On the foster care blog today, Lanette talked about dealing with a child's cussing behavior. As both a foster and an adoptive mom to many older children, all with emotional/behavioral disorders (and/or mental illness), I thought I'd mention a couple of examples from my own parenting and describe a little of how we deal with the problem and still keep some fun in parenting.

About 3yrs ago, we fostered a little 11yr cutie. We refer to her sometimes... more

The fun quote above is from my 13yr old daughter - describing her 14yr old sister to a friend. The rest of this blog is directly from this adorable 14year old...these are her ideas about consequences for poor behavior.

(For background, this cutie was adopted by us almost 1yr ago. She came to our family because of her severe behaviors in her first adoptive family. She has tested. She's not done testing yet. But she sure is doing a lot better than she was!! The girl is no stranger to the "consequence"!)

I could talk about... more

A few weeks ago I caught the tail end of a Today show interview about making spanking illegal for children ages three & under in a certain state ( I think it was Californa). The National Effective parenting initiative along with politicians were pushing to make this a new legislation. When doing some research on this it seems that other countries already have an anti spanking law in place. Boston was trying to pass a bill that would make putting hot sauce or soap in your child’s mouth Illegal as well as... more