1st blog

I, as many of us, had that moment of terror when I was told, “hey we are going to blog for class”. I wanted to introduce myself a bit before I just jump into this first blog and bare my thoughts with whoever comes across this page.
I am a creature of structure. I would describe myself as a “scattered, energetic person”. The irony of that statement is that most of the people I would work with would also add “organized” to that category. In order to function in my environments I have created a lot of structure and routine to my settings. You may ask yourself why this information is important to you the reader. The answer is reflected in my daily living activities. I create structure and routine which means that I don’t have a lot of change in my environment. I don’t have small children or other changes in my job that many people face. This works well for me, but leaves me lacking for interesting things to blog about. I also don’t want to put information, no matter how confidential, about my clients in my blog, which in turn makes even less for me to blog about. My horror is that my blogs would only be about my crazy cats, hence making me the “crazy cat lady blogger”.
Luckily for you all, I got out of town some this weekend. I think I observed enough fun stuff to fill my blogs for the year without referring to my cats. (We will just have to wait and see on that one though…)
While waiting in line for a ride I saw multiple instances of families attempting to parent their very over excited children while the parents themselves looked exhausted. Now, I am not trying to reflect my own opinions on how to raise children I don’t have, judge these families or attempt to make assumptions about how they were feeling, not knowing any history about them. I also know I needed stuff to blog about, so they became my unwitting volunteers.
One family stood out in particular to me. I followed them in line for around 30 to 45 minutes. During this time I saw the mother and father multiple times use punishment such as taking away reinforces from their children who were under 10 years old. The sibling set was repeatedly fighting and not caring whether their “DS” was taken away for “one month” or not. Eventually the parent sighed and I wondered if they were running out of things to take away. I think every parent has gone down that sneaky spiral once or twice.
Removing all other things aside about my judgments on age appropriate punishment, the parents input, or even past histories of what has worked for this family, the children were not responding to this redirection from the parents and stopping the behaviors. In my mind I went back to a wonderful conversation I had with my individual supervisor this week and trying to create positive reinforcement instead of negative reinforcement. I thought of all the ways the parents could reward the children for behavior they were looking for while waiting in lines instead of telling them about all the things they were going to lose. I wondered if how simple something as attention to the behaviors the parents were looking for in the lines would increase that behavior in the child.
I hope to use this with my cats. I have a very intelligent crazy little guy, aptly named “chaos”, who does everything he can to get attention though negative behaviors. Maybe I should use a bit of my own reflections on this family with chaos.