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I have been having parenting difficulties with my five-year-old. He is an extremely sweet boy, but he is extremely strong-willed and he does not like going to school. This has been going on all year, but it has taken an extremely bad turn and he is becoming more physical (and more physically impossible) to battle with to make him go to school.

Tuesday morning was the straw that broke the camel’s back, because our morning was the worst we had ever had together. I have even found myself having scary Mommy Dearest moments where I am yelling my head off at him and he is hitting me, screaming, and refusing to get in the car. I won’t go into all of the trauma, but I dreaded school mornings. He simply did not want to go to school and I did not know what to do. After a tearful talk with his teacher that day, I realized that something needed to change in our house.

Keep in mind that I tried everything that I could; getting him up earlier, eliminating distractions, and giving him warnings that it is nearing time to go, talking to him about what might be bothering him about school, frequent discussions with his teacher about behavior and what could be going on. You know, all the good stuff that the “experts” encourage. No matter what I did though, we were starting our mornings with tears and battles.

I came home on Tuesday feeling defeated. Was it something I did that caused this? Why was I letting my temper get the best of me? Did I fail in disciplining him?

I picked up a book that I got from the library about parenting strong-willed children entitled, The Kazdin Method for Parenting the Defiant Child. I sat down and poured a cup of coffee and read, and read, and read. I got excited in that hour about all that I could do as a parent. I realized that I didn’t have to be a negative mom, I could be a positive parent. The book was filled with tips on positive parenting and how to create positive solutions for your children. The main focus was on creating a point system for good behavior and focusing on positive praise to get positive results.

Dr. Kazdin suggests implementing a chart in the home to award points to your child for the things you want them to do (in our case, go to school without a fight). His system reminded me of another system that our reader, Jodi, had shared about using raffle tickets and points for completing chores in our awesome chore discussion.