Yes, I Ticketed my Teen for Not Listening!

I would like to think that this is part of the crafty side of this blog. Of course, maybe that’s up for debate. However, disciplining or reminding teens to do things does require a bit of creativity if I’m not going to continually yell at them or give up and do something myself instead of making them follow through.

I was pretty creative when they were little and I had a family store where the kids could buy little trinkets or privileges with family money (fake $) that they earned for good behavior or chores. As they’ve gotten older they haven’t really responded to the family money because they want the real stuff.

I find myself getting stressed out from the 2 older kids not listening. Every morning they need to eat breakfast and make their lunch for school. Now I used to make it for them but due to health issues the past couple years I have barely been able to take care of myself. Besides at 16 and 17 they should really learn skills to live. These sound like pretty easy tasks for teenagers, but every morning there I am telling them a count down of we leave in 15 minutes,  10 minutes,  etc and do you have a lunch? Most of the time the answer is no and we HAVE to leave on time to get 2 other children to their schools and myself to work. So they either rush grabbing some bogus thing they call a lunch or lately they resort to lying to me.

I decided that it’s not my problem to remind them and nag them. They are old enough to remember simple instructions and if they don’t take a lunch then they don’t eat. This was hard for me but hey, I survived and I hardly ever ate lunch at school and they’re not little kids anymore.

Along with that unnecessary stress that I was causing myself with the lunch ordeal I am constantly telling them to put their clean clothes away. They usually don’t and it ends up on the floor which makes me irate to see that they don’t care enough to take the little step of putting it away. So, you know how that ends. ..I see folded laundry in the dirty clothes hamper or clothes that I know they didn’t wear in there, but now it smells from being with dirty clothes. It’s such a waste of time and resources and it is so disrespectful.

My new tactic is this ticket. We’ll see this evening if it’s successful. The only reason I put 8pm as a deadline is because she’s at cheer until 5:30 or 6 and will need to eat dinner (after starving all day) and the point is for her to be successful and not set her up to fail the task. Yes I blacked out her name to protect the guilty but if you know us at all, you know who it is.

I hope I’ve found another parenting winner here. Updates to follow.