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The winner for my favorite comment of all time was left by the lovely and talented duo of Emily and Chad on this post, and I hope you’ll all click over and read it. 

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Henry seems to be following suit as one of a long line of mischief makers and talkative distractible students (traits inherited from BOTH parents, I’m afraid).  Each day his teachers report on his classroom behavior by assigning a color according to how well he did.  Options are green (no problems), orange (had to be spoken to more than once about some kind of undesirable behavior), yellow (presumably the student has been very disruptive), or red (the principal had to remove the student from the class).  Henry seems to be getting orange at least once or twice a week these days.  Are we being unreasonable for assigning consequences at home that increase as he gets more orange days?  For example, yesterday he had orange and we did not give him an additional consequence, but today he received orange again (described in his agenda book as being given because he did not stay on task in class – this doesn’t surprise me in the slightest) and we decided to not allow him to ride his bike for a week.  (He recently learned to ride without training wheels and has really been enjoying riding.)  If he gets orange again this week he won’t be allowed to go to movie night at church, something he’s really looking forward to. 

I don’t think we’re being unreasonable at all, but truly, I have zero clue if it’s making any difference.  And I’m definitely not a fan of imposing consequences that don’t work, or of having punishments in effect all the darn time.  I know a family who speak to their children with what I call “high-alert” voices all the time, meaning that they instruct the children to pick up their books with the same sharp, loud, commanding voices that I feel should be reserved for use only when a child is in real serious danger (like they’re about to step in front of a speeding car).  The result of this is that the kids don’t listen to anything, since they’re accustomed to tuning any and all instructions out, with the knowledge that no threats will be followed through with and any consequences will be random and not meaningful.  So I worry about having consequences for the little things and not saving them for the big ones.  What would you do about the orange days?