The Dice of Doom: Fun with Discipline

As promised, here's the post on the Dice of Doom! To keep your home peaceful, you sometimes have to be a good disciplinarian. Though not technically a Wifey Wednesday post, the tone of your home is determined by you, the heart of the home. Here's a way to keep things lighthearted, even when the kids are coming loose at the seams.

The Dice of Doom

Dun-dun-Duuuuuunnnn!

This discipline device adds a bit of fun to the arsenal of Time-outs and revoked privileges and I can take no credit for it. It is a hand-me-down technique. A mother of seven gave it to me when she had four teenagers living at home.

Here's a scenario:

Kid one, overwhelmed with frustration, crosses the line and yells, "Get away from me!"
Kid two ups the anty and retorts, "You're a poophead!"
Every other kid in the house joins in a chorus of, "Oooo!" followed by, "Duh-duh-duhhhhhhhh!" Which is the ceremonial entrance song of the Dice of Doom.
Mom steps in, saying, "Dice of Doom, you two!" The Dice is brought out and rolled with kids begging for Mercy!

Let me explain what it is before I explain why it works so well.

What is it?
It's a box, covered with butcher paper. Written on five of the six sides is a boring housework task. On the sixth side is the word mercy.

Our five boring housework tasks are as follows:

1. Wipe windowsills
2. Mop a bathroom floor
3. Run the duster over everything
4. Dust baseboards 
5. Straighten up the family games shelf

My kids are small, so the tasks are small. We only do one room per dice roll. If you have bigger kids, you could adapt accordingly. Don't forget to add "Mercy!" to one of the six sides!

How do you use it?
This is a simple adaptation of a Time Out. Instead of standing in a corner, the child is given a task to accomplish. It is in addition to chores.

The child rolls the dice, you cheer them on, adding the chant, "Mercy! Mercy!" as you deem appropriate. The child accomplishes whatever task is required. At the completion of the task, forgiveness is asked and granted by all parties. If Mercy is rolled, mercy is granted: no task is given and all is forgiven in the moment.

When do you use it?
We use this whenever someone's dignity has been injured. When a child has forgotten to respect the authority of a parent by backtalk or eye-rolling, it is a good time to use it, but it is better used in cases of sibling squabbling. When a child has forgotten to respect the dignity of a sibling by aggravating, squabbling, shoving, name calling, or poking fun, it is mandatory. This entire set up is designed to intervene before fists or tears fly. It's an early intervention.

I don't use it all the time. Maybe once a week or so, if that. Frankly, I forget to use it or I don't have the wits about me to use it when I should. It's in the tool bag when I want to pull it out and it works.

How does it work?
First of all, this is a Time Out. Time Outs work by removing the child from the source of frustration. Second of all it provides for instant distraction and redirection and at the same time that the tasks are just physical enough to blow off a little steam. Thirdly, it completely resets the tone by replacing the "ritual" of an argument with another (slightly sillier) ritual to perform. Finally, justice is instantly and equitably served. Unless there is a clear cut case of pure and unadulterated innocence, all parties involved roll the dice.

Why is it fun?
Because you make it fun. You introduce it with all due pomp and circumstance. You show how each of the tasks will be performed. You model rolling the dice. You also model the begging and bargaining, "Mercy! Please let me get Mercy!" or "Not the mopping! ANYthing but the mopping!" Then model the appropriate reaction. "AAAuggghhh! Mopping!!" or "MERCY! Whew!" And sometimes, rarely, you roll it yourself.

"Whoops! I just blew it when I yelled at you. I'm sorry about that...Dice of Doom for mom!"

While the kids are working, I tend to "supervise." It's funny how when kids' hands are occupied, their mouths are freed. I have gotten to the root of more problems "listening in" on someone working on their Dice of Doom task.

It works for us. Well enough that I had to pass it along.

Over time this will cut down on the squabbling. It will increase the respect for siblings. It will also assist them in learning how to curb those impulses to unkindness that we are all tempted with. When Momma has a better day with the kids, she has more to give at the end of it.


