Oh yes he did. Who did what, you may ask? Well, Gavin spit on Elliott. I don’t know what brought that on and frankly, I don’t care. We do not spit on people. That is completely unacceptable in the Lost and Tired house.
Before you ask, no, it wasn’t like he was talking and accidentally spit a little bit. This was actually spitting on his little brother.
I’m not saying Elliott was innocent in all of this but he was the spittee and Gavin was the spitter.
Oatmeal was brought back out of retirement because I don’t know what else to do in this case. We don’t hit our kids and very little works on Gavin outside of oatmeal. For those of you wondering what the oatmeal thing is all about, here’s the dime store version. Basically, with Gavin we have exhausted every other option we could think of and nothing works. So, when Gavin needs to be disciplined, we will replace his next meal with oatmeal.
Gavin likes oatmeal but in cases like this the oatmeal is made with water and no sugar is added. He dislikes this greatly but is more upset about being held accountable for his actions then he is about having to eat the oatmeal. It’s outside the box but sometimes desperate times call for desperate measures.
So tonight Gavin will have oatmeal for dinner and then the slate is wiped clean. I’m at a loss as to what should be done but nothing was not an option. I also don’t want to make to big of a deal out of this either and this seemed to strike a nice balance.
Have any of you fine folks had to deal with spitting like this before? What have to done to address it and has it worked?
– Lost and Tired
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I'm usually dealing with spitting from a sensory perspective but some kids do it just to see what happens…kids that have trouble predicting people's reactions or how scenarios play out often need to experience something to learn from it. Hopefully Gavin's learnt that spitting = oatmeal, therefore it's not worth doing again! Also, some kids enjoy the big, negative reaction behaviours like this can elicit so not making a big deal is also the right thing to do. You don't give yourself enough credit Rob 🙂
Sounds to me like you've got a great handle on consequences "outside the box"! Whatever works for delivering the message that the action will not be tolerated (within the bounds of what we deem acceptable as a society, of course). Part of loving is imparting as much wisdom to our children as we can, if you can get this lesson through then that is a win.
Thanks May, we\’ll said. A win is a win in my book 😉