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I think this is a great idea! Could you use visuals? Like a over a picture of someone running? Maybe you could include the 3.5 year old in making it (maybe a $1 poster board and pictures from a magazine?) and in setting up the rules, ask her what she thinks the rules should be? And have her pick the consequences? I think at 3.5, that might help her have more ownership?

Good luck! I have an almost three year old and whew, it's no joke.

I think getting on the same page with your SO is where you start. DH and I do agree on most things when it comes to parenting. We don't use physical forms of punishment, so that's a great rule to start with. Most of our rules give warnings, and then it's an automatic timeout if they're broken. Here are a few we abide by:

1. No hitting (I don't hit you, you don't hit anyone). This one is an automatic time-out b/c my 3 year old knows that this is a hard and fast rule.

2. No shoes on the furniture. I say it once and LO will take off his shoes.

3. No jumping on the furniture. The exception to this is the bed...b/c it's so much fun to jump on the bed! I give 2 warnings. At the 2nd warning, he gets the "do it one more time and you go to time-out" warning.

4. Be kind - He also gets 2 warnings on this. This is a little harder to enforce, but if he's being nasty, I say, "excuse me?" very sternly, and he knows he's in trouble, and immediately apologizes. We have good days and bad days with this...there are days where he's tired and hungry and is just hangry. There are other days where one "excuse me?" puts him right in his place. I try to take that into consideration when doling out punishment for not being nice.

5. Pick up after yourself - I don't allow him to take out more than 2 or 3 things before he has to put something away to take out something else. This is a personal pet peeve. I can't stand walking over a minefield of toys in my family room, so I tell him he has to put something away before taking out the next thing. This was a struggle at first, but the other toys get taken away if he doesn't pick them up.

Those are what I can think of right now. This also assumes that time-outs work for your LO. They work really well for our LO...we rarely have to use them, but when we do, he's an angel the rest of the night.

Things like using your manners, I will constantly be repeating. I just think constant reinforcement there is all that's going to help. He'll ask for something, and I'll make him repeat it until it has a "please" in there, and I make him thank me for everything. If he interrupts me when I'm talking, I will stop and tell him that he needs to say, "excuse me" before interrupting me, and can only interrupt me if he needs something important. Otherwise, he has to wait until I'm finished talking.

This is kinda a good idea. I haven't tried to lump our "rules" into categories.

1. Love each other - this means gentle touches, no hitting or pushing, and no stealing toys. We often say "Is that how you would want to be treated"

2. Treat our things with respect - No climbing on furniture, mistreating toys, etc.

3. Inside voices or inside feet - Its fun to run and jump and yell outside but not inside. Sometimes if she wants to play a whistle or something we will just ask her to go to her room.

4. Listen the first time - We are struggling with this because she wants to compromise or wait for three warnings (to play games) or just doesn't listen. I really dont know how to enforce this, but we are trying. When we ask her to do something (Stop doing xyz) we are trying to get confirmation back from her (Stop doing xyz, yes ma'am, and we wait for her to repeat yes ma'am). Now we struggle with enforcing a consequence if she doesn't listen right away. This is where we end up yelling way too often. We've asked you four times to sit in your chair or stop playing with that toy (or worse stop doing that dangerous thing to your brother).

A few years back I was working at a child care center and we implemented 2 center wide rules that can encompass everything.

1. Be safe. 2. Be respectful.

It was good to have everything fall under one of these two rules & easier for the kids to start remembering and following. We could then prompt the older kids too... Is that being safe? Is that being respectful? The respect one was sometimes broken down to be more easily understood by talking about what that meant, showing kindness and so on. And I totally hear you on implementing consistent rules. Sometimes it is so hard to hold strong and easy to let things slide.

Yes to same page with DH. We also subscribe to the broad category rule thing. DH and I set 3 parenting goals for our kids when we had DS. All of our rules derive from:

1. Don't die (or Stay alive).
2. Love Jesus.
3. Don't be an a$$hole (or Be Nice).

So anything safety related is staying alive (no climbing on junk, we don't touch the stove), we have rules about giving thanks before meals and praying before sleep and go to church on Sunday as a family. We sing Bible songs to DS before all naps and bedtime, and we do not tolerate hitting or throwing things or being destructive and say "we have to be gentle" or "we have to be nice" and we are teaching thank you and please and what not. We enforce a 3 strikes rule currently where we say no once, warn at the second offense ("Mommy is going to take that away"), and 3rd strike means we remove the thing causing the behavior. If it's DS, we remove him. If it's a toy, we remove the toy. Then we try to engage him so the attention seeking bad behavior gets simmered down. Once DS is older we can teach him the broad categories of rules but for now at 17 months we mostly think consistency with mom and dad is most important.

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