war and deployment means except for scraps of conversations he has overheard, he will be fearful and his immediate concern will be what will happen to him.


Children react differently to change. Some take to it easily and there is hardly any change in his life, and others will react with apprehension and fear. His father might get hurt. His mother might also go away. His days and nights will have him fretting until his father comes back. He will also conjure up all kinds of fearful situations of his father at war.


As a mother your first concern should be the welfare of the child, and to have no big changes in his life. Kids love routine. They like the fact that there is stability in the home and that things happen as usual. He must still go to school and have his playtime with his friends. The more routine the home front, the better for kids.


One of the things you can do is to support him in his activities. If he is an achiever at school, encourage him in what he wants to do. Don’t cancel his soccer practice or baseball tournaments. Your husband will be away for some months and what you do and teach him will serve you if he has a sibling, younger than him who will also learn some things about his father’s work.


Keep in touch with your son through email and bond with him via Skype. The world is a small place today; you can communicate with anyone anywhere – except that his father might not always be where he is supposed to be at any given time as a result of the secrecy of his work. You can also let him create a scrapbook with photographs and little notes. If your husband can call once a week it would also help in that it assures your son that his father will soon be home. Find creative ways to stay connected. When his father returns let the occasion be as normal as possible as he slowly digests that his father’s work is in the military.

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Hatred from the mouths of babes

With all the turmoil in the world and people trying to spread love and goodwill it was with shock that I watched a video on the internet and saw a father teach his young son of seven how to hate. The father stood one side, off camera, and coached his son what to say. The placard in his hand read GOD HATES GAYS AND FAGGOTS. The son was part of a group of the Westboro Baptist Church whose job it was to spread hate. His first words to the interviewer were that he was being taught how to hate faggots and hundreds and hundreds of Jews and that he no longer recognizes his sibling, a young girl of twenty-five because she does not share his beliefs. The baby sister, three years old, told her that she must go and leave the house. The mother agreed with the father and taught his family how to hate.


Instead of playing with kites and running around with a ball in the park, he was part of his father’s contingent to spread hate. How does one deal with this? The parents should be prosecuted for creating unrest in the community, and the children will be the ones who will suffer as adults if their parents don’t stop. Members believe that the Bible is the literal law of God and the penalty for violation is eternal damnation. The reason for doing this is that the United States condones homosexuality, abortion and divorce and that all Americans are going to hell.


The young boy continued and said, “You get destroyed and you get put in hell. Hell is like a burning place where it can never be stopped burning and it can burn millions of people every day.” He also adds that ‘enablers’ of homosexuality, including all citizens of the US are destined for hell. Aside from daily pickets they also accompany their parents across the country and drop in at funerals holding signs against other religions, gays and public figures proclaiming that God hates anyone not in line and praising God for taking lives.


How do you stop this kind of hatred? Whatever good is being one on the one hand is being destroyed by evil on the other hand. The best one can do is to protect one’s family from the scourge of such thinking and to educate one’s children. The father as the head of the house has to direct his family towards love and goodwill and being valuable citizens or we will forever hate.

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