Goodbye... Fairwell... Sayonara....Adios...

before:

For those of you who know Katie well, you know that she has sucked her fingers since she was 3 months old (Thanks to Jen! ha) We have tried everything it seems to get her to stop. We tried rewards, charts, stickers, bribery, taping her fingers, taping socks on her hands, yucky tasting fingernail polish (which she likes actually).
Finally last week I was really stressed about it because she was actually sucking her fingers MORE (if that's possible) and every time she put her fingers in her mouth I was getting mad at her and telling her to take them out and she was frustrated and crying saying she liked her fingers.
Greg and I had a talk about possibly taking her to a psychologist to see if they could help. Then, I thought as one last effort I would try something new. I knew I needed something more possitive because my nagging her was NOT working!
So I came up with this idea:

I took her to the store and she got to pick out 4 or 5 small treats and one big prize (Barbie Rapunzle).Holly (my sis-inlaw) told me about this chart system she had learned at her high functioning autism class she is taking. If it can work for autistic children, I thought it should be able to work for anyone. So you just make a simple chart on paper with a smiley face column and a frowny face column. When Katie is seen not sucking her fingers she gets a mark on the smiley column, when she is seen sucking her fingers she gets a mark in the frowny column. We don't get mad or tell her to stop sucking her fingers, we just show her that we are marking the chart and she quickly stops! We started out with about even numbers the first day and then slowly each day we have less and less. Yesterday we had ZERO frowny faces!!! I can hardly believe it.
Then at the end of the day we count up her smiley marks and she gets a pom-pom for each one and for each frowny mark she has to give one back to me. I LOVE this system because it really focuses on what she is doing well but she is held accountable when she doesnt. She then puts the pom-poms in a container that I marked lines on and she gets rewards when she reaches each line. Then when it is all full... she gets her BARBIE! She is so excited, she can't wait to fill it up each night and see if she gets a prize. A friend of mine says she does this same thing with her kids but with marbles. And when the container is full they do something fun as a family (what a GREAT idea!)So far yesterday and today I haven't seen her sucking her fingers once. And from just a few days ago it was constantly I would say we've been doing pretty good! I hope we can keep it up, she is so proud of herself and so am I!!! Love you KATIE!

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