Star chart: Model 2: the PERSEVERANCE model:

Don't judge this model by this photo. This model is the cleverest, honest, and win/win process.

Picture this: Cailin is 4 years old. She is a mommy's girl through and through. All that matters to Cailin is her mommy. So at times whenever I was in the picture (as a new step father), I was seen as a possible threat/ interuption/ enemy to that relationship.

So Rene and I wanted to support Cailin in treating me with Kindness and respect (as well as to support her in processing her feelings to me)

But a traditional star chart is an either-or scenario. If I said to Cailin, "If you are kind to me the whole day, you will get the star, but in just one scenario she pulls a face, that means that all the other 20 acts of kindness don't count (because she now wont get the star). So very very soon she will just give up because she can only experience success when she TOTALLY achieves that goal.

So here is how you get around that:

In this case I started off by giving Cailin 10 stickers every day. So in the morning I cut out a line of 10 stikers and gave them to her to keep for the day.

If during the day she pulled a face at me, she gave me a sticker back (I placed these on the back side of our sheet). And at the end of the day, we looked to see how many of the 10 stickers we had left.

So before bed time, we counted how many were left (this is focussing on the positive), and Cailin could take these and place them on her Star chart bank sheet (what you see in the picture).

This means that on a certain day, she might have 5 left. So although there were still some times of her being 'unkind', she still felt positive about the stickers she had left and felt positive by sticking these onto her sheet.

We had agreed that when the stickers reach a total of 90, the we would celebrate in certain agreed way.

The clever trick here is the underlying emphasis that in a certain moment on that day, although she may be unkind, she could still pull herself out of it, and make sure she keeps the rest of the stickers for the day (which will take her closer to her goal). She was continously motivated even though there may be a pear-shaped situation.

This process will work brilliantly for just about any situation (cleaning rooms, doing homework, sibling rivaly (yep, even for this).