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This has been a Wifey Wednesday Post. To have an even more Wifey Wednesday visit Sheila Wray Gregoire at To Love Honor and Vacuum.

Autism Awareness Month: Discipline

There's a saying in the Autism Community that goes like this, "When you meet one child with Autism, you've met one child with Autism." Each child with Autism is as different from each other child with Autism as any child is different from any other. Autism is a weird thing. Nobody really can define it more than the amorphous "deficits in social interaction and communication" which could mean a whole lot of things.

And does, actually.

That said, I am still introducing you to my son with Autism and our family's various strategies for dealing with it. You won't be any closer to understanding any other child or family working under this burden, but my son and my family have made me look at certain aspects of life and parenting in such a way that I sometimes kick out a gem or two.

There's nothing quite like struggling with an issue to give you new insights on it, is all I'm saying here.

That's all I'm saying all month, too. I'm no expert on Autism, but I am an expert on my son with Autism. And figuring out what worked with him sometimes helps me figure out how we all work, you know?

Discipline: Why Bother?

When my son was three, we started to see the beginnings of outright naughtiness and decided we'd better begin addressing them. Now, we're not talking about behaviors like the sensory stuff of unrolling the entire roll of toilet paper because he liked to see things spin, or the innocent misbehavior of an immature child like eating the entire contents of the jelly jar left on the counter. What we were beginning to see were the birth pangs of the more dubious of social skills: revenge and orneriness.

Because he wouldn't complain, tattling being a language skill he couldn't muster at that age beyond howling in outrage, his siblings sometimes took self-centered and childish advantage of the situation, akin to Enron and their investors. We had to be smart enough to figure out any given situation via discussions among devious preschoolers, a toddler or two, and one outraged little fella with social deficits. I have to admit that sometimes they outsmarted us adults and Simon literally learned to take matters into his own hands--by pinching. His memory proved better than the average preschooler. He'd pinch at seemingly random intervals, but his justification was sometimes days old. (We knew this by various means and subtleties too intricate to express in this post.)

Other times, he'd act up for no good reason. He's human, after all, not angelic, and he occasionally asserts his prerogative to be a little stinker. (If you don't think this is perfectly human, you don't know enough humans, please allow me to introduce myself.) I guess you could chalk up some of this kind of behavior to "testing his boundaries," which is a more noble way of labeling orneriness, but this is my blog and I like the word stinker better. It makes my boy giggle.

 Whatever you want to call it, these new behaviors were greeted with mixed emotions. We were guiltily thrilled to acknowledge that another stage in social development had been reached while at the same time plotting feverishly to stop it. Prior to this development he'd whine or cry and then simply extricate himself from stressful situations. Now he was showing some spunk that could both ward off trouble and bring it on. Something had to be done.

At first we were stymied by the thought, "What if he doesn't understand?" It can be hard to communicate with a person with communication deficits. What if we couldn't get him to buy into the disciplining process? As silly as this sounds, we consulted a discipline expert: this guy. We read his discipline books and then we stalked sought him out at a conference. He put it into terms that permanently solved that:

"Do you expect your dog to obey you?"

My husband and I nodded blankly.

"Do you need your dog to understand why you don't want him on the couch or do you just insist he stay off?"

I think I blinked a few times.

"You don't need understanding or buy in. Just set the rules, set age appropriate consequences and rewards, and teach your son how people behave."

Then he moved in his seat, pointed at us both, and lowered his voice. Everything about him said, Listen up! "Don't handicap him by allowing him to be a brat. He has enough of a handicap to deal with already. Teach him!"

It was the first time we'd ever considered that growing up to be an undisciplined person was an additional handicap we could inflict upon our son! Now what were we going to do!

Dr. Ray Guarendi
Psychologist, Author, Speaker,
and Father of 10
Wait...did you just call my kid a dog?!

Next week...what we did!