The Marble Jar Channel

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll show you how I “take away” my kid’s phone without actually taking it away.  Sometimes parenting can feel a bit like an operant conditioning experiment. You reinforce good behaviors with rewards and discourage bad behavior with punishments. The trick is figuring out what rewards and punishments work for your kid. My son does not have a ton of “levers” that work for conditioning his behavior. He doesn’t seem to be motivated by money, purchases, or curtailing activities. BUT there are 2 things that motivate him: his phone and socializing. I really try not to take away socializing since I feel like it is integral to being a teen and important for their identity development. So that leaves his phone as pretty much my only lever for molding behavior.  This is problematic. First of all, if I take away his phone altogether, it also serves to cut his sole means of communicating with ...