Dad, Tell Me About the Time (51) - Points to Perfection

Friday, June 6, 2025

How did you discipline you children?

This is a long story. We used a point chart, and I think it worked very well. It doesn’t work for everyone, but it worked well for our family. I have been asked by several people to describe our point system, so a few years ago I wrote a brief summary. Rather than repeat what I wrote before, I will just copy my summary here.  

Points to Perfection

 The Atonement and Disciplining a Child

 Forward

I have been asked by many friends and even some of my kids to describe the point system that we used to discipline our children. I use the work “discipline” but it really wasn’t discipline at all, but rather a method through which our kids could atone for their own poor choices and correct behavior that brought them undesirable consequences. The point system evolved over time, but finally settled into a system that worked surprisingly well. I firmly believe that it made our children better people, and I know that it prevented a lot of contention. I share it here, but I leave it to you to decide if it is right for your family.

 

One Size Fits All

It didn’t take Lisa and I long to figure out that there is no right way to discipline a child. Our first child, Kira, would break down sobbing if I even raised my voice at her. Then along comes Brandon who was her complete opposite. I would spank Brandon much harder than I should have, and he would simply look me in the eye and say, “that didn’t hurt”. Ben was a bit different than both Kira and Brandon. Ben was a social butterfly. He lived to be with his friends so grounding him was tantamount to sending him to a torture chamber. I quickly realized that every child had to be handled uniquely and what worked with one would not necessarily work with another. 

 

Justice vs. Mercy

As our children grew, our method of discipline had to change as well. When they were young it was usually sufficient to send them on a “time out” or even a spanking, but that had to change when they got older. Can you imagine trying to spank a 6’3” football player? You had better have their respect long before they are bigger than you are. The one method of discipline that seemed to work for some of the kids was grounding them. I didn’t like grounding my kids, so I ended up modifying the process.

I remember one time when Ben broke some family rule (we had very few rules in our family) and we told him that he was grounded. Shortly after he was grounded, he was invited to go to a party with some of his friends. To my dismay the party ended up taking place during the time he was supposed to be grounded. My heart sank, my frustration with him breaking the rule was gone and I really wanted to let him go to the party. I love to see my kids happy, and his friends were good kids so I would have loved for him to be able to go to this party. The problem was that I never make a threat unless I am willing to follow through on it. My kids learned very early that if I made a threat, I would do what I said I would do. If I didn’t follow through on my threats, then it wouldn’t take them long to figure out that they could take advantage of that.

As I was trying to come up with a way to let Ben go to his party and still follow through on my threat, it dawned on me that even Heavenly Father allows us to repent from our transgressions. I made a deal with Ben that if he completed a job in the home, that I would consider that restitution for his transgression. I loved this new approach. Ben suffered a consequence for his transgression, so justice was served and I was still able to show him mercy and let him go to the party. On top of all that, our closet got cleaned. This was far better than having him mope around the house glaring at me all night. It was the first time that any of my kids was grateful for a punishment. It made him happy, and it made me happy. What more could you ask for?

Thus was born the point system.

 

The Point System

Based on my success with Ben’s party, I decided to implement this new plan for all the kids. If they were doing something to disrupt the peace of our family, then I gave them a “point”. As long as they had a point, they were automatically grounded and could go nowhere except on family outings. They could easily get rid of the point any time they wanted by performing twenty minutes of any approved activity that would make our home a better place. To keep track of the points a child had accumulated I drew up a chart that looked something like the one shown below. Every time one of the kids had a point, I would put a mark in one of the boxes next to their name. If they had worked off their point, Lisa or I would initial over top of the mark.

