I will admit it…..there are days when I don’t like some of my students.  It’s the days when they are whiney and fussy and can’t really tell me why.  By the end of the day they have worn me out!   Luckily, I get to send them home.

I remember those days with my own children……praying they would take a nap and wake up a happy child again.  Some days, that just didn’t happen.

On those days I wish I would have thought of this idea!  My daughter has a friend with a two year old that my daughter adores.  A few weeks ago she was telling me the story of the “Crying Room” and I thought it was quite ingenious and wanted to share it.  As the story goes, it was one of those days when the little girl was whiney, fussy and crying.  Mom had tried everything to get her to be her happy, little girl and it wasn’t working.  Finally, mom told her that she would have to go to the crying room (I believe it was the guest room). It worked so well that the next time she had a fussy day she told her mom she thought she needed to go to the the crying room.  I hope I have told the story correctly.  However it is told, the concept is the same and a good one.  It worked for her.

What I like most about this idea as opposed to going to their room, sitting in the corner or on the time out chair/rug is that mom was out of sight.  The audience was gone.  Toys were gone.  Nothing to play with, just a quiet place.  The child could make calming down her own decision.  Mom had a chance to separate herself from the commotion but still be close enough to keep an eye on the situation.

I wish I would have stumbled across this idea about 29 years ago.  I picture my sparse living room as the crying room.  I wonder how it would have worked?

Discipline…… you can hit one out of the ball park and other times you can miss it by a mile.  It happens in teaching.  It happens in parenting.  It’s the misses that make us want to keep trying new approaches to solve problems.  It is the hope that what we try is the answer and when it isn’t we go back to square one and try again.