Incentives

We have started a new incentive program for Emily. We're rewarding good behavior with a sort of allowance system.

We have a wipe board in the kitchen where we track her behavior and her allowance earned. She gets "strikes" when she does not follow the rules at our house. This also applies when she's with Nanny and Pops during the day. If she gets in trouble at their house, it's a strike on our board as well. If she gets three strikes in a day, then she loses her allowance for the day.

Unfortunately, there are many days where she does get three strikes by the end of the day. The picture of the board was from last week, but the board from this week looks just as sad so far. She gets a lot of strikes for coming out of her room at night or during nap time. I think this should be an easy rule to follow, but she continues to come out of her room for the silliest excuses imaginable. I think she has been out of her room about 14 times so far tonight and she's only been in bed for an hour and a half.

Yeah, not fun.

Now ... occasionally, Emily does earn her a allowance. Right now, she earns $0.50 per day that she does not get three strikes. She gets her money on Saturday mornings.

A couple weeks ago, Mike found her a safe to keep her money in. We looked for one all around the metro area, but never found what we wanted. But he did find a perfect pink one online. It has a pad lock and even an alarm that goes off when the safe opens up.

After we got the safe, we gathered up all Emily's money and it ended up equalling over $40! She and her dad like to look through her safe and talk about the U.S. Presidents that are on each bill denomination. She is learning to recognize and name each one. It's fun to see her soaking up all this knowledge.

We are teaching her about tithing 10% of her earnings at Sunday School, but most weeks she gives more than 10%. This past week, she earned $1.50 for the week and I think she gave $1.00 at Sunday School. She is so generous and loving.

Now if we could just get her to stop getting so many strikes and earning some more money for her safe ...