 

Kira

•

•

•

Brandon

I

I

I

I

I

I

I

I

I

I

Ben

I

I

Alycia

I

I

•

Alex

•

•

I

Sarah

I

•

•

 

This method worked very well. No longer did I have to worry about empty threats. All I had to do was tell a disruptive child that if he didn’t stop what he was doing then I was going to give him a point. He knew instantly what that meant. Before the point chart I had to think carefully about what I said. I would say something like, “if you don’t stop that then you’ll be sorry”. Or I would say, “if you boys keep fighting then I’ll ground both of you”. And then there is the one that drives me nuts. I’m going to count to three, one…two…I mean it, you will be in big trouble…two and a half…you better stop it right now…two and three quarters…   You get the idea.

When I sat the kids down to explain the point system to them, I went to great lengths to explain to them that this wasn’t a system of punishment but rather a system of consequences. It was entirely up to them if they were going to get a point or not. I promised them that I would never give them a point without warning them first so they would have a chance to decide for themselves if they wanted a point or not. I also promised them that I would only warn them once and there would be no additional warning. They just had to know that if they continued an activity that they had been asked to stop, then there would be a consequence for their choice. The choice was theirs.

 

Self Improvement

In its early days the most common method of removing a point was hard labor. With six kids in the house, there were plenty of opportunities to clean. Kids would do the dishes, mow the lawns, vacuum the floors and even clean their own rooms. I hesitated to reward them for doing a job they were expected to do anyway, but since they weren’t very good at keeping their rooms clean I decided this was a behavior I wanted to reward. I didn’t just let them work for twenty minutes and call that good. I clearly defined the work that had to be done and if they worked hard, it could be done in less than twenty minutes but if they dawdled it might take them much longer. Of course, when they needed someone to check if their job was done “good enough” they would always ask me to check it off because they liked my definition of “good enough” a lot better than their mother’s definition of what “good enough” was.

The opportunity to use the point system to improve weaknesses in my children happened one night when Lisa and I were going out for the night. Being the oldest child, the job of babysitting when we had to go out usually fell to Kira. For some reason Kira wasn’t available on this particular evening, so we left Brandon in charge. This was not very well received since Brandon was apparently a mean babysitter. It got so bad that in some cases we would leave Alycia (his younger sister) in charge, even if Brandon was home, and we would threaten Brandon with points if he didn’t obey her. It still didn’t work. On this occasion however we left Brandon in charge and Sarah started crying. She hated it when Brandon was in charge, and she begged us not to have him babysit because he was so mean. It broke my heart to hear her so terrified of one of her siblings so I decided that I could use the point chart to remedy this problem.

The next time that Brandon needed to work off a point I told him that he had to play with Sarah for twenty minutes. I told him he had to do whatever she wanted him to do and that if she complained about him, then I would give him an extra point rather than remove one. Well, Sarah decided that she wanted to play Barbie’s. What a sight it was to watch my fifteen-year-old son playing Barbie’s with his little sister. The surprising thing was that Brandon enjoyed himself (at least he enjoyed it much more than cleaning out the closet) and every time he had a point (which was often) he asked if he could play with Sarah. They would go play in the park, play in the back yard, do nails and even have “sleep over’s” (Sarah would sleep on Brandon’s bedroom floor). Within just a few weeks, Brandon quickly went from being the hated brother to her favorite sibling.

This naturally spilled over to the other kids. Ben was not terribly academic, and he especially hated reading. We decided that he could work off points by reading for twenty minutes. This really annoyed Brandon because he loved to read and it was “so unfair” that Ben could work off points by reading but he couldn’t. We looked at each of our children and tried to identify an area where they could improve themselves and we would come up with an activity that would help them to improve upon this weakness. It was wonderful. We literally turned their weaknesses into strengths, and it was all disguised as discipline.

 

Misdemeanors

It didn’t take long for us to see that some of our kids were racking up points much faster than others.  Kira was one of the easiest kids to raise. She was obedient, rarely talked back and was an all around talented and hard working kid. She almost never got points and yet she had a few annoying bad habits that I thought she should work on.

