In the early days of putting our disciplinary plan into actions, we did not really visit other people very often so dealing with him acting out at someone’s house was not a problem. Inevitably, once the craziness of the beginning of the school year died down (I was a full time high school teacher at this stage in our son’s life), I started visiting friends again. It was interesting to see how our son interacted with other people. While he was largely very well behaved and and a pretty “good listener,” there were of course instances during our outings to a friend’s house that he would need to be disciplined. At first I did not know how disciplining our son at someone else’s house would work. I discovered that consistency is paramount. By maintaining our standard for appropriate and inappropriate behavior coupled with the same consequences, disciplining him was not a problem and he responded the same as he did at home.
When our son was twenty months old we moved back to the Midwest, which brought with a new set of disciplinary challenges some of which were easy to counter and others that were more difficult. Moving into a different house posed the need of getting used to a new place and putting everything into order. Right away we designated a new time out place in the only hallway in the house. While our son’s boundaries were the same, it seemed like he needed to learn some of them all over again given the new layout of the house and placement of everything. During this time he became a very adept climber (something he was not too interested in while we lived in Texas), perhaps this was because we went from one step to two flights of stairs. Whatever the reason, he was getting time outs for continually getting himself into dangerous situations…
(To be continued …)