I thought I had it all together with my kids but this morning proved me wrong. I had a ten year old who refused to get organized for school and decided that she would be on a "go slow". Now I understand that different combinations of kids and parents have an impact on what heppens in individual households. But I would like to share with you what I did this morning at my house.

There has been an ongoing issue with my daughter regarding getting out the door to school on time each morning. Even when I wake her up very early she still seems to muck around every morning. she is regularly late for school by a few minutes and this is a source of frustration for me.

The first thing you should do with a child reluctant to get out the door to school is to talk to them about what happens at school. Are they being bullied? Is there a reason that they don't want to go to school ? Once you have eliminated anything there, then you will need to come up with a plan of attack for how to turn this problem around.

Always try something positive to start off with. An example of this might be a sticker chart and at the end of the week a trip to buy ice cream if they have stickers for every day. Make the reward immediate and something that the child likes in order to motivate them. And as your child gets better you can then start to make the rewards a bit further apart.

You need to exhaust all the possibilities of positive consequences before thinking of turning to a negative consequence as positive consequences really do work better. Unfortunately for my daughter I had to use a negative consequence this morning, on account of her throwing a tantrum. That was something I would not have expected to see from a ten year old.

Becky is finally gone to school now and it's time to dream up her consequence. Because she chose to throw a tantrum like a little child I have decided to deprive her of some things that are reserved for older girls. I shall be taking away her favorite earrings and also a few random items of "grown up" clothing. They will go up into my top cupboard. Beck will be devastated but I will explain to her that those kinds of things are reserved for girls who act their age and don't throw tantrums.

It is important to make the crime match the punishment as closely as possible. I don't know if I have got it exactly right today. But I figure that if a child of mine is still throwing a tantrum at age ten, perhaps she should not be wearing grown up clothes.

In all of this I will give her a chance to lessen the consequence through improved behavior over the next couple of days. If she shows me that she can indeed get ready for school quickly without fussing or throwing a tantrum she will get something special that belongs to her back quite quickly. The end result is that Becky learns that she can control the quality of her life by her actions or inactions. And that is what we want our kids to learn.