Our House Pledge

Recently, kiddo has been focused on sharing with us the many things he learns in school.  I enjoy listening to his sweet little voice as he tells about what he learned, and often have to hide a smile because his delivery is so animated and full of wonder.

Since he is in a classroom focused on positive behavior changes, one of the things his class does every day is recite a pledge about how they will conduct themselves.  It goes like this:

We will be safe.  We will be nice.  We will work during work time.  We will listen, and we will not put others down. 

(There are hand motions that go with each item, but those don’t translate well here.)

We’re also focused on kiddo controlling his body and his behavior at home, so we have talked about how that pledge could apply here.  Kiddo took that conversation a step further, and asked if we could write a “House Pledge” for our home.

So, after he got home from school today and had a snack, we sat down together to outline what should be in our pledge.  I was surprised at how quickly kiddo knew what content he wanted in it; my assistance was simply with the phrasing so we kept the focus positive.  “We will…” instead of “We will not…” supports how we try to parent him, so it fit well for this exercise.

Here is what we agreed upon:

In Our House…

We will treat each other with respect.

We will keep our hands to ourselves.

We will follow house rules.

We will listen to Mom and Dad.

We will talk with gentle voices.

And we will tell each other “I love you!”

We’re still working on the hand motions.