Tantrums and Timeouts

Cassidy throws the occasional tantrum... most of the time its when she's earned a timeout for something.  A while back, she had earned a timeout for something or other (I think it was for not listening and refusing to cooperate for bathtime) and we sent her to her room and closed the door.  When I opened the door after the time was up and she was quiet again, she said "Look what I did." 

Destruction during a time out.

It was clear she wasn't sure how I would respond to this by the hesitant way she showed me.  I simply looked at it, choking back my laughter, and said, "That's a big mess."  I turned around and said "time for our bath." 

Bathtime progressed smoothly (as it usually does once she has a bit of time in her room to realize we mean business).  However, after bath and putting on our pajamas in her room, I said "This is so sad.  We can't do anything fun before bedtime because Cassidy has this giant mess to clean up."  Cassidy looked at me and immediately went to pieces.  I sat calmly while she worked on cleaning up her mess until bedtime.  At that point I pushed the remainder off to the side of the room and said she would finish it in the morning. 

When she woke up, we got ready for school without our usual cuddle/book time and she continued picking up and putting away her clothes.  She didn't finish before school, so when we came home from school, we went right into her room to continue cleaning.  (When I say we, I mean she cleaned and I watched and helped only when she needed a bit of guidance.)  When she finally finished, I gave her a big hug, told her she did a great job working so hard to clean up such a big mess, and said we could do some fun stuff after dinner! 

The next morning when Cassidy woke up and we were getting dressed, she looked at me seriously and said, "I'm not going to make that big mess again.  That was hard work to clean up."

She's never done it again! 

Thank you Love and Logic! 

Genius!