February 11, 2004 - Sunday
Harry is in the midst of an annoying habit of being exceedingly silly after his evening bath, particularly when he's suppose to be putting on his pajamas, brushing his teeth, and basically getting ready for bed. It's not new, but it's either getting worse or our tolerance is waning. And, it's completely understandable, really. Kids do all kinds of things to avoid bedtime and that makes it one of the trickiest times of the day. But, it's also understandable how this awkward behavior drives his mother crazy, because what's happening is that he's just not heeding her requests and warnings. We've done various things like ignoring him, making him sit in the hall by himself, getting mad, but it's a tough time because just about anything ultimately makes the process take longer and that's really both what he wants and counterproductive to our goal of getting through to bedtime. We've also tried limiting the number of stories he'll have at bedtime, but I'd think quantity of stories is a hard thing for him to really digest. So, tonight it was no stories and that seemed to get his attention. Whether the message got through or we just made him sad or mad for a night is impossible to say.

Somewhat related, Harry's Pre-K class has some discipline problems. It's a class made up mostly of older, five-year-olds boys and two or three that are not very well behavior generally. I find it's certainly a balancing act between identifying the bad behavior of specific kids as bad - "[this boy] did [this]," Harry will say. "Well [that boy] is not a very nice boy and that's not a very nice thing to do - and going too far and unintentionally glamorizing the boy or the behavior by calling overt attention to it. I also find there's a difficult balance when I'm there of budding in too much when I see behavior in other children that is inappropriate, but that's another discussion. Anyway, because of this discipline problem, the teachers in the class have this system of green, yellow, and red circles, or "lights," on the wall. Each child's name is written onto a large slip pocket and at the beginning of each day each of these pockets has a green circle sticking out. When behavior turns ugly, the teachers eventually put a yellow light on top of the green and then a red one if bad behavior continues or there is another transgression soon after. Very awkwardly, there are a couple of kids who more than half the time seem to have red when I pickup Harry in the afternoon and it's very discouraging to me that I have to leave Harry in that kind of environment, although I suppose he'll need to learn how to deal with that sort of thing eventually.

Fortunately, Harry is not one of often "red" boys. Indeed, I can proudly say that Harry is one of the best behaved boys in the class. Although today, he got his first "yellow light," interestingly for being part of a group of kids that were being far too silly at quiet time. His teacher reports that he was quite pained to get yellow and relieved to be quickly switched back when he quieted down. But, it made for a nice tie-in with the discussion we had to have with him tonight on the right and wrong time for silliness. Again, we've had that discussion before and will certainly again, but it was kind of nice in a backhanded way to have the reinforcement from school, especially because most of the learning by watching he does at school contradicts the messages at home.


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