Welcome to the Gathering Pod, the audio version of my weekly gathering room broadcast. I'm Martha Beck.

Welcome to the Gathering Room. I'm so happy to see you here. I was thinking, you know, I always think throughout the week, what do we want to talk about on the gathering room on Sunday?

And this week, we were in our household. We were trying to

decide what to tell our 20-month-old Lila what to do to reinforce her behavior. Like, she's in a place

where she's in that phase where she will like take a piece of precious something like a tictack she'll hold something out oh and you say no no

like and she starts to tip it you're like no and she just stares you dead in the eye and just drops it yeah she's at

the time where you really do need some behavior modification strategies. We mostly like to praise not blame.

Important point. I hope in your own heads, in your own lives, that you use praise more than blame.

Praise, by the way, has been calculated to be 51 times as effective as criticism for modifying behavior.

So there's that. But then we had this thing where we were saying,

good girl when she would do things. Problematic in several ways. First of all, it assumes she's a

girl. Who knows? We have to wait for her to tell us what she feels like. Okay. The other thing is

that when you say you're a good girl because you didn't drop the tic-tacks or whatever,

you then imply that when she does do things not perfectly, like if you say, oh, you learn to

spell your name and, you know, in kindergarten, good girl. It means that if she can't spell

or she can't count the way other kids can or something, she's not a good girl, even if you don't say it. So, okay, we've been out online, we've read books. No more good girl.

But then, what do you say? So we start out with, oh, you, good job? And then it's like,

oh, now I'm reinforcing jobs. It it really gets bad so I have come to rest

and I think everyone in our family likes this on the phrase you did it and it's been really

effective because you know it's inarguable if she did it and you can say it with great festivity and it feels good, it's inarguable if she did it. And you can say it with great festivity. And it feels good. And it's

just, you know, it's true. So then today I was, I was planning to do a gathering one like,

how do we get better at this or that? How do we feel better? Heal our wounds. Blab-de-ba-blab-blab-de-blub-de-ble.

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