One example of this was her bad habit of leaving her personal possessions all over the house. She would come in the front door and drop her backpack, a few feet down the hall and she would then kick off her shoes, she would walk in the family room and throw her jacket on the couch. One day after she was in bed I saw that her earrings were on the fireplace mantel. It annoyed me enough that I about gave her a point but twenty minutes of “hard labor” seemed excessive for a pair of earrings. I then decided that if I could find five of her things lying around the house that I would give her a point and it dawned on me that it would simpler and more flexible if I created a dot.

A point was identified with a vertical line on the point chart like this “I” and a dot was simply a dot like this “•”. A dot by itself was nothing, but once a child accumulated five dots’, then those five dots were equal to a point. Now we had a way of discouraging minor misdemeanors without the rather harsh consequence of a point. Kira quickly joined the other kids in a program of involuntary self-improvement. She did not appreciate it, but we had a lot fewer items of clothing left around the house.

 

Added Incentives

While the point chart worked great for those kids who had an active social life, it wasn’t working as well as I’d hoped for those kids who were quite content to just sit around the house. Ben usually wanted to go and do something every weekend and so every Friday he would come home from school and quickly work off any points he had accumulated because he knew he wasn’t going anywhere if he had a point. In fact, our point chart was so famous by this time that when the kid’s friends called the house the first thing they wanted to know was how many points they had. Their friends were getting mad at them for getting points and strongly encouraging them to work the points off. It was working great except that Brandon was often quite content to just let the points rack up. He had no great desire to go out on the week end and was happy to sit around the house playing on the computer or watching TV.

 This was a problem because he would build up a dozen or more points and then he would be invited out and there was no way he could work off three or four hours of points in time to go to his activity. I was back to where I started, wanting to break my own rules so that my child could go to a movie with one of his friends. This was even more important for Brandon because he didn’t spend as much time with his friends as the other kids did and I wanted to encourage him to do more things with them, not less.  I decided that there had to be additional incentives put in place to discourage the kids from just letting the points build up. I figured that a kid would usually have time to work off an hour and a half of points if they were invited out at the last minute, so I chose five points as the trigger for additional restrictions. Once a kid had accumulated five points then they were no longer allowed to watch TV or to play on the computer. If the family was watching a movie together as a family activity, then they were welcome to join us, but if another kid was watching a movie or a TV show then they weren’t allowed in the family room. This worked like a charm. Rarely did anyone accumulate more than five points.

 

Anecdotes

To give you some idea of how the point system has worked in our family I thought it would be fun to share a few of the many stories we have to tell.

I remember one time when Brandon was talking back to his mother about something or other she finally got frustrated and told him that he had a point. That only made Brandon even more upset, and he continued to get louder and even more obnoxious. She then promptly told him that he had another point which only served to make him even more obnoxious and even louder. This resulted in yet a third point. This continued until Brandon finally backed down at which point I think Brandon had chalked up about a dozen points. He may have felt pretty defiant during the whole confrontation, but he had plenty of time afterwards to think about whether it was worth it or not. All I can say is that this was far better than what happened when this same son as a five year showed his defiance by looking me in the eye and telling me “that didn’t hurt”.

I remember another time when it seemed that most of the kids had several points on the chart. It was the end of the school year, and we went as a family to their seminary graduation at the church. I believe that three of our kids were in seminary at the time and every single one of them won an award for perfect seminary attendance for the year and perfect scripture reading for the year. I was thrilled for them, and I was very aware of the effort they had made to be up early and at their early morning seminary every day that year. I wanted to reward them, so that evening I sat them down and told them that we needed to talk. This usually wasn’t a good thing, and they were quite confused about what I could possibly want to talk about. They got even more concerned when I went and got the point chart and a pen. I started out talking about how disappointed I was that so many of them had so many points on the chart that needed to be worked off, but before they could get too defensive, I cut them off and told them how thrilled I was that they all earned the awards they did in seminary. I then told them that I was giving them all amnesty, and I signed off every point on the chart. I think it is important to reward good behavior, and what better behavior could any parent ask for?