Can someone remind me how the pasta jar thing works - Soupy?

[rickman]

Message withdrawn

glass jar .. pieces of pasta in it at start of week (say 5) .. naughty / bad / insolent take pasta out ... good / adequate / controlled put pasta in .. end of week count it up and either give small pressie / pocket money / praise / big fuss .. then start again

when out and naughtiness threatens hiss Pasta

Message withdrawn

How old do they need to be for it to work?

Message withdrawn

Worked for DSs from 5 and 3.

Thing is you have to keep at it and don't forget to exchange it for rewards at the end of the week. We've slipped with ours (keep forgetting!) so I'm going to "relaunch" it.

Might make it a little more complicated so they get a white piece of pasta for good and a red piece for bad. Good - bad = reward. This means that when I've already taken away all their pasta, I can still punish them : -ve pasta = they give me money out of their money box.

It works from any age where they understand the exchange for rewards. For younger children, you can use something direct like Smarties - the smarties they have left at the end of the week they get to eat. DSs love the whole counting pasta and then counting money aspect. Also enjoyed counting the total in their money boxes.

I actually picked this tip up from mumsnet a few months ago for my six year old ds. Works really well for us. He's a materialistic little bleeder so we have rewards built in depending on how many he gets!
All I have to say now is; 'You're going to lose some pasta if you do that again' and he practically begs me on bended knee not to do it!

it works well with my 3.5 and 5 year olds. though i am a bit worried they think the world turns on pasta now. we went to the school fete at the weekend, they had been "earning" pasta all week to "spend" at the fete. but dd1 would not let me convert it into money (10p per pasta piece, i was offering) but insisted on taking the pasta with her and she even used it to pay to get into the fete!

Something we found worked well was having pasta jars for the grown ups too. my dds love the equity of this. if we swear, or shout unnecessarily, we lose a bit of pasta. etc.

We've started doing something similar for ds (almost 4) - who has ahem..challenging behaviour, and has been particularly bad for the last few weeks. We have a glass jar and put pennies into it if he does anything remotely good - if he gets 10p then he can 'buy' a sweetie from us (he doesn't get sweets usually so it's a real treat).
The first few days he still played up enormously and although we were trying to pick out things to reward him for he didn't manage to get near 10p! (he was doing a lot of biting, jumping from tables, etc) - yesterday I was almost in tears as he was behaving so nastily when I picked him up from nursery so I made up some 'good behaviour' (ie. suggested that if he said sorry after biting me he could have a penny) - and that seemed to turn the tide.
Once he saw the coins going in he completely changed personality and got his sweetie and 7p towards the next. He ended up going to bed really nicely and talking to me really nicely and it was a lovely end to the evening.

Long post - sorry - just wanted to say - give it a go - be prepared to give it a few days - hope it works out for you all.