Better Discipline at Home
Hey parents, Denny Strecker here from Skillz Dynamic Martial Arts, and we’re continuing in our series. Basically talking about discipline. I got a call this morning, was talking to a mom, I’m sure one of thousands that is absolutely tired and fed up with having to tell her Ninja that something needs to get done four, five, even 10 times. So, if you’re in the same boat, if you’re tired of having to tell your Ninja how to do something four or five or 10 times, do me a favor; hit the like button right there so that way we get an idea that we’re not alone. It’s one of the greatest things about knowledge, knowledge being power is just the simple fact that, hey, it’s not me. It’s not me as the parent. This is what all parents are going through at this point.
Well, got a great idea for you. This is one thing that I’ve been using for 25 years with success here at the karate school and sharing with parents in my program. And I call it stacking. Basically what starts to happen, the biggest mistake that parents make in general, is that you try to control the person instead of trying to control the behavior. And that’s exactly where stacking helps you out a little bit, because now you’re letting the child make the decision. The goal is to get them to make the right or the good decision, as opposed to continuing to make the bad decision. So, a perfect example would be: one of their chores is to take the garbage out. And so, you remind them, “Hey, remember you’re supposed to take the garbage out.” 20 minutes later, you look, the garbage is still there. Remind you, this is the second time having to tell you, take the garbage out. You spend the rest of the night, take the garbage out, take the garbage out take the garbage out.
And finally it’s bedtime, and the garbage still hasn’t been taken out. And now you’re just kinda fed up, and frustrated, and pulling your hair out saying, my Ninja just doesn’t listen. What’s going on? Well, the idea now is, instead of just telling them and telling them, what we do is we stack on consequences. And by stacking, what you’re doing is you’re allowing them to continue to make the bad choice, but there’s going to be consequences. And that’s the biggest thing that parents miss out on. You can nag your kid until you’re blue in the face, but if you don’t put a consequence on it, they’ve got no incentive to listen now, if they choose not to. Stacking is going to change that for you.
So, what we do is take again, taking the garbage out. You know what, your chore is take the garbage out. It needs to be done before dinner time. So number two, we put a deadline on it. By setting a specific deadline, now there’s no question and there’s no discussion or argument whether it was done or not. If we sit down at the dinner table, I look over, the garbage is still there. You didn’t do your chore, period. No discussion. You dropped the ball. So, now we can move on to fixing it. All too often, again, you leave it open ended and your Ninja is going to say, “I was going to do it.” But it’s at their timeframe. And again, working on discipline, we don’t want the kids to go at their own speed or do things in their own timeframe, because all too often it’s not going to be fast enough.
So number one, set a deadline whenever you’re putting a specific request, or even a demand, on your Ninja. Number two was stacking. This is how it’s gonna work. All right. I want you to have the garbage out before, again, dinnertime. So, now you sit down and you say, “All right, look. It’s dinner time. The garbage isn’t taken out. So, now either you take the garbage out or you’re going to also have to clean the family room after we get done with dinner.” They make their choice. You know what? I don’t feel like taking it out. We don’t take it out. Okay, well now you still have to take the garbage out. You have to clean the family room. And if it’s not done in the next 10 minutes, you’re going to lose all electronics for the rest of the day. And all you do is you keep adding and stacking on another consequence. Eventually your Ninja’s going to get motivated to be able to take care of it because they’re not going to want all of those negative consequences.
One other key element to this is you can’t just throw a consequence willy nilly. You really want to find out what your Ninja’s currency is. And what I mean by that is what are the things they find most valuable? For example, if you have a reader, your Ninja likes to read books, you could say, “Well, you’re going to lose screen time for the rest of the day,” and they go like, “Okay, I don’t care.” So, it’s not super effective. So, what you want to be able to do is really spend some time in finding what is the number one thing that your Ninja really craves on a daily basis? What’s the number two thing? What’s the number three thing, et cetera, et cetera. So, when you have those in your pocket, you’ll have a better idea of how to instill better consequences, therefore getting you better results faster and quicker.
So, there you have it basically working on your stacking ability so that that way you don’t have to repeat yourself hopefully more than once. Because soon as you stack on another consequence, it’s going to get their attention right away. And they’re going to start saying, “Oh man, shoot,” and take off and do it. So, basically I found success with this here in the karate school. Parents tell me that it works for them all of the time. I’m looking forward to seeing how and hearing how it works for you. So, leave a comment below. Let me know if you’re going to give this a try and better yet, please share this video with other parents and other people that you think would like this information. We love having all this opportunity to work and share our great knowledge with you guys. Have an awesome day. I’m going to go teach some great classes and we’ll talk to you tomorrow.