Blue Smiley Blues

Yesterday, Gabe came home from school with a "blue smiley face".

This might sound like a (generally) good thing, but it's NOT! Each day all the children in Gabe's (kindergarten) classroom begin the day with a star with their name on it on a Green Board. The Green Board represents perfect behavior, a clean slate, innocent until proven guilty and all that tripe. If a child misbehaves, the child is asked to get up and move their star from Green to a Blue Board. Eventually, they can be further downgraded to a Yellow and then a Red state (plus an expense paid trip to the Principal's office. Oooooh!). It's color coded criminal justice.

The kids are send home with a chart with a smiley face colored in marker representing "their day" (As if behavior is the only important marker of how their day went. What about academics, socialization, attitude, etc.? But, I also DO appreciate the behavioral feedback. So I can't gripe too much.) Gabe has only had a Yellow once. It was a frowning face rather than a smiling face. I think it was during his first week of school.

Gabe was doing really well after he settled into the school routine. Initially, he was having lots of blue faces for "not following directions" which meant (according to my phone conference with his teacher) that he was frequently thinking that he could negotiate behavior with his teacher, by ignoring her instructions. He would argue that he didn't like her instructions and so on. She finally convinced him that she was the teacher and he was the kid and that he just plain had to function within those parameters.

(Gosh! I am so torn on this one: I totally get that he has to be able to FUNCTION in a setting in which someone has authority over him. The world is like that. Sometimes authority is a good thing, or at least a necessary evil. But I hate the argument that you must obey " just because" someone is in a position of authority over you. I will NEVER say "because I'm the Mama and I say so". BUT sometimes I really need him to just obey because I am juggling more things than he can be cognizant of at his age. I want him to obey ME and his teacher and his Papa but not to just blindly follow ALL authority just because they are AUTHORITY. We will have to work on debriefing this notion of blind authority as he gets older and can better handle the complicated reasoning and rules. Aargh.)

Anyway. Now he gets Blue smilies for infractions such as "not being quiet" and "knocking down Maddie's blocks". (I wonder where he gets the excessive talking from?)

Yesterday the infraction was: "Playing in the bathroom". When I questioned him about it he said that he didn't know he wasn't allowed to play in the bathroom because "never in his whole life" had anyone told him he couldn't. I wasn't sure what to make of this but I still decided to enforce the new punishment we had agreed upon for a Blue smiley: No computer, no TV, no friends over to play for that day.

Secretly, I was more afraid of this punishment than Gabe was. I figured he would follow me around forlornly begging for TV or other entertainment. Hubby doesn't get home until after 8:30 most nights and the (long, long) hours between 5:00 and 8:45 are often filled with TV babysitting while I make dinner, clean up the house, nurse the baby, and attend to all the other mundane but critical details of family life. This punishment meant I was facing a whole evening with no respite from his five-year-old demands.

But, he surprised me. He played with Play-Doh for over two hours! He destroyed his bedroom playing dress up and digging out toys that have been buried in toy rubble since just after their post-Christmas gluttonous discarding. He, in essence, kept himself cheerful and occupied all afternoon and evening! I totally underestimated him.

So, now I am going to need to seriously reconsider my use of television to occupy the kids. When I start working, evenings are going to be even more hectic, but it will be even more important that I use that time to connect with the kids. I think I better think it out again.