Learner Dad: 'We’re big into Cancel Discipline in our place'

I might have just stumbled on the key to child discipline — a calendar, an aquarium and a big lie.

We’re big into Cancel Discipline in our place. This is where you arrange something like a play-date, so you can threaten to cancel it if the kids don’t eat their dinner/leave us alone for five minutes/stop fighting/go to bed/get out of bed/eat your breakfast, you know yourself.

We’re also big into not following through on these threats. At least I’m not big into it. My wife held tough a couple of times with our seven-year-old, so her threats tend to carry more weight. The latest triumph is where she signed our daughter up for drama, and made her miss a week after a bit of drama at home. There was a semi-volcanic outburst when we handed down the sentence (I’ve not convinced we need to pay someone to show our daughter how to be dramatic) but she quickly calmed down and accepted the rap.

As is the way with these things, my wife decided that it was now my job to come up with a similar trick to in order to discipline our son. That’s a short, short straw. He’s pretty advanced for a five-year-old. I asked him this morning if there are aliens on other planets. He replied, “I don’t know.” Great answer. At least I can stop worrying about him ever going into politics

As well as being sharp, he doesn’t like any activity enough to care if we cancel it. His sister, The Trainee Hippy, is open to everything, loves everything and wouldn’t be surprised if I arrived home with a pet unicorn.

He is meh about most things, or at least very good at pretending to be meh about them when we threaten to take them away. Except for fish.

My son’s dream-come-true would be for the entire family to go live in an aquarium. When it’s his turn to choose what we watch on YouTube, he’ll often ask for a video that a social media influencer shot with their child in some random aquarium. They’re very soothing — they’d be even better if it wasn’t for their pesky kid blocking the view of the fish.

We’re bringing him to the aquarium in Dingle for his birthday next month. He has pretty much laughed in our faces every time we threatened that it wasn’t going to happen — it was too far in the future, the threat just didn’t seem real.

And then I spotted the calendar by the fridge in the kitchen.

We’d used reward charts in the past, where you’d put a sticker in a box when they did something good and there would be a treat when they completed a row. What if he had to get a tick on the calendar at the end of every day to keep alive his hopes of fish-watching?

It worked. Now we have a sanction that kicks in every day, about something that matters to him. I topped it up with a big lie, telling him if he didn’t get the ticks he needed, the hotel room in Kerry would be going to ‘another boy’ in a few weeks. (We’d used an ‘another boy’ ruse before, telling him that the mobile home we’d booked for holidays would be given to a German kid if he didn’t behave. It worked a treat for a while, although he might have a problem with Germans when he grows up.)

The daily tick is now a thing. In fact, we have two ticks — my daughter has asked to be included as well, because she’s basically Lisa Simpson and loves a bit of affirmation.

So there you have it, a calendar, an aquarium and a big lie. The only problem is my daughter reads this and tells her brother that the ‘other boy’ doesn’t exist. So, darling daughter, if you are reading this, say nothing. Or else I’ll withhold a tick and maybe even cancel drama. (We both know that isn’t true, but I have to be seen to be trying.)