annieology

I have attended my share of parenting and relationship classes and seminars in the past almost seven years.  Each year, as foster parents, my husband and I are expected to get 50 hours of training in some sort of family building genre.  I thought I’d share one of my favorites.  The Good News Sandwich.

As any parent will tell you, there is a lot of “behavior modification” that comes with the territory.  The reasoning behind the Good News Sandwich is that it’s two good things or things they are doing right, with a corrective measure or bad news, sandwiched in between.  Therefore, twice as much positive gets spoken into the life of our relationships.   For example.  A wife could say to her husband…

“Honey, you are the most awesome husband, EVER!  The doctor called, you have four days to live.  Thanks for taking out the trash last night.”

See, he probably didn’t feel the complete weight of his impending death.  He was cushioned by the good news.    We leave things on a positive note, and we all go away feeling good about ourselves.

Every time I think of this little gem, I laugh and laugh.  I suppose there have been years of research and tons of  gov’ment funding, but when it comes to kids, some days two slices of goodness are hard to come by.  Those no good, awful, bad days where they wake up cranky and it goes downhill from there.  Like the day they learn that they can get out of time out by forcing themselves to vomit.  Might go something like this…

“You’re so smart. You’re evil and need exorcised.  I see you ate all your broccoli, good job.”

Unfortunately, it’s mostly true.  And by broccoli, I might mean Cheeto’s.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 at 2:12 am and is filed under How to be an Awesome Parent, Kindle, Parenting, annieology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.